The 6 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses

Best overall

Shooting up from 4.3/5 to 4.7/5 in our most recent research, Wix is today's winner. Since our first round of testing , Wix now lets you sell via Instagram and Facebook, and use drop shopping services.

It's also the best ecommerce platform for small businesses looking to appear higher on the search engine results pages, getting you higher visitor traffic and more sales, thanks to its SEO Wizard tool providing step-by-step tutorials and helping you track your site’s SEO success with regular performance updates.

There are 71 ecommerce-specific templates available, with in-built capabilities such as checkout buttons and industry-specific features. It's no wonder Wix scored the highest in our ‘website features‘ category, with 4.6/5.

Syncing your physical inventory with your online store is far easier on other platforms, and you might find the sheer creative freedom Wix offers to be overwhelming at first, however, Wix is our overall winner for a reason – it's powerful, great for SEO, and simple to use.

Best for combining design with sales features

What impressed us most in our second round of testing was Squarespace's improvements on user experience, shooting up from a 3.4/5 to a 4.2/5 ease of use score. It's now the easiest platform to build an online store with.

With its sleek, ready-made templates to help your products stand out, you really don’t need to spend hours making a beautiful Squarespace store.

Squarespace is also great value for money, supporting the sales of physical, digital, and service-based products, and the ability to sell through Instagram on its affordable price plans.

However, it only supports two payment processors (compared to Shopify’s 100+ integrations) – which might restrict your options.

Square Online is one of the very best ecommerce platforms for small businesses. It has all the essential features on its free plan – including multi-channel selling – making it one of the best free ecommerce platforms, too.

The ability to sell for free is a big draw. Instead, you pay 1.9% per transaction, which is relatively high compared to the competition in truth. It's still the best value for money platform we tested, scoring 4.6/5 in that category.

It does only support one payment processor on its cheapest plans (Square POS), while BigCommerce and Shopify support over 100. You’ll also likely find the design options to be quite restrictive. 

Overall, Square Online is a no frills approach to selling online. It covers the basics very well, but doesn't go much further than that.

Best for sales-specific features

Shopify is one of the most comprehensive ecommerce platforms on the market, offering the most amount of sales features of any platform we tested, including access to 1,200+ apps. So, why doesn’t it get full marks?

In truth, Shopify is better suited to larger online stores with more complex inventories – it's a powerful solution that might be overkill or too expensive for most small stores, with price plans starting from A$7 per month. It also enforces transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments – two things which may hinder the growth of your small business.

However, Shopify's backend is really easy to navigate, outperforming the other platforms such as Woocommerce (as discussed in-depth in our comparison between the two), in our customer score category, with 4.8/5. 

Best for multi-channel selling

At no extra cost, BigCommerce allows you to sell your products via Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, and Pinterest. It's also perfect for online clothing stores thanks to its industry-leading inventory management features.

BigCommerce also provides useful SEO prompts when you add products, and imposes zero transaction fees (unlike Shopify).

However, as a small business owner juggling different tasks, you might find BigCommerce time-consuming and tricky to use, especially compared to the user-friendly platforms Wix and Squarespace. We actually rate BigCommerce as one of the top platforms for large companies instead.

Best for speedy setup

Running a small business is hard work. You might be struggling for time, or lacking the creative inspiration required to build an online store from scratch – which is where GoDaddy comes in.

It uses an ADI (artificial design intelligence) approach – first asking you a few questions, then generating a new website within minutes, with a new layout and proposed images. Simply put, GoDaddy is easily the best ecommerce platform for small businesses who are extremely tight on time.

That said, GoDaddy’s website features lack the quality to help your website stand out online (in stark contrast to Squarespace), and you won't be able to sell digital products.