The Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses in Canada

Hands holding smartphone shopping online best ecommerce platforms for small businesses

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Our research puts Wix at the top of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses leaderboard, closely followed by Squarespace and then Square Online (yes, they are different). These three online store creators are the best around.

We rated each ecommerce platform according to criteria that matter most for small businesses, including value for money, sales features, marketing tools and ease of use. We combined category testing with user trials to calculate a score out of five for each platform. In this way, we’ve made it simple to compare them on a like-for-like basis.

Small business doesn’t mean small workload, and some days it can feel like you’re holding the sky up with your bare hands. Even some selling methods which may be known for their ease of operation, like dropshipping, can take a lot of effort and time to manage. You’ve got to find productivity hacks where you can – and creating a solid ecommerce website is a very good place to start. To know more, just head below.

The 6 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses:

Our research + user testing = overall score out of 5

  1. Wix – 4.7
  2. Squarespace – 4.6
  3. Square Online – 4.5
  4. Shopify – 4.1
  5. BigCommerce – 4.0
  6. GoDaddy – 3.9

Check out our comparison table followed by ecommerce platform deep dives. Psst – if your company is already growing you may want to check out our guide to the best ecommerce platforms for bigger businesses. 

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0 out of 0

Wix

Squarespace

Square Online

Shopify

BigCommerce

GoDaddy

Score
4.7
Score
4.6
Score
4.5
Score
4.1
Score
4.0
Score
3.9
Best For

Best overall

Best For

Combining design with impressive sales features

Best For

Value for money

Best For

Sales specific features

Best For

Multichannel selling

Best For

Speedy set up

Price range

$28-$49/month

Price range

$31-66/month

Price range

$0-85/month

Price range

$38-389/month

Price range

$39-400/month

Price range

$11.99-27.99/month

Try Wix Try Squarespace Try Square Try Shopify Try BigCommerce Try GoDaddy
Need a website builder?

If you are not ready to start selling online but still want a website, check out our in-depth guide on the best website builders instead.

Wix 4.7/5

Best for SEO and marketing

Shooting up from 4.3/5 to 4.7/5 in our most recent research, Wix came out on top. A solid all-rounder, it boasts first-rate website features including SEO analysis, slick marketing options and handy widget integration.

As mentioned in our Wix review, the provider scored second highest for sales-specific features in the research we conducted, beaten only by BigCommerce, which has superior reporting tools. It does what you'd expect it to: offers multiple sales types as well as check-out and order status. Yet it performs these basics to a super high standard – and includes nice extras such as abandoned cart recovery and diverse shipping options. Taking these into account, it's no wonder Wix scored a perfect 5/5 in our feature vs price testing – matched only by Squarespace among all the platforms we reviewed.

Comprehensive creative tools let you craft your online shop exactly how you want to. Wix's impressive customer support and user-friendly interface means we rate it as the gold standard in launching small businesses online. That said, some test users found the editor page cluttered at times.

No platform is perfect, and Wix is less capable of handling complex inventory than Shopify. It also scored 0/5 for storage space. But it will handle the sales volume you'd expect of most young companies.

Wix is our top choice for small businesses looking to get seen online.

Pros

  • Brilliant SEO and marketing features
  • Lots of creative freedom; huge template choice
  • Best customer support
  • Wix ADI can build a website for you within minutes

Cons

  • No storage space to speak of
  • Can’t switch templates after publishing your site
  • Editor page can seem cluttered and overwhelming at times

Wix Pricing

Wix offers a 14-day free trial period on its premium plans, of which there are three ecommerce-specific options.

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Light

Core

Business

Price (Paying Annually)
Price (Paying Annually)
Price (Paying Annually)
Best For

Starting a small online store

Best For

Selling internationally or subscriptions

Best For

High-volume selling online

Key Features
  • 2GB storage
  • 30 minutes video
  • Remove Wix watermark
  • Free domain for 1 year
  • Light marketing suite
Key Features
  • 50GB storage
  • Abandoned cart emails
  • Sell on social channels
  • 5hrs video
  • Professional logo
Key Features
  • 100GB storage
  • Data analytics
  • 10hrs video
  • Automated sales tax on 100 transactions per month
  • 24/7 customer care
Transaction Fees

0%

Transaction Fees

0%

Transaction Fees

0%

Grow your sales with a wonderful Wix website

Squarespace 4.6/5

Best for ease of use

What impressed us most in our second round of testing was Squarespace's improvements on user experience, shooting up from a 3.4 to a 4.2/5 ease of use score. It's now the easiest platform to build an online store with. Overall, it’s a great choice for tech beginners looking for a straightforward online store setup.

Stylish, ready-made templates mean you don’t need weeks to make a beautiful Squarespace store. This platform offers incredible value for money, supporting the sales of physical, digital, and service-based products. We’re impressed with its plentiful visual marketing plug-ins, too – something we praised in our Squarespace review.

Squarespace performed the weakest out of our top six in terms of multichannel sales – Instagram is your only external platform option. Stock monitoring capabilities were fairly limited as well, so don’t expect advanced visibility into your product levels.

Nevertheless, Squarespace supports a fair number of payment processors, and test users found the build experience intuitive. Customer support, however, was on the weaker side. Squarespace scored 3.5/5 here, which still isn’t too bad, but its competitors are quicker to assist their new users.

Squarespace is our pick for easily creating your first online store.

Pros

  • Easiest to use
  • Incredible value for money
  • Great visual marketing tools

Cons

  • Limited stock monitoring capabilities
  • Only one external sales platform (Instagram)
  • Customer support less than perfect

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial when you sign up to one of its ecommerce plans.

Plus, you can save 10% on your subscription by using code EM10 at checkout.

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Business

Basic Commerce

Advanced Commerce

Price (Paying Annually)

$31/month

Price (Paying Annually)

$37/month

Price (Paying Annually)

$66/month

Best For

New entrepreneurs and small business owners

Best For

SMBs looking to sell online

Best For

Medium-sized ecommerce businesses

Key Features
  • Sell unlimited number of products
  • Professional Google account
  • Google Ads extra credit
  • Sell gift cards
Key Features
  • Product waitlists
  • Sell on Instagram
  • Ecommerce analytics
  • Product reviews
  • Display stock levels
Key Features
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • Sell subscriptions
  • Commerce APIs
  • Advanced shipping features (including a real-time cost calculator)
Transaction Fees

3%

Transaction Fees

0%

Transaction Fees

0%

Want an easy-to-build ecommerce platform?

Square Online 4.5/5

Best for value for money

Square Online is a solid option for setting up a free simple online store. For the money-conscious, it’s definitely the one to watch.

The ability to sell for free is a big draw. Instead, you pay 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on most plans, which seems a bit steep when you consider Squarespace, BigCommerce and Wix have no fees at all. Yet the high quality of features and relatively low average pricing plan make Square Online the best value for money platform we tested, scoring 4.6/5 in that category.

It’s obviously also a payments company, so your ecommerce account can give you access to Square Online POS products as well as business loans and credit cards – a boon for small businesses looking for cashflow solutions.

Surprisingly, there are no marketplace integration options, so you can’t cross-sell on eBay or Google like you can on most other platforms. Like with Squarespace, your only additional channel choice is Instagram.

Overall, Square Online is a no-frills approach to selling online. For that reason, it turned out to be pretty easy to use (third highest overall). It covers the basics very well, but doesn't go much further than that.

Square Online is the best value for money platform for small businesses.

Pros

  • Bets value for money
  • Easy to use
  • Access POS products, loans and credit cards

Cons

  • No marketplace integrations (eBay, Google, etc.)
  • High transaction fees
  • Limited marketing functions

Square Online Pricing

Square has four price plans to choose from:

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Free

Plus

Premium

Price (Paying Annually)

Free

Price (Paying Annually)

$36/month

Price (Paying Annually)

$85/month

Key Features

Sell unlimited products

Instagram and Pinterest integration

2.9%+30¢ transaction fees

Key Features

Customer reviews on your site

Abandoned cart recovery

Accept PayPal

2.9% + 30¢ transaction fees

Key Features

Advanced ecommerce analytics

Real-time shipping

Low processing rate

2.6%+30¢ transaction fees

Want to save money while you make money?

Shopify 4.1/5

Best for range of sales features

Shopify is one of the most comprehensive ecommerce platforms on the market, offering more sales features than any other platform we tested. What’s more, you can easily sell across social media platforms – no one else enables sales through more channels.

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

That said, Shopify's backend is really easy to navigate. Test users scored Shopify a strong 5/5 in overall user experience. This puts it in a better position than platforms such as Woocommerce (as discussed in-depth in our comparison between the two), so you can’t go too far wrong with this one (even if it will cost you a fair bit).

Shopify has a plethora of mighty sales features for your online store.

Pros

  • Excellent multichannel integration
  • Best choice of sales features
  • Great customer support

Cons

  • Transaction fees unless you use Shopify Payments
  • Pricey subscription
  • Mobile editor not particularly easy to use

Shopify Pricing

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial period, so you can test its tools and build your entire online store before spending a penny. If you’re happy with Shopify after that period, you’ll then need to upgrade to one of Shopify's paid plans:

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Starter

Basic

Shopify

Advanced

Plus

Price (Paying Annually)
Price (Paying Annually)
Price (Paying Annually)
Price (Paying Annually)
Price (Paying Annually)

From $2,677/month

Best For

Adding a buy button to your existing website or social media

Best For

Starting a small online store

Best For

Growing your business

Best For

Larger online stores

Best For

High volume merchants, large businesses

Key Features
  • Get “shoppable links” (URLs)
  • Product pages
  • Basic order management
  • Customer support
Key Features
  • Unlimited products
  • Four inventory locations
  • Two staff accounts
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Domestic credit card rate (online): 2.9% + 30¢
Key Features
  • Ecommerce automations
  • Five inventory locations
  • Five staff accounts
  • Domestic credit card rate (online): 2.7% + 30¢
Key Features
  • 15 staff accounts
  • Eight inventory locations
  • Advanced reports
  • Third-party calculated shipping
  • Domestic credit card rate (online): 2.4% + 30¢
Key Features
  • 99.99% uptime
  • Built-in AR, video, 3D media on product pages
  • Automation for complex processes
  • Faster checkout
Transaction Fees

5%

Transaction Fees

2%

Transaction Fees

1%

Transaction Fees

0.5%

Transaction Fees

0.15%

Sell out in no time with a Shopify online store

BigCommerce 4/5

Best for multichannel

For businesses with a diverse customer base, BigCommerce has you covered. You can pull in sales from all directions with its excellent multichannel integration: Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Walmart and more. While Shopify has more social media integrations, BigCommerce takes the crown on sales-specific platforms.

Its strengths lie in sales functions including shipping options, accounting integration and inventory management, scoring a perfect 5/5 in each of these areas. BigCommerce is perfect for online clothing stores as it offers the widest range of product filters as well as the option for headless commerce.

BigCommerce also provides useful SEO prompts when you add products, which is helpful for new stores without an established online presence. What’s more, there are zero transaction fees (unlike with Shopify) so revenue can stay strong.

What about the negatives? BigCommerce isn’t the best value for money; it has the highest base price of any of our platforms. For the extra price, there's no opportunity to make Facebook ads or Instagram stories, unlike with Wix and Squarespace.

In addition, BigCommerce is still the least user-friendly platform we've tested (scoring 3.3/5 for ease of use). Nevertheless, BigCommerce is brilliant at helping you to manage your entire business processes, not just sell products.

BigCommerce can help a small store master its inventory in no time.

Pros

  • Industry-leading inventory management
  • No transaction fees
  • Superb multichannel integration

Cons

  • Not user-friendly
  • Not great value for money
  • Can’t make Facebook ads or Instagram stories

BigCommerce Pricing

BigCommerce offers a one-month free trial when you sign up to one of its three core plans:

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0 out of 0

Standard

Plus

Pro

Price (Paying Annually)

$39/month

Price (Paying Annually)

$106/month

Price (Paying Annually)

$400/month

Key Features

Sell an unlimited number of products

Multichannel selling

Coupon creation

Reporting tools

No transaction fees

Key Features

Abandoned cart recovery emails

Customer loyalty programmes

Store credit card payment details

No transaction fees

Key Features

Product filters for sizes and colours

Dedicated SSL security

Google reviews

No transaction fees

Prices converted from USD to CAD based on conversion rates on April 13, 2023.

Want customers from more places?

GoDaddy 3.9/5

Best for speedy set up

Another fuss-free online store creator, GoDaddy is dependable but not awe-inspiring. It’s the only platform not to have improved on its overall score (3.9), achieving exactly the same rating as it did in our last round of research. It does, however, have a lower transaction fee (2.3% + 30¢) than Shopify or Square Online.

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

It offers some neat marketing tools such as email campaigns and social media integrations, so it will do more than the absolute minimum (but not a whole lot more). You can also sell through Google, eBay, Amazon, Etsy and Walmart – a wider selection of options than Squarespace or Square Online provide.

Still, it has to be said that the platform's website features lack the quality found in competitor products, as we pointed out in our GoDaddy review.

GoDaddy can build an attractive ecommerce store for you within minutes.

Pros

  • Fastest setup we tested thanks to its ADI function
  • Competitive transaction fee: 2.3% + 30¢
  • Good cross-platform selling opportunities

Cons

  • Very limited creative control
  • Limited range of features

GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy offers a generous one-month free trial on its ecommerce-specific price plan:

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Price (Paying Annually)

CAD$27.99/month

(Renews at $39.99/month after first year)

Key Features
  • List 5,000 products
  • Send 25,000 marketing emails monthly
  • Flexible shipping options
  • Add discounts and promos
  • 24/7 support
Key Features
  • List 5,000 products
  • Send 25,000 marketing emails monthly
  • Flexible shipping options
  • Add discounts and promos
  • 24/7 support
Try GoDaddy

Set up your online store in a blink

Expert Verdict

Wix is our top recommendation of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses. It's the way to go if you need an ecommerce platform that will actively grow your business with professional marketing techniques. That said, BigCommerce could help you reach more buyers with its top-notch multichannel integrations. Alternatively, Shopify may suit a more complex business with ambitious inventory plans. The best choice really depends on your individual entrepreneurial strategy. Whichever provider you select should align with your profit goals, bearing in mind the current ecommerce industry trends.

Every business starts small, but few want to remain that way for long. Armed with our expert knowledge, you’re now in a great position to choose the ecommerce platform provider that’s right for your entrepreneurial goals. Starting your online store doesn’t need to be an impossible mountain of frustration; in fact, all of these platforms excel at breaking down the workload for you.

Whether you’re looking for the least scary setup in terms of design complexity (Squarespace or GoDaddy), the best budget option (Square Online), or the best marketing tools on the block (Wix), there’s definitely a platform to suit you.

Here’s a quick roundup of our three best ecommerce platforms for small businesses…

  1. Wix came out on top thanks to its strong SEO features and improved sales opportunities.
  2. Squarespace is the better option if you want an easy online store without sweating over design details.
  3. Square Online is the best value for money, combining ease of use with the option of a totally free plan.

How We Test Ecommerce Website Builders for Businesses

We tested eight market-leading ecommerce website builders to evaluate them in terms of functionality, usability, accuracy, and aesthetics so we can make the most useful recommendations to Canadian businesses.

Our rigorous testing process means these products have been scored and rated in seven main categories of investigation and 47 subcategories – in fact, we covered 341 areas of investigation in total. We then gave each category score a ‘relevance weighting' to ensure the product's final score perfectly reflects the needs and requirements of Expert Market readers – and that's our product testing algorithm in a nutshell!

Our main testing categories for ecommerce website builders are:

Website Features: the capabilities and functionalities offered by a website builder, e.g. blog functionality, SEO capability, marketing capacity.

Sales Features: the sales capabilities and sales functionalities offered by a website builder, including shipping, inventory capacity, and payment options.

Design: the aesthetic appeal and visual layout of a website created using a website builder. It encompasses aspects such as page templates and customizable themes.

Customer Score: external customer opinion; the feedback and ratings given by customers who have used a particular website builder – the market position and reputation a website builder holds.

Ease of Use: how user-friendly and intuitive a website builder is for people with varying levels of technical expertise.

Value for Money: the balance between the cost of a website builder and the benefits it provides. It considers factors such as pricing plans, subscription models, and available features.

Help and Support: the assistance and resources available to users when they encounter issues or need guidance while using a website builder. This can include tutorials, knowledge bases, and email or chat support.

 

FAQ

Which online platform is best for small businesses?
Wix is the best platform for small online stores because it boasts the widest range of sales and marketing features for the best value for money. Not only did our test users find it easy to create their Wix store, but they were impressed by the sheer range of sales-specific functions that deliver great customer experience. Wix also has great customer support – helpful if you want some guidance during the setup process.
Which ecommerce platform is best for startups?
Startups are recommended to use Wix as their first choice for an ecommerce platform, according to our in-depth research. This platform includes many inbuilt marketing tools to reach new customers, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) to help your business appear higher on Google results pages. Wix offers diverse shipping options to keep customers happy.
Is Shopify best for small business?
Shopify is a great ecommerce platform provider for small businesses, but in our opinion it’s not the best. While Shopify offers an excellent range of sales features, it may be more expensive than strictly necessary for a small business. It’s a very powerful online store builder that will enable you to do a lot with your inventory, but this could be overkill for young companies that are just finding their feet online.
What is considered the cheapest ecommerce platform for a small business?
Square Online is the cheapest way to run an online store as a small business. Uniquely, it offers you the chance to sell for free, whereas most other platforms require subscription fees. While Square Online will take a fee per transaction, our expert research found it’s still the best value for money ecommerce provider on the market today.
Written by:
Sabrina Dougall
Sabrina is a business journalist whose career began in news reporting. She has a master's in Investigative Journalism from City University London, and her work has appeared in The Times, The Daily Express, Money Saving Expert, Camden New Journal, Global Trade Review, and Computer Business Review. She specializes in writing about SEO (search engine optimization). Having run her own small business, Sabrina knows first-hand how critical digital marketing is to building a client base and local reputation.
Reviewed by:
A head shot of Natasha Willett - a blonde woman in a work shirt with a blue background
For over 9 years Natasha has worked as a mixed method researcher working across a range of sectors from insurance and policy development, to business services and software. As a member of the Market Research Society, Natasha is an advocate for high ethical, commercial and methodological best practices.