The 9 Best Website Builders and Ecommerce Platforms

In our latest round of testing, Shopify shot up from 4.2 to 4.7/5 overall. This comes down to its intuitive inventory management tools that pre-empt what you might want to add next, and more comprehensive customer support.  What's more, you can upload single or multiple products, receive daily revenue reports, and use its online invoice generator to make your payment collection days much easier.

It also offers superb multi-channel integration, letting you sell through Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, and other social platforms (which is more than Wix Ecommerce can offer). In that sense, it also beats competitors like Woocommerce (as discussed in-depth in our comparison between the two).

However, it’s the only platform to enforce its own transaction fee (2.2% +20p on the ‘Basic’ plan) unless you use Shopify Payments. Shopify also relies on third party apps for much of its functionality, which can see your monthly costs add up quickly.

Wix Ecommerce has also improved, increasing from 4.3 to 4.6/5 overall. It now supports Instagram and Facebook integration, while you can also use drop shipping services.

We also liked the SEO Wizard tool, which makes it really easy to improve your store’s ranking on Google’s results pages.

That said, Wix is still your best bet if you want total control over how your storefront looks. With Wix, you can create an online store entirely within your own control, with its flexible creative tools enabling you to build a truly unique storefront. If you're not too concerned about a powerful inventory system, then you'll love using this platform.

Read Full Wix Review

BigCommerce is big on built-in features. It has everything you need to grow your business already available at no extra cost – unlike the other platforms, such as Shopify, which rely on third-party apps.

We found BigCommerce’s multi-channel selling particularly impressive – enabling you to sell via social media and grow your audience with ease – and loved its SEO features, which can help your online store to appear high up on relevant search engine results pages. 

Again, unlike Shopify, there is no transaction fee to worry about, which can help you save enormously in the long run.

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

Square Online lets you build a website and sell for free. That's by far its biggest selling point. While it could massively improve its design flexibility (scoring a measly 2.6/5), and offer better reporting features, it's still one of the quickest and most affordable ways to build an online store.

We recommend Square Online for small online stores – it has all the essentials you need to start selling online for free, including multi-channel integration, and it doesn't overwhelm you with data fields like BigCommerce does.

The transaction fees are relatively high, and the overall layout could be more intuitive, but Square Online is an excellent no-frills approach to selling online.

Squarespace is the best website builder that offers ecommerce functionality on the side, impressing us with its intuitive inventory management, visual marketing approach, and improved ease of use – going from a 3.4 to 4.2/5 score since our previous testing. In fact, it's now the easiest-to-use platform on our list.

It supports multi-channel selling, the ability to create and brand your Instagram story posts, and built-in social media live feeds on your website – something that costs extra on the other platforms. Squarespace has also increased the number of integrated payment processers from two to five.

Space for improvement? Sure. It has limited stock monitoring capabilities and a relatively poor site speed performance, meaning you risk your customers waiting for some pages to load. For a platform focussed on design, we were disappointed to find a limited number of ecommerce-specific templates, too.

With over 154 million users in 190 different countries, Wix enables you to build a professional-looking website within a matter of hours, offering 510+ templates and intuitive drag-and-drop design tools. 

Better yet, Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) can generate a brand new website for you in minutes, after you’ve answered a few questions about the type of site you want.

On the downside, Wix doesn’t allow you to switch templates once you publish your website, which can be quite restrictive.

The best website builder for design, using Squarespace is the closest you’ll get to professional web designer quality. It offers the best-designed templates on the market, and powerful design tools.

Due to this creative complexity, Squarespace is harder to use than Wix. If you struggle with tech or have little interest in spending hours – or days – designing your website, then you should try Wix or Weebly instead.

That said, you’ll end up with a beautiful website if you stick it out with Squarespace.

GoDaddy is a solid all-round choice for small businesses. It's user-friendly thanks to its ADI feature (artificial design intelligence) and has since improved its design functionality by offering sleeker templates and greater customisation. It's also the quickest and most efficient website building experience.

However, the ADI feature sacrifices originality for time. This means your store will get built within a few minutes but risks looking just like another GoDaddy product.

We were also impressed by GoDaddy's SEO Wiz, helping you optimise your website in order to appear higher in the search engine results pages. All in all, GoDaddy's a safe pair of hands.

Weebly is another popular drag-and-drop website builder, meaning you can place elements wherever you like on each page. 

It offers affordable price plans and plenty of apps to help you grow your business, as well as strong SEO features to help your website appear higher up on the search engine results pages, making Weebly great value for money.

It can’t match Wix for creative freedom, and it doesn’t have an ADI option. Also, Weebly’s templates are less impressive than those offered by Squarespace, but it’s a good option for small business owners who don’t have much technical skill.