Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses 2024

Ecommerce has grown rapidly in recent years and according to the United States Census Bureau, ecommerce sales make up around 15% of total retail sales. This will only keep growing so the ability to sell online will be essential!

But what is the right ecommerce platform to help you succeed?

Every year our expert insights put market-leading web builders through several rounds of hands-on testing against 300+ different criteria to find out who really comes out on top for small businesses. This time round, the best ecommerce platform for small businesses is Squarespace.

Squarespace came out on top in our research in key categories such as value for money, user experience and most importantly in customer testing. However, each business has different needs and that’s why we looked at five other top ecommerce platforms and put them through their paces too.

To help you make a decision quickly, we created an easy comparison of online store tools. And below, you’ll find a side-by-side summary of the top ecommerce platforms followed by individual reviews of each one. Read until the end for some more guidance about how and where to sell online.

Quick Comparison: Best Online Store Tools

1. Squarespace: Best Overall

• Subscription pricing: $23-$72
• Transaction fees: 0-3%
• Overall score: 4.7/5

Squarespace works well as a portfolio website, showcasing the aesthetics of your brand with classy web design. Think of your Squarespace website as a virtual art gallery: lots of white space, few features, and impeccable taste.

Who we Recommend Squarespace For

First of all, we recommend Squarespace for anyone who has never built a website before. It’s the easiest to use out of all the ecommerce website builders we’ve reviewed. Anyone, even with limited online experience, can set up a functional, well designed website.

And polished, slick design is at the heart of Squarespace. We recommend Squarespace for solo entrepreneurs or small to medium sized businesses who operate in any creative industry. Think artists, writers, photographers, content creators or high end luxury brands.

You can sell products, services, subscriptions and digital content, a key feature for musicians, authors and filmmakers.

Where Squarespace Stands Out

The striking beauty of its design templates, optimised for both web and mobile use, is one of the stand out features of Squarespace. It’s never been simpler to create a slick, professional, beautiful looking website with a solid ecommerce backend.

But it’s not just pretty templates. Squarespace also provides easy payment processing with trusted providers like Paypal, Stripe and Square. It’s drag and drop design functionality means you can create an online store easily. Its inventory management and sales analytics are easy to follow.

Its ease of use is important as it allows anyone to set up a website and start selling, breaking down any barriers that come with more complex website builders or coding a website yourself. It’s no surprise it came out on top in User Experience during our latest round of research, with a score of 4.5/5.

Where Squarespace Could Improve

While Squarespace is easy to use, it has drawbacks. What makes it perfect for small to medium sized businesses also makes it limited in other areas. When it comes to payment processing, while it is easy to use, it doesn’t have a lot of providers to choose from. Overall, based on our latest research, Wix ranks higher for sales features in comparison to Squarespace.

Where Squarespace falls down in general is that it doesn’t suit a business that wants to grow beyond that medium stage. Its ecommerce features aren’t as advanced as a platform like Shopify. And, if it comes to the point you feel you’ve outgrown Squarespace, it has some export limitations, meaning it may be hard to move to another website builder if necessary.

Features Worth Knowing More About

We really like the Squarespace App which allows you to update pages, review traffic and update inventory on the go. This gives you great flexibility as a business owner, especially when you have to be in a thousand places at once.

Squarespace also offers beautifully designed email marketing templates to match their slick templates. This means you can keep your brand consistent across all marketing communications.

Squarespace Pricing

There are four Squarespace price plans to choose from, all of which are relatively low cost compared with the larger platforms Shopify and BigCommerce:

You may have noticed Squarespace pricing is similar to Wix, and they’re near competitors because of their focus on design and style. You wouldn’t come to either for complex inventory management and warehouse services, for instance.

Squarespace’s Commerce Basic plan costs $28 per month, $1 more than Wix’s Core plan ($27 per month), but with Wix you’ll get 5 hours of video storage versus 30 minutes with Squarespace. You’ll also get slightly better selling features from Wix at this price point, including abandoned cart recovery emails, applying discounts automatically, and the ability to accept pre-orders.

But if you want to sell more than 50,000 products, you should choose Squarespace over Wix. And if product reviews are important to you, Squarespace is the better choice once again, as Wix limits these.

2. Wix: Best for Bookings and Services

• Subscription pricing: $17-$712 a month
• Transaction fees: None
• Overall score: 4.7/5

Wix tops our website builder list thanks to the wide range of features, but dips into second place when we consider its sales platform. The reason is its selling features are slightly less generous – Wix limits the number of transactions with automated sales tax, for instance.

Who we Recommend Wix For

Wix is a good all-rounder platform that’s suited to a wide range of small business users. It’s not so complicated that only seasoned professionals can use it – we’d comfortably recommend this for beginners with very little web design or even commerce experience. You’ll get more design control than GoDaddy, but it’s not as complex as Shopify. 

Where Wix Stands Out

Wix is similar to Squarespace due to its focus on ease of use and attractive design. However, where it stands out is its extensive app market, with 250+ free and paid apps to choose from, giving you a lot more functionality in your store. In terms of overall features Wix scored the highest in our latest round of research, with a score of 4.6/5. 

Wix also allows you to create multiple multilingual sites for different countries. This, combined with outstanding shipping options, means the platform is ideal for scaling your business into new markets easily 

Where Wix Could Improve

Wix doesn’t offer unlimited storage space like Squarespace does, meaning it could be a barrier to scaling. It only offers unlimited storage space on its Business Elite, which costs around $159 a month. 

And while Wix is easy to set up and use initially, it can be a little tricky to master it properly. In user testing earlier in 2023, it was noted that it was easy to use but “some things just feel like they are a headache for no reason. This is reflected in our latest round of research as the user experience scores a lot lower than Squarespace and Spotify. 

Features Worth Knowing More About 

We’re excited about Wix’s use of AI, such as the text generator to speed up content creation. AI assists in the set up process too, with Wix suggesting features you’ll need based on your industry.

Here are some examples:

• If you run a restaurant: table reservations, food delivery, menu listings
• Hotel managers: season-specific room pricing, list add-on services at extra cost
• Fitness enthusiast: bookings (in person or online) via Wix Fit, subscriber-only content,  automated reminders
• Creative professionals: membership areas with paywall content, video streaming

Wix is better for the services industry compared to Square, because the latter isn’t set up for paid members-only pages.

Wix Pricing

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

Wix is very similar in pricing to Squarespace, with Squarespace Business costing $23 per month (compared with Wix Core at $27 per month). But Wix could prove cheaper as Squarespace charges 3% transaction fees on its Business plan, whereas Wix charges no equivalent fees.

We’ve created a Wix pricing page if you want to look more closely at costs.

3. Shopify: Best for Scaling Your Business

• Subscription pricing range: $5-$2000 a month
• Transaction fees: 5-15%
• Overall score: 4.6/5

Shopify is a comprehensive online selling tool with a website builder – and we’re impressed. The best feature of Shopify is that it will scale as your business grows. That means you’ll start with a clean, well-presented shopfront and you can bulk import products as your catalog expands.

Who we Recommend Shopify For

Shopify is aimed at business-savvy merchants with a very clear business plan. If you’ve sourced your products, decided on your branding, and are looking to scale up your sales, then Shopify has the sales features you need.

We recommend Shopify over BigCommerce for sellers with dozens of inventory storage spots. Why? Shopify can cope with up to 1,000 inventory locations (on all plans), whereas BigCommerce facilitates selling and distribution from just four, five or eight (depending on your plan). Wix has much weaker inventory management features than Shopify.

Where Shopify Stands Out

Shopify is the best for serious online retailers and its Sales Features are unparalleled. In our latest testing, Shopify scores the highest in terms of Sales Features, scoring 4.7/5. It also is brilliant for integrating marketing into your site through apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Where Shopify Could Improve

There are no native features to connect your Shopify store with any of the main online marketplaces. Exceptions are Facebook and Instagram marketplaces as well as a wholesale option called Handshake. For any of the others, you’ll have to connect an app, which comes with monthly fees. For instance, to connect Etsy, you’ll have to pay $19 per month to synch up to 20,000 products.

Another disadvantage we found during our research was a lack of tutorials, which make it hard to familiarise yourself with the platform.

Features Worth Knowing More About

This year Shopify released its AI writing tool Shopify Magic, which we found effective in crafting creative prose for our product descriptions. While Wix has a similar AI text generator, it doesn’t offer the same range of tones of voice as Shopify’s tool.

Similarly, the AI chatbot assistant in the help center was quick and mostly effective at answering my questions about setting up additional sales channels. Its comprehension was not perfect, for instance, it couldn’t understand that the Amazon by Shopify app was no longer supported. Instead, it repeated (outdated) instructions for downloading that very app.

Shopify Pricing

Here’s an overview of Shopify’s pricing plans:

In terms of costs, Shopify pricing is not the most generous on the market – in fact, the free trial period is now just three days. Although it offers a really accessible entry price point (its Starter plan is $5 monthly), that comes with 5% transaction fees when you’re signed up to Shopify Payments. And you’ll likely need apps with – you guessed it – more monthly fees.

You’ll have to pay transaction fees for every sale across all plans. That’s not the case with Wix, which has no transaction fees.  This places Shopify on the pricey end of the ecommerce platform scale.

We’ve gone into more detail in our Shopify review, in case you’re still undecided. Otherwise read on for more options.

4. GoDaddy: Best for Getting Set Up Quickly

• Subscription pricing: $10.99-$20.99 a month(first year)
• Transaction fees: 2.3% + 30¢
• Overall score: 4.2/5

GoDaddy offers one of the fastest ways to get your website online and the best value for money out of all the platforms we tested.

Who We Recommend GoDaddy for?

GoDaddy is suitable for any business that wants to get their website up and running quickly. In terms of their ecommerce function, they aren’t as well known as platforms like Shopify but offer robust ecommerce features. GoDaddy scored an impressive 4.6/5 for Customer Score in our latest round of testing.

Where GoDaddy stands out

GoDaddy scored 4.3/5 for customer support and in our last review of GoDaddy, we similarly highlighted its strength in this area There’s a phone line, with the company readily publishing their number online. With Wix you’ll have to click through online options and request a callback. Squarespace doesn’t even have a customer service number.

In terms of ecommerce features, GoDaddy supports a wide range of payment processing options like Paypal, Stripe and Square. It also Offers a POS system that integrates with your site.

Where GoDaddy could improve

GoDaddy primarily started as a web hosting platform, meaning its e-commerce functionality isn’t as advanced as platforms like Shopify and Wix. It scores a 3/5 when it comes to Sales Features in our latest research. GoDaddy is perfect for a business that wants a small online retail presence or wants to test online retail. However if you want to make online selling the focus of your business, we recommend Shopify or Wix.

Features worth knowing more about

GoDaddy uses an Artificial Design Editor (ADI) so the design process is less time consuming. This is perfect for business owners who aren’t focused on the design of their website.

The downside to this, however, is that you’ve less creative freedom and your site may end up looking like a lot of other businesses. If you need more creative freedom, look at Wix or Squarespace.

GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy has three tiers in its pricing plan

On updating this article we found that GoDaddy now has three tiers of pricing instead of four – Basic, Premium, and Commerce.  The Commerce plan is the best option for small businesses and offers features like unlimited products, sales tax calculation, and up to 10,000 email marketing sends per month.

The Commerce plan is currently $20.99 for the first year and rises to $26.99 per month the year after, which is affordable for most small businesses.

5. Hostinger: Best for Local Business

• Subscription pricing: $9.99 a month
• Transaction fees: None
• Overall score: 4/5

Hostinger is an easy to use website builder and ecommerce platform, best for small and local businesses. Its one of the few ecommerce platforms with no transaction fees.

Who We Recommend Hostinger For

We recommend Hostinger for small local businesses who want a simple, straightforward website builder and e-commerce platform that doesn’t take up a lot of time. In our research we found that Hostinger scored really well when it came to user experience, scoring 4.5/5.

Where Hostinger Stands Out

Hostinger has some great ecommerce features like no transaction fees, customisable checkout options and an advanced fraud detection system. These are solid e-commerce features for a small business and all for a relatively low price compared to other website builders aimed at small businesses.

Hostingers AI Website Builder is a useful tool for business owners. The AI builder creates a custom website based on the description you enter and offers AI content creation tools to create engaging, SEO friendly website copy quickly.

Where Hostinger Could Improve

While Hostinger offers some great features at a low price, it is missing out on some key features that some businesses may need to be successful online. In fact, in our latest round of research it only scored a 3.4/5 for Sales features.

At the moment, Hostinger doesn’t offer any POS integration which may be a disadvantage for local businesses with a physical store alongside an online store. It also doesn’t offer any email marketing feature which could limit your ability to grow your business.

Features Worth Knowing About

Hostinger offers 24/7 live support with a typical response time of 3 minutes through its live chat and email. They claim to offer support in 10+ languages which would be useful if your business spans different countries.

Another key feature is its fraud detection systems. Hostinger monitors servers 24/7 so any suspicious activity is picked up straight away, keeping your online store safe.

Hostinger Pricing

Hostinger offers one pricing tier for it website builder and web hosting plan

Hostinger is one of the cheaper plans we’ve looked at. However it has a product limit of 500, which could be limiting depending on the size of your product range. Squares free online plan for example, has unlimited space for products

6. Square: Best Free Plan

• Subscription pricing: $0-$79 a month
• Transaction fees:
• Overall score: 3.7/5

Square is perfect for business owners who need to sell online, in-store or on the road and with its free plan, is the most cost effective way to sell online. On the free plan you can sign up to sell online with no monthly subscription fees.

Square is quite popular in the hospitality industry. It’s ideal for a the brick and mortar restaurant or the burger van at a festival. The Square POS (point of sale) hardware devices are, admittedly, an additional expense. However, Square’s ability to offer a very wide range of payment options for your customers is a big pull-factor.

Who We Recommend Square For

Square is ideal for entrepreneurs and small business leaders who sell in person as well as online. For instance, if you picture yourself selling through your website, but also attending festivals, events, and perhaps selling at a brick-and-mortar location, Square is a good choice.

Square is also the only platform that lets you sell online for free. However there is limitations with this free plan, as there isn’t any abandoned cart emails or the ability to use PayPal.

The Square POS (point of sale) hardware devices are, admittedly, an additional expense. However, Square’s ability to offer a very wide range of payment options for your customers is a big pull-factor.

Where Square Could Improve

The drawback of the Free plan is the basic nature of the editing tools. You won’t have as much design customization as you would with Square Plus. And you’ll have Square-branded adverts on your site.

The transaction fees could also build up over time, so it may not be suitable for bigger businesses who sell a lot of products. Shopify has much lower transaction fees, so may be more suitable if you are growing your business.

Features Worth Knowing More About

Square has recently launched improvements to Square for Retail’s checkout including the addition of a “buy online, pick up in-store” option. We really love that, across all price plans, you can opt for a courier to come straight to your location as soon as a sale goes through.

Shipping is now more streamlined, thanks to a refreshed Shipments Page, from which vendors can manage online, in-store, and subscription order fulfillment.

However, Square is not the best for international sellers as it doesn’t offer multiple currencies. If you need to sell products in multiple currencies, look at a platform like Spotify

Square recently launched AI-generated product descriptions, which help you to publish your new product pages faster. That’s a really valuable time-saver, and means you won’t have to spend time and money on professional copywriters each time you want to launch a new product. range

Square Pricing

Square has three price plans to choose from:

Square’s premium price plans are good value for money, in our eyes. At just $29 per month, Square Plus will send personalized product recommendations to your customers (if they’re logged in). Customers will also get order status text alerts. That’s a surprisingly affordable price point for such a personalized customer experience.

Square’s simple pricing structure (monthly subscription fee + set fee per transaction) is also much easier to understand than Shopify’s multi-layered payment fee structure.

That said, you should be aware of the following payment processing fees with Square:

• AfterPay (you get the full amount upfront, but the customer pays in installments): 6% + 30¢ per transaction fee
• Cash App (digital wallet): 2.9% + 30c per transaction fee
• PayPal: 3.49% + 49¢ per transaction fee
• Google Pay/Apple Pay (via Square Payments): 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction fee

Buying Guide: How to Choose the Best Ecommerce Platform

The best ecommerce platform for Staples (a brand that happens to use Shopify) isn’t necessarily the best choice for you. Here are the factors you should bear in mind when it comes to selecting an online selling tool:

• Selling location – Wix is better for digital sales, but Square is easy to connect with in-person selling
• Level of technical skill needed – Wix is on the easy side, whereas WordPress/WooCommerce is harder
• International selling capability – Shopify supports multiple currencies, Squarespace doesn’t

After you’ve identified those key features of your business plan, you can move forward with selecting an ecommerce platform. We’ve gone into more detail about which type of user each tool is best suited to, in the reviews below.

What’s the Difference Between an Online Marketplace and an Ecommerce Platform?

It’s easy to get confused about the different types of online selling platforms. But the differences matter. A lot. An online marketplace is owned by a company, and shoppers can buy from many different sellers who list their goods there. By contrast, an ecommerce platform is a tool you can use to build your own online store, and yours are the only goods or services for sale on that website.

Here are the different examples:

As you can see, the marketplace sites (also confusingly known as ecommerce sites), are akin to a shopping mall where you can choose to enter a number of different stores. But the ecommerce platforms are the online version of your physical store.

Should I Use an Ecommerce Platform or Online Marketplace?

Honestly, there’s nothing stopping you from using both. But if you do, you’ll need to ensure you synch your inventory across all of your online sales channels. That way you’ll avoid a situation where you can’t fulfil orders from your website because you’ve already sold out on eBay.

Let’s quickly look at the differences between using an ecommerce platform versus an online marketplace:

The main points of difference are the cost to you (the seller) and product visibility. Let’s look at each of those.

Costs of Ecommerce Platforms vs Online Marketplaces

The main costs of ecommerce platforms are the monthly subscription fee (although Square Online has a free plan), which online marketplaces typically do not charge. Almost all ecommerce platforms charge payment processing fees (except, again, Square Online, which instead charges a flat fee for its premium monthly plans).

Online marketplaces typically take a commission per sale – some ecommerce platforms do this as well, such as Shopify. This is what makes Shopify a pretty expensive ecommerce platform. Some online marketplaces charge a listing fee – eBay and Etsy do this. However, ecommerce platforms do not charge such a fee.

You can also pay extra to “boost” visibility of your product listing on an online marketplace. On platforms like eBay, you are charged only when a click on a paid placement leads to a sale. On Etsy, however, you are charged per click no matter if the viewer buys your item or not. A model like this can cause you to lose out on profit per sale. However, promoted listings can draw in shoppers to browse the rest of your store.

Product Visibility on Ecommerce Platforms vs Online Marketplaces

The supposed advantage of listing your products on marketplaces like Amazon is that buyers are already searching there. Therefore your products should automatically get lots of visibility from eager buyers. But if that were entirely true, there wouldn’t be any need for paid marketplace listings (described in the section above).

Therefore listing your products on a third-party marketplace is certainly no guarantee of better visibility for your wares.

With an ecommerce platform, SEO strategy is vital. That means you need to set your website up well enough that search engines pull in your product pages. However, you may also want to promote your ecommerce store with pay-per-click ads on Google, Bing, Ecosia or other search providers.