Ecommerce is on the rise. And it’s no mystery why: Businesses can make a huge amount of money by selling their products online. But to reap these benefits, you’re going to need an online store. What’s the best software to build ecommerce website? Or what’s the best free ecommerce website builder? Check out software and plugins which are best suited for building you a successful ecommerce website.
Best Software to Build Ecommerce Website – You are an entrepreneur who plans to start an online business and develop a website. You must have already thought about best ecommerce site builder software which can be used for building your website. The best thing is that now you don’t need to pay extra money because the best free ecommerce website builder platforms can help you.
Ecommerce website design is a lucrative business. At the same time, it’s not easy to create an online store from scratch. You need a host of ecommerce software to quickly build up catalog. Also, you should consider if you want an automated or manually-driven store. These are the main considerations when choosing free ecommerce software for your online store.
Best software to build ecommerce website: If you are planning to start an ecommerce business then you must be searching for best ecommerce website builder so that you can create your own ecommerce site easily. It is not always possible for everyone to hire a designer to build your ecommerce site. Some of us just have little or no knowledge of coding at all. That’s why we need special applications and software to help us with this thing. Well, building an online store from scratch may look like an intimidating task but with the help of some handy online tools, you can save tons of time and energy.
How to Pick Your Best Ecommerce Platforms
Getting the best eCommerce platforms for your business could be tricky.
It’s even worse if you’re just starting.
But it shouldn’t be like that!
We’ve listed a comprehensive step-by-step guide to help your decision making.
1. What Type of Ecommerce Platform Are You Settling For?
There’s no problem if you’re ready to start up your eCommerce store today.
But you just need to answer the above question.
In total, there are five different eCommerce platform types.
Customized Ecommerce Platform – This platform requires you to contract a developer to build it.
Traditional Ecommerce – This option requires you to pay a license fee in advance. Afterward, your internal team builds and customize the app to your company’s brand.
Cloud Ecommerce – This platform type is common amongst many people. Why? It hardly poses any threat to security or loss of files. For example, we have Salesforce, Demandware, etc.
Open-source Ecommerce – This platform is similar to the traditional platform. Why? It involves the same development method. The major difference is the cost incurred for buying a license—which isn’t the case for Open-source platforms.
SaaS Ecommerce – This type of platform involves building on a single codebase. Also, you have to pay a fixed monthly subscription to cover maintenance, upgrade, server use, and security.
So, in the end, your choice matters. The main thing is to find a platform that meets your company’s full potential.
2. Pricing and Payment
The pricing should be the next thing to consider. You need to know what you’ll be paying for, whether you’re a small, medium, or large-scale business.
Most eCommerce platforms come with a monthly fee, depending on the type of platform you choose.
The processing fees aren’t left out. You should know what applies to the platform. While you’re at it, don’t forget to check for hidden costs. Some platforms are good at hiding costs, so tread cautiously—especially if you’re on a budget.
Finally, it’s not so wise to negotiate the features you need for a meager price. That’s why we recommend you weigh your options and PLACE quality before price.
In terms of payment, confirm that the platform makes it easy for users to pay for products and services. If it doesn’t, that’s a RED flag.
Our best advice is:
Look for an eCommerce platform that integrates Apple Pay, Stripe, PayPal, and other popular payment gateways.
3. How Easy Is the Shop Setup?
Finding a platform that is easy to design and set up should be the next thing to consider after concluding on the price.
For most people, no-code tools always stand out because they don’t require a lot of technicalities. And it’s crucial if you’re a new business that can’t afford the services of a web developer.
So, here’s our recommendation: go for something that doesn’t require rocket science to operate.
Oh yeah! Even if you’re a professional coder, you should also look for a no-code software that can make things easier for you—at first.
But if a pre-controlled no-code tool isn’t your thing—then you can opt for a tool you’re comfortable with.
In any case, ensure to focus on ease over sophistication.
4. Is It Easy to Navigate?
You don’t want you or your potential customers to get frustrated with your eCommerce platform?
Of course, who does?
First off, don’t confuse sophistication with complexity. What you need is a platform that eases the process for you and your customers.
Every online shopper today wants a seamless experience that’s fast and stress-free.
These potential customers want to spend their money. Give them the opportunity and freedom to do so. Don’t let them climb Mt Everest and fly over Pluto to purchase your product.
So, how do you handle this situation?
Test your proposed eCommerce website as a customer. If you get stressed by navigating through the platform, DITCH IT and find something else.
5. Does the Platform Allow Third-Party Integrations?
Third-party integrations are the next thing to consider.
So, when making your choice, think of the tools you already use or plan to use for your business.
Would any of these work with the eCommerce platform you intend to choose?
6. How SEO Friendly Is the Platform?
Running an eCommerce business doesn’t exempt you from working on your SEO.
Your company needs it. Or how do you think your store will rank high on Google search?
If you plan to expose your business to a ton of new users frequently, then SEO should be crucial to you.
Your eCommerce software should be able to do the following things to certify its SEO readiness:
- Able to use your personalized domain name
- Open for your customers to leave comments and reviews
- Able to add a blog to your site
7. Mobile Compliant?
Nowadays, most people do a lot of internet searches on their mobile devices. It validates the report that stated 60 percent of search queries come from mobile devices.
And a large number of these searches lead to an eventual purchase.
So, we can’t underestimate the power of mobile-responsive eCommerce platforms.
The best thing to do is to:
Go for eCommerce platforms that are mobile friendly and support payments via mobile devices.
8. Is the Platform Scalable?
Most businesses scale at some point—as long as they keep doing what works and remain consistent.
So, you should choose an eCommerce tool that can handle more traffic as your company grows.
9. How Secure Is the Platform?
Security is a crucial factor to consider if you want to be a successful eCommerce owner.
If your security is faulty, you may lose the trust of your customers and, eventually, your business.
The first litmus test is to check if SSL or HTTPs secure the platform.
Next is to check if the eCommerce platform is PCI-DSS compliant. It’s a standard for secure payment processors.
Google captcha is another feature you should be able to integrate into your eCommerce tool. It helps to limit hackers from your website.
10. Customer Support
Do terms like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML seem like gibberish to you?
If your answer is yes, you need reliable customer support for your eCommerce platform. That way, you’d avoid unnecessary disruptions.
It pays to get a 24/7 support team that has multiple communication channels to respond to customer queries.
WooCommerce (powered by Bluehost)
Best overall self-hosted ecommerce software
4.2out of 5Overall Rating
4.2 out of 5 starsEase Of Use
3.5 out of 5 starsSales Features
4.1 out of 5 starsWebsite Features
3.9 out of 5 starsHelp and Support
5 out of 5 starsValue For Money
4.4 out of 5 starsVisit Site
| WooCommerce (powered by Bluehost) Pros | WooCommerce (powered by Bluehost) Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy to install | Fewer multichannel integrations than other platforms |
| Excellent value for money | No built-in abandoned cart recovery feature (requires an extension) |
| Our recommended hosting provider, Bluehost, offers a 30-day money back guarantee | Extra plugins can add up over time |
WooCommerce Gallery
Click the image below to expand
WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin that lets you create powerful online stores. You can start from scratch, or turn an existing WordPress site into a store with ease.
WooCommerce is super customizable thanks to its huge marketplace – you can pick and choose the features you want to add to your store.WooCommerce is a self-hosted ecommerce solution, so you need hosting – we recommend Bluehost, which even has WooCommerce-specific hosting plans.
Online store Two Chimps Coffee used WordPress and WooCommerce to create a unique brand.
OK, we’re guessing you’ve heard of WordPress? After all, it’s one of the most popular platforms around.
To turn your WordPress site into an ecommerce store, you need to use extra ecommerce solutions. The best of these is WooCommerce.
How does it work? It couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do is sign up to your chosen hosting provider’s WordPress-specific hosting plans, if it has them, (we strongly recommend Bluehost), and it will automatically install WooCommerce onto your computer for you.
WooCommerce also offers an ‘setup wizard’ that guides you through the process of building your store, helping you set up payments, choose currencies, and decide on shipping and tax options. It’s no wonder that WooCommerce clocked a 3.5/5 score in our ease of use research.
Why do we recommend Bluehost to power your WooCommerce store? Well, we’ve carried out some serious research into all the important areas for building online stores using self-hosted software, such as value for money, ease of use, sales features, and more.
From our findings, we can confidently say that Bluehost is head and shoulders above the rest of the hosting competitors for powering WooCommerce stores. With WooCommerce powered by Bluehost, you’ll get:
- 15+ themes costing on average just $38 (compared to $100 on Magento)
- Bluehost plans starting from just $13.99 per month (helping WooCommerce, combined with Bluehost, score a brilliant 4.4/5 in our value for money research category)
- WooCommerce extensions costing on average just $79 per year
- Translate your site into 24 languages
- Multichannel selling – sell on Amazon, eBay, and Instagram through a paid extension, and sell on Facebook for free.
- Great SEO support (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – the practice of boosting your site’s rankings in search engines like Google. The higher you rank, the more traffic and sales you get)
- The ability to add and customize products
- Payment options like PayPal and Visa – WooCommerce scored an impressive 4.1/5 in our ‘sales features’ category.
The great benefit of ecommerce software like WordPress + WooCommerce is personalization. You aren’t tied down to any one way of doing things, instead having the freedom to play around in the backend. For instance, you can customize everything from your check-out cart through to your confirmation emails.
But, while WooCommerce may sound simple in principle, just like Magento, it requires technical skill to run.
In our experience, add-ons that are included in Shopify and BigCommerce plans can get quite pricey with WooCommerce. If you’re looking for an alternative, check out BigCommerce’s WordPress plugin. This allows you to make the most of BigCommerce’s features along with the freedom of WordPress.
BigCommerce has more multi-channel integrations than WooCommerce, so if you want to sell through numerous social media channels or marketplaces, it’s an option worth thinking about.
Do You Want Total Flexibility?
WooCommerce is a powerful, flexible ecommerce solution that’s extremely popular and pretty easy to get started with too!
Magento (powered by SiteGround)
Best self-hosted ecommerce software for large businesses
4out of 5Overall Rating
4 out of 5 starsEase Of Use
2.5 out of 5 starsSales Features
4 out of 5 starsWebsite Features
4.2 out of 5 starsHelp and Support
5 out of 5 starsValue For Money
3.5 out of 5 starsTry Magento powered by SiteGroundRead SiteGround Review
| Magento (powered by SiteGround) Pros | Magento (powered by SiteGround) Cons |
|---|---|
| Ideal for medium to large- sized businesses | Very technical, not beginner friendly |
| Back-end inventory has excellent built-in features e.g. multiple product variants and bulk product import | Expensive extensions for multichannel e.g. $499 to sell on eBay |
Magento Gallery
Click the image below to expand
Magento is a self-hosted ecommerce software that’s best for larger businesses.
Designer Paul Smith uses Magento to power its impressive online store. It features stylish images, banners, and menus, making for a great customer experience.You’ll find plenty to choose from with Magento’s Extensions Marketplace. It’s not very user-friendly, though, so we recommend using its handy search filters.
Magento is one of the most well-known ecommerce solutions on the market. It powers over 240,000 stores, so it must be doing something right!
If you know a bit of code (or are able to pay someone who does), then you have great freedom to build the store of your dreams.
But Magento’s editor just isn’t as easy to use as hosted ecommerce software. For an inexperienced store builder, there are far more potential pitfalls. For example, we found the Magento interface includes a lot of technical terms that will seem alien to a first-time user.
The more time you spend working out what they mean, the less time you spend perfecting your store. This is why we scored Magento 2.5/5 in our ‘ease of use’ research category.
One area Magento is pretty strong in is the sales features category, scoring a brilliant 4/5. With Magento, you can:
- Sell physical, downloadable, and service products
- Accept payments for WorldPay as a built-in feature (though this payment processor is only suitable for large businesses)
- Add multiple product variants
- Generate total revenue reports
- View total visitor count
The Magento community is very helpful, too, and there are lots of quality guides available. This is why, combined with SiteGround’s customer support, we scored Magento 5/5 for help and support.
As with Shopify and BigCommerce, you can purchase themes externally via Magento, while you can also access a large selection of apps and plugins. The key difference with Magento is that you need to pay for your own hosting.
How much does hosting cost? Well, we recommend using SiteGround to power your Magento store, which comes with three main price plans costing $9.95/month, $17.95/month, and $29.95/month. Overall, considering the cost of extensions and SiteGround price plans, we scored Magento 3.5/5 in our value for money testing.
Do You Want to Get the Best Out Of Magento?
We recommend using SiteGround hosting to power your Magento store. Check out SiteGround to see what it’s got to offer.
Wix (Web, iOS, Android)
Most eCommerce platforms make it possible for you to add an about page, contact page, or even a basic blog to your site, but it’s normally more of an add-on than an out-and-out feature. If you’re looking to build a full website where an online store is a part of things, but not the whole package, then Wix is your best option. It’s a powerful site builder—but it doesn’t skimp on the eCommerce features like order tracking, automated sales tax, and abandoned cart recovery.
When you first sign up, you tell Wix what kind of site you’re looking to build, and it makes a few suggestions. Then you get the option to choose from one of more than 500 templates and make your own site, or answer a few more questions and let Wix’s “Artificial Design Intelligence” or ADI do it for you.
The ADI option is surprisingly quick and effective. Click Start Now, and, after answering a few questions about what you plan to sell and what sort of look you like, selecting the features and pages you want to add to your site, and adding your details, you’ll have a site ready to go in a few short moments. You can even import content from an existing site or Google My Business listing. And, of course, you can dive in and customize things further once Wix’s robo-designers are done.
With so much going on, Wix’s onboarding to-do list is long but comprehensive. In addition to adding things like shipping rates and your shop’s opening hours (if you have physical premises), you’re guided through setting up a professional email address, building an email list, advertising on Google and Facebook, setting up a payment gateway, and a lot more. At times, it might veer a little close to hand-holding, but too much guidance is better than too little.
Wix is one of the most popular site builders around, so there’s also a healthy third-party app and extension marketplace. If you want to integrate your store with accounting services like QuickBooks or shipping coordinators like Shippo, there’s a simple one-click install app. Or you can use Zapier and connect Wix to thousands of other apps like Trello and Google Tasks.
One last note: While Wix is our favorite site-builder for eCommerce websites, it’s not so much better than Squarespace, Weebly, or any other option that you should switch platforms. If you already have a website through another site-builder, try its eCommerce features first.
Wix Price: Free for 14 days; from $30/month Business Basic Plan; transaction fees depend on payment gateway with Wix Payments charging 2.9% + $0.30.
WordPress + Easy Digital Downloads
- Price: from $6-$10 / month
- What it is: self-hosted ecommerce software
- Sell: digital products
- Features: 6/10
- Ease of use: 5/10
- Designs: 7/10
WordPress + Easy Digital Downloads is our other self-hosted ecommerce software on this list. As you can see, the core element of the setup is the same – that’s WordPress. But here, the ecommerce portion of the job is done by a plugin called Easy Digital Downloads.
Setting aside all that is cool about Easy Digital Downloads, the one downside is that it’s only meant to sell digital products – downloadable goods. While such feature set can be considered a bit limited, for some online stores this might be all they need. And Easy Digital Downloads is really good at its job!
Easy Digital Downloads lets you sell software, documents, photos, ebooks, songs, graphics, and any other type of media file. Then, it also handles the part where you make that product available for the customer to download directly from your site.
The same hosting requirements exist here as well – similarly to how it works with WooCommerce. Meaning, you need to buy a web hosting account separately, which will set you back $6-$10 a month. Again, we recommend SiteGround.
The story is also the same when it comes to designs – as in, you can choose from thousands of ready-made themes from around the web.
Here are some of the features you get with Easy Digital Downloads:
- Everything unlimited: orders, products, file storage, bandwidth
- Lets you sell all types of digital products
- Support only from your web host
- Optimized for mobile
- SSL certificate via your host
- Accept PayPal and Amazon Payments by default, and you can also install extensions for processing credit cards
- Good drag-and-drop builder for site content
- A top-of-the-line blogging platform included
- Works with multiple languages
- Set up customer profiles and accounts
- Optimized for the search engines
- Social media integration via extensions
- PCI compliance depending on your host
See Easy Digital Downloads in action:Main dashboardNew productThemes directory
Some examples of existing ecommerce stores built on Easy Digital Downloads:IconDock
Why use Easy Digital Downloads?
Easy Digital Downloads is your choice if you know that you’re only going to be selling digital products and you also enjoy the prospect of having full control over your online store.
At the same time, you can’t be intimidated by the need to set up the bulk of everything on your own.
How we test and rate ecommerce website builders
The scoring above is based on in-depth, independent assessments of each of these ecommerce website builders. So you can know which system is right for you, we put each brand through a series of tests and user feedback assessments.
For an ambitious online store, you’ll need excellent features and access to a range of apps – all of which goes into our features assessment. But it’s no use having these options if they’re too complex to use. That’s why we also do real-life user testing, getting users with a range of skill levels to try out the website builders and provide feedback on how approachable they found them.
We rate the variety and quality of templates you can use to create an online store, plus we rate the Help & Support on offer when you need assistance.
Finally, we give an all-important value for money rating, based on the variety of plans available and what you get in return for your investment.
If you’re looking to make a smaller, more boutique store, then we’d recommend choosing Wix – it has some fantastic ecommerce functions, and competitive price plans that will be more appealing than the Shopify top tiers for larger stores.
Conclusion
Building an e-commerce website is a complex task and one that you could easily miss the mark on. There are a lot of essential components that need to be considered in order to create a functional and successful site. While it is possible for you to code your own e-commerce website, it is preferable for businesses to turn to proven software that ensures quality and simplicity.
Businesses that want to start selling their products online can find themselves in a situation of not knowing where to start with the ecommerce platform. Whether it’s finding the best ecommerce website builder for your needs or looking for free e-commerce website builders, you need to have some information about the platforms and software out there before making a decision on what to use.