The perpetual technological advancement in the current world has made ecommerce a convenient and viable sales option for businesses, whether big or small. As a small business owner, the ecommerce platform you choose to develop your online store on could impact your business positively or negatively. As such, you have to be meticulous when selecting the best ecommerce platform to build an attractive online store for your business.
Building your online store with the best ecommerce platform could help your small business evolve exceedingly to become a big business. Running through the list of ecommerce platforms to select the ideal one for your small business may be very tedious. However, this article will ease your stress. This article presents you the six best ecommerce platforms for small businesses, as well as their notable features, benefits, prices, and drawbacks. This will therefore help you make an informed decision about the platform that is most suitable and cost-effective for your business. Information in this article is thoroughly researched and accurate. Now, let’s delve into the main issue.
The best ecommerce platforms for building small business websites are:
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Shopify
- Weebly
- Square online
- GoDaddy
- BigCommerce
1. Wix
Wix tops the list of best ecommerce platforms for small businesses. The platform provides awesome features and benefits to small businesses to develop an attractive website. Developing a website on Wix is very easy and fast. It’s even more interesting to know that the process requires no design skill and coding knowledge. You also get the chance to get unique and creative with your website design with the Wix drag and drop theme feature.
Key Features
With Wix, you get many quality features at less expensive prices. Some of the major features that come with Wix include:
- The drag and drop theme feature enables you to use features of your choice to build a unique business website that serves its purpose.
- Wix allows you to manage inventory, orders and communicate with your customers with the use of a store manager that comes with the platform.
Benefits of Wix
- Wix affords its users, especially small business owners, many benefits. The platform is built to enable your store’s easy setup with little or no knowledge of design and coding.
- Wix gives you a lot of creative liberty to develop a store that suits your fancy allowing you to add features like product video. Wix also offers small business inexpensive ecommerce services
Drawback
Wix’s major drawback is that it has limited social channel integration. You can’t sell your products on social media platforms like Pinterest or Facebook
Prices Range
Wix Business basic costs $23 per month; Business unlimited costs $27 per month; Business VIP costs $49 per month, and Wix Enterprise costs $500 per month.
2. Squarespace
Squarespace is an all-inclusive ecommerce platform that offers you all you need to build and run your website effectively. It is very easy to use by beginners; it requires no coding know-how. It comes with many themes, templates, and features that allow you to create a well-customized online store.
Key Features
- It has over 115 templates which makes it highly mobile responsive. It also has strong SEO tools.
- It comes with amazing themes and built-in tools that support some businesses like blogging, photography, and others. It allows you to customize your website to meet your needs and allow for social media integration
Benefits of Squarespace
- Squarespace awesome templates are compatible with any device – smartphones, desktop, or tablet.
- Squarespace allows you to edit pages, alter your store functions, and restore deleted pages even after 30 days
Drawback
It is not a highly scalable website. Some of its features can’t accommodate some big businesses’ needs.
Price Range.
Squarespace offers some of the cheapest ecommerce solutions. Their packages prices include $18 per month if you sign up for a year. $26 per month if you are on a one-off monthly plan. You can even get the $18/month plan for only $16.20/month when you use the Squarespace offer code on your first purchase.
3. Shopify
If your main goal as a small business owner is increase sales, Shopify is the ideal e-commerce platform for your business. The reason being that Shopify has more improved sales tools than other e-commerce platforms. It also has a wide range of multi-channel sales options. Therefore setting up online stores on the platform allows you to make more sales. Sales are one of the major factors that grow small businesses into big businesses. If you desire to see your business sale grow, then you can give Shopify a trial.
Key Features
- Shopify provides a wide variety of tools for amazing store creation and management.
- It also has an apps store to search for other stuff you need for your store creation.
- Shopify integrates with other e-commerce email marketing software to reach customers and market sales
- Shopify comes with in-built dropshipping tools which help you to find storage for your products.
Benefits of Shopify
- It has a vast app market and sales-specific features that make it fast and easy to use.
- It also provides multi-channel options. You can sell your products on Amazon, eBay, and other platforms
- It has a responsive design that enables your website to adapt to any device it is accessed with.
Drawback
Shopify is a little bit expensive for small businesses. Shopify charges transaction fee except you use Shopify payment
Price Range
The only downside of Shopify for small businesses is the price. Shopify’s price range includes $29 per month. You will get a 10% discount if you sign up for one year, while you get a 20% discount if you sign up for two years.
4. Weebly
Weebly is an ecommerce platform that is distinguished from other platforms by its double feature of simplicity and affordability. It is very easy to use for beginners and very affordable. You can open your store for free on the platform. Interesting, right! So Weebly comes highly recommended for small business owners who have less to spend on ecommerce platforms. Weebly is a very promising ecommerce platform well structured to meet small businesses needs. Despite being less expensive, Weebly comes with some good features ideal for small businesses.
Key Features
- It comes with tools for the fast and easy building of an online store.
- Weebly also possesses some features such as a mobile app and automated tax calculator for easy business management.
Benefits of Weebly
- Weebly’s greatest benefits are its low price and free offer.
- Weebly is very easy to use. It requires no sophisticated tech skill.
Drawbacks
- Weebly cannot sell across various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. They may slow down sales.
- Weebly doesn’t offer the option to create a custom checkout page which is very important.
Prices Range:
Weebly offers a free ecommerce plan meaning you can sell on the platform for free. However, it’s advisable to subscribe to one of their packages. Weebly offers both a professional package and a performance package. The professional package costs $12; it removes advert from your site and offers you a free domain, shipping calculator, and unlimited storage. The performance package costs $26 per month. It offers better features like abandoned cart emails and shipping discounts.
5. SquareOnline
Weebly was bought by the owners of Square, a payment processing company. So, square online ecommerce platform was formed to improve the ecommerce solutions offered by Weebly. Hence, the similarities between both website building platforms. SquareOnline is also cheap and beginner-friendly, like Weebly. The improvement they, however, offer is the Artificial design intelligence (ADI) that comes with it. SquareOnline, with its ADI, allows its users to build their store according to their needs. SquareOnline is created to help its user, especially small businesses to increase their sales and ensure customer satisfaction. You can get all SquareOnline awesome features at affordable prices.
Key Features
- As an upgrade to Weebly, SquareOnline provides extra features that you can’t get on Weebly. These include features for building customize invoices and tracking customer behavior.
- SquareOnline offers its users AI tech to add products which makes it easy to identify and suggest category names for a product.
Benefits of SquareOnline
- Despite the improved features that come with SquareOnline is very affordable. You can develop your store for free on the platform
- The Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) that comes with SquareOnline makes the platform user-friendly and quick to use.
Drawback
The platform still has the limitations of Weebly, like limited sell integration with social channels and limited creative options.
Price Range
Space Online offers a free plan to build and sell, but you have to subscribe to any other three packages to avoid unnecessary advertisements on your website. The three packages are Professional $16 per month if you pay monthly but $12 and month if you are paying annually. The performance package is $29 per month if you pay monthly and $26 per month if you are paying annually. The premium package is $79 per month if you pay monthly and $72 per month if you are paying annually.
6. GoDaddy
GoDaddy ecommerce platform offers a very fast and easy store-building process. It is less complicated and requires no coding knowledge. Small businesses’ success tops GoDaddy priorities. Thus, ecommerce provides many business-enhancing features. Examples are the marketing suite and the Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI).
Key Features
- GoDaddy has a marketing suite that helps business growth
- They offer users artificial design intelligence (ADI), a tool to create their online store, upload products, and manage sales.
Benefits of GoDaddy
- GoDaddy ADI allows the easy and fast building of an online store
- GoDaddy supports small businesses more than other platforms; its marketing tools ensure this.
Drawback
GoDaddy still has a social media marketing limit like most small business ecommerce platforms. The limited designing options on GoDaddy also limit users the creative freedom in creating a highly customized website.
Price Range
GoDaddy offers a month free trial. GoDaddy paid plan costs $24.99 per month if you pay monthly and $19.99 if you pay per year.
7. BigCommerce
Big-commerce is an ideal ecommerce platform for any business whose major goal is to improve sales. BigCommerce is the best platform to help any business grows because it comes with many features and tool aimed and ensuring continual business advancement. Though not each features offered by BigCommerce is useful to small businesses. However, if a small business efficiently utilizes the sales marketing features that BigCommerce offer, such business will experience tremendous growth in sales. It also has great SEO features that can help small businesses become more successful. So, if you have big sales plans for your business and you are willing to spend whatever it takes to see this plan successful, then BigCommerce is highly recommended for you.
Key Features
- BigCommerce comes with many features and tools that allow you to get creative with your store design and create customized stores that meet your business needs.
- BigCommerce allows you to add large amounts of products to your online store
- BigCommerce platform comes with in-built SEO enhancements.
Benefits of BigCommerce
- BigCommerce offers businesses multi-channel integration that allows you to sell your products across various social media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram.
- BigCommerce has strong SEO tools that help your business get more known. This massively benefits small businesses
Drawback
The many awesome features that BigCommerce provides comes at a cost that might be pocket tiering for small businesses.
Prices Range
BigCommerce offers 14 days trial, after which you may subscribe to any of these plans.
Standard costs $29.95 per month; Plus costs $79.95 per month; Pro costs $299.95 per month, and Enterprise price varies.