Best ecommerce website builders for small businesses
TL;DR: Shopify leads for serious stores, WooCommerce wins on flexibility, and Wix is the fastest to launch. But the platform you pick only half-solves the problem: you still need a link-in-bio page that sends social traffic to the right product, not just your homepage.
The best ecommerce website builders in 2024
The best ecommerce website builders for most small businesses are Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Shopify wins on ease of use and support. WooCommerce wins on customization and cost. BigCommerce wins on built-in features without transaction fees. Which one fits you depends on how much you want to build versus buy, and how fast you need to go.
That said, picking the right store builder is only half the work. Once your store exists, you need to drive traffic to it, and for most small businesses today, the bulk of that traffic starts on social media. Your Instagram bio, your TikTok profile, your YouTube channel card: all of them get one link. What you do with that link decides whether your followers actually buy anything.
- Shopify: best all-around for growing stores
- WooCommerce: best for customization and budget control
- BigCommerce: best for scaling without extra fees
- Wix Ecommerce: best for getting online fast
- Weebly: best free-plan option for physical goods
- Zyro: best for simple, mobile-first stores
Why most small businesses pick the wrong platform first
Sixty-eight percent of small business owners who switch ecommerce platforms do so within the first year, according to a 2023 survey by Reforge. The main reason is almost never price. It is capability mismatch: they picked a platform based on what looked good in a demo, not what matched how they actually sell.
Before you read the platform breakdown below, answer three questions. First, do you sell physical products that need shipping calculations, or digital products that need file delivery? Second, do you need inventory management for more than 50 SKUs? Third, are you starting from scratch or migrating an existing catalog?
Your answers should cut the list in half before you compare a single pricing page.
Shopify: the safe default for most stores
Shopify is the most popular hosted ecommerce platform for a reason. Setup takes a few hours, not days. The theme library covers most niches without custom design work. And when something breaks at 2am before a sale, Shopify's 24/7 support via email, phone, and chat is actually staffed by people who know the platform. That last point is not universal among competitors.
Pricing starts at $29 per month for the Basic plan. Transaction fees apply unless you use Shopify Payments. The fee structure is the main complaint: Shopify charges 2% per transaction on Basic if you use a third-party payment gateway, dropping to 0.5% on the $299 Advanced plan. For high-volume sellers, that math can get painful fast.
Where Shopify genuinely pulls ahead is the app ecosystem. Over 8,000 apps cover everything from review collection to subscription billing to cross-border VAT compliance. You can add almost any capability without custom code. The tradeoff is that a well-configured Shopify store with necessary apps often runs $80-150 per month in total, not $29.
One practical note for anyone promoting a Shopify store on social media: Shopify's native "link in bio" feature, called Linkpop, is free and connects to your storefront. It works. But it runs on Shopify's subdomain by default, which means your social traffic builds Shopify's domain authority, not yours. If SEO matters to your business, that gap compounds over time.
WooCommerce: full control, higher upkeep
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress. It powers roughly 39% of all online stores on the internet, according to BuiltWith data. That market share reflects one core truth: if you already have a WordPress site, WooCommerce is the path of least resistance to selling products.
The plugin itself costs nothing. You pay for hosting (typically $10-30 per month on a managed WordPress host like Kinsta or WP Engine), a theme, and whatever extensions you need. A well-built WooCommerce store can run cheaper than Shopify at scale because there are no per-transaction fees and many extensions are one-time purchases rather than monthly subscriptions.
The catch is maintenance overhead. WordPress requires regular updates. Plugin conflicts happen. Security patches are your responsibility, not the platform's. If you have no interest in managing a web server environment, WooCommerce will drain time you could spend on your actual business.
For stores with unusual product structures, WooCommerce's flexibility is hard to match. Custom fields, non-standard checkout flows, deeply integrated membership systems: all of these are possible because the codebase is open for modification. No other platform on this list offers the same depth of customization without expensive enterprise contracts.
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BigCommerce: built-in features without the nickel-and-diming
BigCommerce's biggest practical advantage over Shopify is the absence of transaction fees on every plan. You pay your payment processor's rate (typically 2.9% + $0.30 on Stripe or PayPal) and nothing extra to BigCommerce. For a store doing $20,000 per month in sales, that difference can be $400-600 per year depending on your Shopify plan tier.
The platform also includes features that cost extra on Shopify: professional product review tools, advanced shipping rule configuration, and multi-currency support come standard. The 2024 pricing starts at $39 per month on the Standard plan, which is slightly higher than Shopify Basic but accounts for those included capabilities.
BigCommerce is a better fit for stores with complex catalogs. Adding product variants (color, size, material combinations) is more flexible here than on most competing platforms. The SEO tools are also meaningfully good: customizable URL structures, automatic sitemaps, and schema markup for product listings are all built in without an SEO app purchase.
The weakness is the ecosystem. BigCommerce has about 1,000 apps compared to Shopify's 8,000+. For niche integrations, you may find the specific tool you need simply does not exist, or requires custom API work to connect.
Wix, Weebly, and Zyro: the fast-launch options
These three platforms serve a different need. They are not competing with Shopify for serious ecommerce. They exist for businesses that need to sell something online quickly, without a developer, on a limited budget.
Wix Ecommerce is the strongest of the three. The drag-and-drop editor is genuinely fast to learn, the free template library is large, and the app market covers most basic needs. Wix stores struggle to scale past a few hundred SKUs cleanly, and the platform's SEO has historically lagged behind purpose-built ecommerce tools. Wix has improved SEO significantly since 2022, but if organic search traffic is a primary growth channel, Shopify or WooCommerce will perform better.
Weebly stands out for one specific reason: even on the free plan, you can list unlimited products. No other platform on this list allows that without a paid subscription. The trade-off is that free Weebly stores have Weebly branding and charge a 3% transaction fee. The $12-per-month Pro plan removes the transaction fee and branding, which is still one of the cheaper paid entry points available.
Zyro (now rebranded as Hostinger Website Builder in some markets) is the fastest to get a mobile-optimized store live. The editor is simpler than Wix, which is a feature if your goal is speed and a limitation if your store needs complex configuration. Zyro connects natively with Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon for multichannel selling, which matters if your customers are already shopping on those platforms.
How your link-in-bio page affects every platform's performance
Whichever ecommerce platform you choose, you will spend real money on social media marketing. Instagram posts, TikTok videos, YouTube content: all of it funnels toward one destination in your bio. That destination needs to send people to the right place, not just your homepage.
A creator with 50,000 Instagram followers and a generic "link in bio" pointing to their homepage is leaving money on the table. A link-in-bio page with direct links to your current sale, your bestseller, your digital product, and your email signup converts dramatically better because each visitor self-selects into the path that fits them.
The platform you use for that link-in-bio page also matters for SEO. Many popular link-in-bio tools host your page on their subdomain, for example linktree.com/yourname. That means Google attributes the page authority to Linktree, not to you. When someone searches your brand name or your store name, a Linktree subdomain may rank, but it builds equity for Linktree, not your business.
MyLinks.page lets you host your link-in-bio on your own custom domain, for example links.yourbrand.com. Every visit, every click, and every backlink that points to that page builds your domain's authority. Over time, that compounds into meaningful organic search advantage compared to running on a shared subdomain. The analytics layer also shows you exactly which social platform and which post drove each click, so you can stop guessing which content is actually converting into store traffic.
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Which ecommerce builder should you actually pick
Start with Shopify if you want the most proven path with the least technical friction and can absorb $29-79 per month. The ecosystem is deep, the support is real, and the platform will not limit you as you grow.
Start with WooCommerce if you already have a WordPress site, want to avoid transaction fees at scale, or need customization that hosted platforms cannot provide. Budget extra time for maintenance.
Start with BigCommerce if you have a catalog with complex variants, expect high monthly volume where transaction fees add up, and want strong built-in SEO without purchasing apps.
Start with Wix if you need to get online this week and your catalog is under 100 products. It is not the right platform forever, but migration to Shopify later is straightforward.
Weebly makes sense only if the free unlimited product listing tier genuinely fits your budget situation right now. The $12 Pro plan is cheap enough that most businesses should just pay it and remove the 3% transaction fee immediately.
Zyro works best for simple, mobile-first stores with direct social commerce ambitions. The Instagram and Facebook integration is the strongest of the three fast-launch options.
Whatever you pick: set up a proper link-in-bio page with your own domain before you spend a dollar on social media advertising. Your store is only as good as the traffic you send to it, and the link in your bio is the most reliable traffic source you control. A well-configured link page on a custom domain, with analytics that show you which content converts, will earn back its cost in the first week a promotion goes live.