Are you ready to develop your new e-commerce website? Perhaps you already know what kind of features you’d like to have and you are ready to start bringing your website to life! If you do, that’s a great start! However, there are a few things you need to figure out before you jump into the creating process.

First, you will need to decide which eCommerce website platform you want to use. Overall, this will have a huge impact on your experience and your customers’ experience. There are several great website builders for eCommerce businesses’. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are easy to use or navigate if you aren’t a professional.

Throughout this article, we will discuss some of the most common, user-friendly e-commerce website builders available to you. These platforms will allow you to easily navigate and update your website on a daily basis.

Shopify

Shopify is our first contender and has a lot to offer when it comes to e-commerce. Shopify is known for being extremely easy to use and customizable. With Shopify, you will finally be able to bring the vision for your e-commerce business to life, without spending countless hours creating it.

Shopify has thousands of free themed templates available to you as well as some more advanced themes for a price. You can also add whatever features you’re website needs or you may want. Install a feature to gather analytic data on your website viewers or a tool to help calculate a general price statement.

Lastly, Shopify has an intuitive interface and an easy layout for beginners with little to no experience. You can add pages and subcategories with ease while getting tips from the software along the way.

Shopify’s most basic plan starts at twenty-nine dollars a month. However, if you are looking for something more advanced they offer plans worth up to $299. You may also end up spending more on extra plugins, transaction fees, or advanced themes.

BigCommerce

As you can probably see by the name, BigCommerce specializes in building excellent e-commerce websites for a wide array of businesses. In many ways, BigCommerce is similar to Shopify’s general layout. BigCommerce has a variety of customizable options as well as free/paid themes, plugins, and more.

BigCommerce is designed to take the creator step by step through their website creation. No rock goes unturned during their design process. They will help you understand and create the things you may not even know that you needed. This is perfect for someone that needs a little extra push in making their website as effective as possible.

BigCommerce is priced similar to Shopify, $29 a month. However, they do not charge any transaction fees or annual fees. BigCommerce has more features than Shopify and costs slightly less when factoring in the costs of potential apps and transaction fees.

Weebly

Weebly uses what’s called a “drop and drop” software which allows you to alter your website’s design layout. Note that altering and customizing are different things. Customizing your layout after you initially sign up will be rather difficult. This will put some extra pressure on choosing the most effective theme for your website upfront.

A great benefit Weebly offers is that they have a great variety of features available on their product page. Their most standard template will allow you to add multiple images or videos of a single product as well as useful sales features.

Weebly also has social media integrations available along with other marketing and sales tools. They also have a variety of different payment options making it more flexible than others. Their services cost around $25 a month.

Weebly is excellent for beginners who are looking for a simple website building platform. This platform is also best suited for small businesses with a small number of products.

Squarespace

Squarespace is another excellent website building platform. This is the go-to for anyone looking to make an e-commerce site quickly and easily. Squarespace is straightforward and “normal”, relatively speaking.

Their e-commerce templates can be set up with the click of a few buttons using their drag and drop technology. No coding experience is required to use Squarespace as a website builder. However, the customization options are more limited than others. You may want to keep that in mind if you had something particularly special in mind.

One great feature Squarespace has is its ability to change the template of your website at any time without losing any content. This means you can pick the template you’d like to use now and if your needs change in the future you can simply change your template while keeping all the content you’ve previously posted. While this may seem like a simple task, it is not. Many other platforms struggle to migrate content over to a different template, and will even charge you for attempting the service.

On the downside, Squarespace doesn’t have as many integrations as its competitors. However, there are enough integrations available to meet your basic website needs. The basic website needs like shopping cart recovery, bulk shipping labels, and other e-commerce website needs

There are a plethora of e-commerce website builders available to you out there. What’s most important is that you find the one best suited for you and your specific needs as a business owner. Remember to know the features you want to have before committing to a website building company. It’s not just about building a website, its also about creating a website that maintains functionality while being simple for your customers to use.

After all, the last thing you want is to build an amazing website and not be able to give it the proper maintenance it needs and it ends up working against you instead of for you. All of the website builders mentioned are all high quality and highly recommended by experts within their industry. However, it’s mostly the little things like features & customization you have in mind that will determine which platform is ultimately best for you.