Online shopping is not only here to stay but is the way of future shopping worldwide. People shop for everything online nowadays, starting from mobile phones, to car parts and even medicine.
New technologies like Amazon’s currier drones, live shipping tracking, outsource call centers for phone and chat customer service, to a faster internet connection only make it easier for people all over the world to buy goods from different corners of the planet.
With more and more shoppers turn online, more offline store owners turn to sell their products online, manufacturers turn to sell their goods themselves and entirely new industries like dropshipping are being created. With so many new opportunities, people are looking for a good online store website builder to match their needs.
What Are eCommerce website builders?
Imagine you want to build your store. What do you do? well, you can turn to web developers to develop your store from scratch, but that will be a very expensive, complicated, and time-consuming project, which in the end you still don’t know if the quality worth it.
The answer to this is website builders. Those are pieces of technology that help you build and manage your own online store with minimal to no technical skills, fast and cheap (well, relatively).
There are 3 main types of website builders –
- Open-source: open-source website builders are free to use website builders such as WordPress and Magento. They are free to use under the GNU General Public License. Click here to learn how to start a website with WordPress and Bluehost
- Semi-open: Those are privately owned builders that allow you to make changes to certain aspects of their code, but not entirely and still under their license.
- Closed code: Privately owned website builders where you DO NOT have access to the code and if you want something done, you need to ask the website developers. Those are our less recommended website builders.
3 Best Website Builders for eCommerce
Although we’re looking at eCommerce specific website builders here, we do have a list f the best general website builders for in-case you need a blog, or a marketing site or anything else than a store.
#1 – WordPress and Woocommerce
WordPress is the most popular open-source website builder in the world today, powering an estimated distribution of more than 30% of the world’s websites.
WordPress on its own is not an eCommerce platform. In comes Woocommerce. WordPress’s most popular store addon which has, well, almost anything a store owner will want out-of-the-box. And if you can’t find it embedded in the plugin, well just search it amongst the thousands 3rd party addons developed to support the plugin.
Pros:
- FREE to use
- Open code for any change you’d like to do
- The biggest CMS developers community in the world
- Free to host wherever you want
- Ten’s of thousands of plugins and addons for any use
- Very SEO friendly
Cons:
- A learning curve to learn how to use
- Can start a small website on your own (click here to learn how to start a blog) but a bigger site needs a developer
#2 – Shopify
A semi-open code, eCommerce specific CMS that’s growing like crazy in the past few years. Shopify is a Canadian based company that’s traded in the stock market and is a favorite for dropshippers and international online stores as it is VERY easy to use, very easy to expand, scalable, and has great customer service.
Shopify allows you to make changes to the design theme, add your design theme, or purchase a design theme from marketplaces like Themeforest.
It also allows you to build 3rd party apps (or addons) so you can sell them in the marketplace or use them to further customize your site.
Pros:
- Very easy to use
- eCommerce dedicated applications (addons)
- Highly Scalable
Cons:
- Can be a bit pricy for some people
- The website can’t be transferred to another CMS
#3 – Wix Stores
Started in 2006, Wix is now one of the biggest free website builders in the world with over 145 million registered users, and over 500,000 paid/premium users.
As far as eCommerce goes, Wix has over 400,000 online stores, ranging from small 1 products store, to a bigger mom and pops store.
Although Wix is a good choice to start a website, I would only recommend small users to worx with Wix’s website builder as it’s low cost and fits a small store like a glove.
Pros:
- Free or very low cost
- Very easy to use
- Very easy to design and customize the store
- No experience needed
Cons:
- Suitable only for small stores
- Very little code access
- SEO compatibility not proven yet in my opinion
Summary
Although there are many more website builders and many more options to go when you choose to build or change your online store’s platform, I would start my research with this 3. Most of the time, that’ll be enough and you won’t need to keep researching.
I hope this article has helped you. Please feel free to drop us a comment, question or suggestion and we will be happy to respond asap.
Thanks!