The 6 best ecommerce platforms for small businesses in 2023

Following our rigorous testing, we found that Wix is the best ecommerce platform for small businesses. It's a great all-rounder, offering fantastic sales and design features for an affordable price – helped in particular by some regular Wix deals and discounts that keep it ahead of the competition. That's why it tops our charts scoring an overall 4.8 out of 5.

Shopify comes in a close second, scoring a strong overall 4.6 out of 5 in our research. This is thanks to its superb features and extensive app market that give ambitious ecommerce businesses everything they need to scale rapidly.

According to the International Trade Administration, internet shopping is more popular in the UK than in any other country, so you'll need an ecommerce platform you can rely on.

To help you make this crucial decision, we've compiled a list of the top six ecommerce platforms for small businesses. Our methodology was built on our latest round of in-depth research and user testing.

Short on time? For a quick overview of our top-rated ecommerce platforms and their best features head-to-head, you can visit our handy ecommerce builder comparison page.

Otherwise, read on for a comprehensive review of each ecommerce platform.

What is an ecommerce platform?

An ecommerce platform lets you create an entire online store with a professional-looking website, manage your stock and inventory, and sell your products or services online.

Ecommerce platforms can be built by a business of any size because they are no-code. This means that even someone with no experience using website builder software can get started.

Examples of large-scale ecommerce platforms include Amazon or eBay, while small businesses are likely to use Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, or BigCommerce.

One big advantage of an ecommerce platform is that it integrates all the business and commerce functionalities under one roof, giving you the features needed to operate and grow your store. You can also have your ecommerce store on mobile, but keep in mind it will have to be optimised. 

1. Wix ecommerce: Best all-round ecommerce platform for small businesses

Our in-depth user testing shows that Wix is the best ecommerce platform for small businesses, scoring an impressive 4.8 out of 5 overall.

The ecommerce platform takes the top spot for features, design flexibility, and help and support. Its closest contender, Shopify, trails behind by only 0.2 points, partly because Wix gives you more value for money.

With more than 70 different ecommerce templates to choose from – each of which is highly customisable – you can create a unique online shop that’s tailored to your brand. However, you'll need to choose your template carefully because it cannot be changed once your website is live.

From our first-hand user testing, we found one of our favourite parts about Wix's features: it recommends items that you should put onto your website based on its type, industry, and name. For instance, if you're building an ecommerce site, Wix will automatically recommend you add in a chatbot. This makes the process of building a website quicker.

While it might not be an ecommerce-specific platform – like Shopify and BigCommerce – Wix's extensive App Market gives it the sales functionality you'll need. This includes multiple payment options, secure checkout, and abandoned cart recovery – all of which will help you increase sales and grow your customer base.

It also boasts the most advanced SEO features of all the ecommerce platforms we tested. One unique element of Wix's SEO offering is its exclusive partnership with Semrush, which users to access Semrush's industry-leading SEO keyword data directly through the Wix dashboard. Back in February, Wix added SEO reports using Google Search Console to its arsenal of SEO tools. This is great as you can easily create new reports from GSC, including top search queries and top pages in search. However, keep in mind you'll need to be relatively well-versed in SEO to make the most out of this Wix feature. Therefore, it's not ideal for complete SEO newbies.

This will help Wix users improve their website visibility for search terms relevant to their business, and increase valuable web traffic by moving up those all-important search rankings.

In our latest round of testing, Wix improved in a few notable areas. Its sales features score increased from 4 out of 5 to an excellent 4.4 out of 5, putting it just behind Shopify in this specific category.

Wix's ease of use score rose from 3.6 out of 5 to 4 out of 5, making it even easier for you to use Wix to create a fantastic online store. This is thanks to its drag-and-drop functionality, which makes website building a more intuitive exercise.

It's also important to mention that Wix offers incredible value for money, costing just £20 per month for its Business plan. This is compared to a whopping £49 per month for Shopify's equivalent plan.

Wix ecommerce pricing

Our dedicated Wix pricing page breaks down the company's ecommerce plans in more detail, so you can work out which is the right fit for your business. All prices are shown when billed annually.

What the users said

2. Shopify: Best for sales-specific features

In our most recent round of in-depth research and testing, Shopify scores a very strong overall rating of 4.6 out of 5.

Its customer score – the proportion of users that would be likely to recommend a platform to a friend – Shopify held onto its position as our top provider for this metric with an impressive 4.7 out of 5.

Its simple and straightforward approach to design is central to its appeal. While our researchers found that creating an online shop with other ecommerce builders could be ‘overwhelming', Shopify’s user interface was described as ‘clean and refreshingly intuitive', making it easy to get the results you want.

Shopify's scores have remained pretty steady in our latest testing. It's held onto its position as the second-best ecommerce platform, though BigCommerce is now ahead of it for sales features. It also has a very solid affiliate program, which we've determined is the best for ecommerce brands.

Although both Shopify and Bigcommerce offer an arsenal of sales features, you can differentiate the two by comparing dropshipping functionality, of which Shopify is ahead. Moreover, Shopify is also better at customisable features and has a larger app store than BigCommerce.

As for Shopify's standout features, the platform pre-empts and predicts what a merchant might need when creating a website. This kind of automation is unmatched in the ecommerce space, and means small businesses can feel confident they are setting up an online store that's tailored to the needs of their customers.

Unlike other ecommerce website builders, Shopify first prompts you to fill in your inventory rather than building the site. This means it's a better fit for businesses that have a game plan.

Competitively priced, easy to use, and with a bevvy of great sales features, Shopify is an excellent option for ambitious, growing businesses. You can also trial the platform for free for three days.

Shopify pricing

Prices shown for annual billing.

What the users said

3. Squarespace: Best for creative control

Like Wix, Squarespace is a website builder that rivals ecommerce-specific platforms when it comes to creating a professional online store.

Squarespace is now our joint top platform for design functionality (alongside BigCommerce), earning an impressive overall score of 4.6 out of 5. It offers a range of beautiful and stylish themed templates for numerous industries and, unlike Wix, you can change your theme whenever you want. It even has a checkout style editor, so you can make sure your checkout page matches your site’s aesthetic.

Another feature we liked from our first-hand user testing is that you can import directly from Etsy, which is handy if you already have an established customer base there.

The editing interface itself is clean and easy to navigate, and our testers praised the creative freedom allowed. However, they found that there can be a steep learning curve for beginners.

It is also lacking in the sales features department, achieving the lowest score in the category with 3.4 out of 5. This drop in score is largely because you'll need to sign up for one of its pricier plans to access features like subscriptions and abandoned cart recovery. Dropshipping functionality is non-existent.

Alongside Wix, it’s now our joint second-best value ecommerce platform. You'll struggle to find a more design-focused ecommerce solution, with a genuine focus on its users’ needs, for such a great price. Check out Squarespace’s pricing plans here.

Squarespace pricing

Struggling to work out which Squarespace plan is right for you? Our Squarespace pricing page will give you the lowdown on which plans offer which features, and what sort of business each plan is best for.

Prices shown for annual billing

What the users said

4. Square Online: Best for selling for free

Square Online is the only provider among the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses that allows you to start selling products for free. This is why our researchers found it to be the best value ecommerce platform on the market.

However, this doesn’t mean you can sell for free. It is also the only platform that does not allow you to waive the transaction fee, adding a 1.4% + 25p charge to every payment processed.

But what's it like to create an online store with this ecommerce site builder?

Square Online is pretty solid as there is no limitation to how many products you can feature or the type of product – be it physical, digital, donation, event, service, or even to sell as a restaurant. This is great because you can literally sell your products and services without having to spend money on a premium ecommerce plan, some of which can cost you over £50, like Shopify and BigCommerce.

The other handy feature we found from our testing is the ‘hide category' in its inventory management, allowing you to set up a new product ahead of launch day.

Stock and inventory can be configured any way you wish, with decent analytics and reporting tools available even on a free plan. These can help you make data-driven decisions based on your best-selling products.

On the design front, Square Online scores incredibly low, with a score of 2.7 out of 5. This is because there’s no choice of templates and the only changes you can only make changes to the font and colours. That said, the basic online store design it offers is very clean and follows user experience best practices. This is in stark contrast to the likes of Wix and Shopify, which offer a multitude of templates and design features for you to take advantage of.

Overall, we found it to be a neat, simple, and affordable online shop builder that’s partnered with an industry-leading payment system.

Square Online pricing

Prices shown for annual billing

5. BigCommerce: Best for multi-channel selling

BigCommerce offers users the most expansive range of sales features of any platform we reviewed, supporting multiple languages and currencies. This should be your go-to ecommerce platform if you’re wanting to expand your operations overseas.

Unlike Shopify, most of its ecommerce features are built in (rather than from third parties), which means they’re generally of a much higher quality. This is why BigCommerce has overtaken Shopify as the platform with the best sales features. However, based on our first-hand testing, we do think BigCommerce's sales features are more advanced than Shopify, so expect to hit a steep learning curve if you're an ecommerce beginner.

Despite being slightly difficult for beginners, BigCommerce made some recent improvements to its ease of use. Its drag-and-drop builder offers you design flexibility, so all you have to do is select a page element you like and insert it wherever you want it to go. During testing, we found that this feature wasn't super intuitive. If this is something you're after, we'd recommend looking at Wix.

BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial for its Standard, Plus, or Pro plans. So you can try out the platform before signing up for any of its (rather dear) plans.

While BigCommerce  integrates with Facebook Marketplace, it falls short in many other aspects. For one, it is easily the most expensive ecommerce platform available (scoring just 3 out of 5 in our value for money category). To put it into context, BigCommerce's cheapest plan will set you back £23 per month. When compared with Wix, which will cost you £15 per month for far better ease of use and customer support.

BigCommerce is not for everyone, but scaling ecommerce businesses should look no further, particularly if you have the budget to spend.

BigCommerce pricing

For more detailed information about BigCommerce pricing plans, visit our dedicated page on BigCommerce Pricing.

Prices shown for annual billing and only available in USD

What the users said

6. GoDaddy: Best for ease of use

GoDaddy is an entry-level website builder that makes starting your own ecommerce site a breeze – even if you’re not technologically inclined. It received an overall score of 3.9 out of 5 in our analysis.

Our researchers rated GoDaddy the second easiest ecommerce platform to use. We found it to be an accessible, helpful editor that includes an Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) function that can save time while making your online store look slick and professional with minimal effort.

However, this very same ADI also severely limits your creative control. This isn't a problem if you just want to get up and running with a great-looking online shop, but it's less appealing if you want to create something unique. Once you've created your store using ADI, you can't change much more about it. However, Wix and Shopify still give you the creative freedom to make any changes you want.

The GoDaddy Online Store is easy to get to grips with, even for complete beginners. It’s also one of the cheapest ecommerce website builders, and promises real business growth (not just a pretty shop front).

However it is seriously lacking website features. It only scores 2.5 out of 5 for this category in our research, the worst score of any of the providers. You will get the bare minimum with GoDaddy, and SEO prompts and reporting are pretty lacklustre.

GoDaddy is still a solid choice for small businesses that want to get up and running quickly and easily.

GoDaddy pricing

To learn about what is included with each GoDaddy plan, head to our dedicated GoDaddy pricing page.

What the users said

Our methodology: How we choose the best ecommerce website builder for small business

Each platform has been put through rigorous user testing and ranked on the six key factors that matter to you most.

By gaining an understanding of the factors we used to determine our list, you can decide to what extent each matters for your online store.

Customer score

Our customer score is based on three areas of investigation: user experience (UX), ‘likely to recommend', and brand awareness (an assessment of popularity based on keyword research).

Design functionalities

This factor is based on several areas of investigation, including templates/themes, flexibility of design, a mobile editor, and more.

Help and support

Help and support is based on restore options (whether a website builder offers the option to restore your website), customer support, and the availability of a knowledge centre.

Sales features

An assessment of sales features, including security, multi-channel integration, payment options, and shipping options.

Value for money

This is based on three areas of research: features vs price (a combination of the average pricing plan score and quality of feature score), free trial availability, and the average pricing plan.

Website features

We look at everything from the quality of website features to internationalisation, marketing power, SEO features, blogging competence, and beyond.

How does an ecommerce platform work?

An ecommerce platform is a website builder that's specifically designed to create online stores. In a short amount of time, a business owner can design and build a no-code ecommerce website using drag-and-drop functionality, so you can have complete control over what your store looks like.

On top of that, you can add third-party apps and extensions to oversee everything from managing stock, to taking customer payments.

Customers will then be able to find your products and add them to their cart for checkout via a fully-automated sales process where products are catalogued, payments taken, and shipping is managed all from one end-to-end location.

What types of businesses are ecommerce platforms suitable for?

If you want to sell a product or service online as part of your business offering, you should invest in an ecommerce platform.

Ecommerce builders are DIY software, so we recommend them to companies that don't have a complex sales cycle and need an inexpensive, simple tool to get their online store set up quickly.

If you plan to launch a dropshipping business, you will also need an ecommerce platform to sell from.

Using an ecommerce website builder, dropshippers can design an entire online shop front for customers to make a purchase. Businesses can then automate the sales process to review, process, and deliver the product straight to customer.

Best ecommerce platforms: Final verdict

Wix is our top ecommerce platform for small businesses because it has everything you need for a great price, while our runner up, Shopify, will allow you to fully optimise your online store with top-quality sales features and opportunities to scale and grow.

If you’re looking for maximum creative control, then Squarespace is the online shop to go for, beating Wix and Shopify in this regard.

When it comes to the best ecommerce platform, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. It all depends on what your business model is, and what you're looking for.

If you’re not sure which provider is the right choice for your business, try a free trial or free versions. With Wix, you can try the (very limiting) free plan, or just sign up and get a money-back guarantee on your subscription if, for any reason, you change your mind. Squarespace, BigCommerce, GoDaddy, and Shopify all offer free trials.