Best Website Design Software for eCommerce Stores
Building an online store today is easier than ever, but choosing the right website design software can make or break your success. The best eCommerce website builder isn’t just about good looks; it’s about speed, security, SEO, and how smoothly customers can buy your products. Whether you’re starting your first store or looking to switch platforms, here’s a simple guide to help you find what fits your goals best.
The four platforms covered here are not interchangeable despite marketing pages that make them all sound similarly capable. Each one was built with a slightly different type of seller in mind, and the sections below focus on that fit rather than a generic feature checklist.
Shopify, The All-in-One Store Builder
If you’re new to eCommerce, Shopify is like your friendly business partner that handles all the tough stuff, hosting, security, inventory, and payments. You can launch a store in a day using drag-and-drop templates and built-in tools for managing orders, discounts, and marketing. It’s also strong on SEO and mobile optimization, meaning your store looks clean and loads fast on every device.
However, Shopify’s monthly fees and transaction costs can add up, especially for small sellers, something you’ll want to compare if you’re just starting out. You can learn more about affordable options in our post on Free vs Paid Website Builders, Which One Should You Choose?
Squarespace Commerce, For Beautiful Online Stores
If aesthetics matter most to you, Squarespace Commerce is a strong pick. Its award-winning templates suit fashion, design, or art-based businesses that want their products to look striking. Beyond design, Squarespace offers built-in analytics, email campaigns, and integrations for shipping and payments, ideal for creative entrepreneurs who want to sell without juggling multiple tools.
It’s a great fit if you prefer simplicity over customization, though developers may find it a bit limiting compared to Webflow (which we explore more in Top Professional Web Design Tools for Developers and Designers).
Wix eCommerce, For Growing Businesses
Wix eCommerce strikes a balance between beginner-friendly and powerful. It offers flexible templates, drag-and-drop design, and built-in tools for managing your catalog, payments, and customer reviews. The best part? You can start for free and upgrade only when you’re ready to scale, a safe choice for small businesses testing the waters.
Wix also gives you strong SEO features and integrations with popular marketing tools, making it easy to grow your brand visibility online.
BigCommerce, For Large and Scalable Stores
For bigger businesses handling high traffic and large product catalogs, BigCommerce is a serious contender. It offers advanced SEO controls, robust analytics, and multi-channel selling (like marketplaces and social media). BigCommerce’s learning curve is a bit higher, but the long-term flexibility and lower transaction fees often make it worth it for serious sellers. It’s designed for those ready to grow beyond simple drag-and-drop tools and move into something more enterprise-grade.
Which eCommerce Builder Should You Pick?
If you’re a beginner, start with Wix or Shopify. If you want your store to look like a brand, go with Squarespace. If you’re scaling fast or managing multiple channels, BigCommerce is your best fit.
And if you’re unsure how to decide, we’ve shared a complete breakdown on How to Choose the Right Website Design Platform for Your Needs, which helps you match tools with your business goals and skill level.
A Worked Example: Choosing Between Two Platforms for a Real Store
Consider a founder launching a small batch skincare line, twelve products at launch, planning to add more over the following year, with an expected mix of one-time buyers and repeat subscribers.
The founder shortlists Wix and Shopify. Wix wins on initial simplicity and cost, the templates look polished out of the box and the monthly fee is lower at the entry tier. Shopify wins on the subscription and repeat-purchase side, its app ecosystem includes mature, well-tested subscription billing tools that Wix’s marketplace covers less thoroughly.
Because recurring subscription revenue is central to the business model, not a nice-to-have, the founder chooses Shopify despite the higher entry cost, reasoning that the app ecosystem built specifically for that use case will save far more in development time than the price difference over the first year. A different founder selling one-time gift items with no subscription component might reasonably make the opposite call and choose Wix for its lower cost and simpler setup.
This is the actual decision process worth copying: not “which platform is best,” but “which platform’s specific strengths map onto my specific revenue model.” A different founder, selling one-time custom furniture pieces with no recurring component at all, would likely weigh the decision differently again, favoring whichever platform makes rich product storytelling and high-quality imagery easiest to present.
International Selling and Multi-Currency Support
For stores planning to sell beyond a single country, platform choice affects this more than it might seem at first. Look specifically at native multi-currency display, localized checkout experiences, and how easily the platform handles varying tax rules across regions. Shopify and BigCommerce both offer relatively mature tools here, since a meaningful share of their merchant base sells internationally. Squarespace and Wix have improved in this area but historically leaned more toward single-market sellers, so international functionality is worth testing directly rather than assuming based on general platform reputation.
A store planning to start local and expand internationally later should at least confirm the chosen platform has a credible path to that expansion, even if it is not needed on day one, since re-platforming specifically to gain international selling capability is a disruptive and avoidable move if considered early.
Comparing the Four Platforms Side by Side
| Platform | Best for | Learning curve | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Fast launch with strong app ecosystem | Low to moderate | Transaction fees and app subscription costs can stack up |
| Squarespace Commerce | Design-forward brands, visual storytelling | Low | Less flexible for complex catalog or inventory needs |
| Wix eCommerce | Small stores testing the waters, tight budgets | Low | Fewer advanced features once the store scales significantly |
| BigCommerce | High-volume, multi-channel, enterprise-grade selling | Moderate to high | Steeper setup and design customization curve |
How Much Design Customization Actually Matters
New store owners sometimes overweight visual customization when comparing platforms, assuming more design flexibility automatically means a better store. In practice, most successful stores use fairly standard layout patterns, a clear header, a well-organized product grid, a straightforward checkout, because customers are used to that pattern and unusual layouts can create friction rather than delight.
The platforms with more design flexibility, like BigCommerce paired with a custom theme, matter most for brands with a strong, distinctive visual identity that a template genuinely cannot express. For most stores, a well-chosen template within a simpler platform like Wix or Squarespace produces a perfectly effective result without needing the added complexity of a fully custom build.
What to Check Before Committing to Any Platform
- Payment processing fees beyond the platform subscription, since these compound with every sale and vary meaningfully between platforms.
- App and integration costs for anything beyond core functionality, since a platform’s advertised price rarely includes every feature a growing store eventually needs.
- Migration friction, checking how easily products, customer data, and order history can be exported if a future switch becomes necessary.
- Mobile checkout experience, tested directly rather than assumed, since a majority of online shopping traffic now arrives on mobile devices.
- Real customer support responsiveness, ideally tested with a genuine pre-sales question before committing, since support quality varies more between platforms than marketing pages suggest.
The Hidden Costs Beyond the Monthly Subscription
A platform’s advertised monthly price rarely reflects the full cost of running a real store on it. Beyond the base subscription, most stores end up paying for a paid theme once the free defaults feel generic, several apps for functionality the core platform does not include natively, payment processing fees on every single transaction, and occasionally a developer for custom work the built-in tools cannot handle.
None of this means the platforms are misleading about pricing. It means the entry-level number is a starting point, not the full picture, and budgeting for a more realistic total from the outset avoids an unpleasant surprise a few months into running the store.
Common Mistakes When Choosing an eCommerce Platform
- Choosing based on template looks alone. A beautiful template with weak backend inventory or shipping tools becomes a daily operational headache once real orders start arriving.
- Underestimating transaction fees. A platform that looks cheaper on the surface can end up costing more once per-sale fees are factored in at real sales volume.
- Ignoring how the platform handles growth. A store that works fine at 20 products can behave very differently at 200, especially around search, filtering, and inventory management.
- Skipping a real test of the checkout flow. The single most important few seconds of any store is checkout; testing it as a customer, not just admiring the storefront design, catches friction that would otherwise cost real sales.
Matching the Platform to the Product Type
Beyond store size, the type of product being sold changes which platform actually fits best, something generic “top platforms” lists rarely address directly.
- Physical products with simple variants (size, color) work well on any of the four platforms, since basic variant handling is a solved problem across the board.
- Made-to-order or highly customizable products often need more flexible product configuration tools, which tends to favor BigCommerce or a well-built Shopify app stack over Wix or Squarespace’s more rigid product structures.
- Digital products and downloads are well supported natively on Shopify and Squarespace, while Wix and BigCommerce sometimes require a third-party app to handle delivery cleanly.
- Subscription and recurring billing models lean heavily toward Shopify, given the maturity of its subscription app ecosystem compared to the other three.
- Large catalogs with complex filtering, hundreds or thousands of SKUs, tend to perform and scale better on BigCommerce, which was built with larger catalogs in mind from the start.
Matching product type to platform strength avoids the common trap of choosing a platform for its brand reputation alone and then fighting its limitations for years afterward.
SEO Considerations Specific to eCommerce Platforms
Product pages carry different SEO demands than blog content, and platforms vary in how much control they hand over for this specific use case. Look for control over product page URL structure, the ability to add unique meta descriptions per product rather than an auto-generated template, and support for structured data that helps product listings show pricing and availability directly in search results.
Platforms that restrict these controls to higher-tier plans effectively tax a store’s SEO performance unless the owner upgrades, which is worth checking before committing to an entry-level plan for a store expecting meaningful organic search traffic.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I pick a platform based on what my competitors use?
It’s a reasonable starting signal, worth investigating rather than copying outright. If several successful competitors use the same platform, it likely fits the product category and sales model reasonably well. But a competitor’s specific business, catalog size, and growth stage may differ enough from a new store’s situation that blindly copying the choice skips the more useful step of evaluating fit directly.
Can I switch eCommerce platforms later without losing my store?
Migration is possible on every major platform, but it involves real work: re-uploading products, resetting SEO metadata, and often losing some historical data like past order records unless exported carefully beforehand. It is far easier to choose well upfront than to migrate a growing store later.
Do I need coding skills to run any of these platforms?
No, all four are designed for non-technical store owners to launch and manage independently. Coding skills become useful only when customizing beyond what the built-in tools and templates support, which is more common on BigCommerce and Shopify than on Wix or Squarespace.
Which platform is cheapest for a very small store?
Entry-level pricing is broadly similar across Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace, so the more useful comparison is total cost at realistic sales volume, including transaction fees and any apps needed, rather than the advertised starting price alone.
Is it worth starting on a cheaper platform and migrating later if the store grows?
Sometimes, but migration costs real time and can disrupt SEO rankings built up on the original platform. If there is reasonable confidence the store will scale significantly within the first year or two, starting on a platform built for that scale, even at a higher initial cost, often saves more than it costs.
How important is a platform’s app marketplace when choosing between options?
Very, once a store needs anything beyond core selling functionality, loyalty programs, advanced shipping rules, review widgets, upsell flows. A platform with a mature app ecosystem lets a store add these capabilities without custom development, while a platform with a thin marketplace often means paying a developer to build custom functionality that a competitor’s app store already solves off the shelf.
Does store design quality actually affect conversion rates?
Yes, meaningfully, though “design quality” here means more than visual polish. Clear product photography, an intuitive navigation structure, and a checkout with minimal friction tend to matter more for conversion than decorative visual flourishes. A simple, fast, well-organized store frequently outperforms a visually elaborate one that is harder to navigate.
Testing a Platform Before Fully Committing
Every major eCommerce platform offers a free trial, and the most useful way to spend it is building a genuinely representative slice of the real store, a handful of real products with real photos and real descriptions, rather than clicking through the onboarding wizard with placeholder content. Try adding a product with the actual complexity the real catalog will have, variants, custom fields, whatever applies. Then place a real test order through the full checkout flow, on both desktop and mobile, to feel exactly what a customer will experience.
This hands-on test surfaces friction and limitations far faster than reading comparison articles, including this one. Comparison content is a useful starting filter to narrow the field to two or three realistic options; the trial period is where the actual decision gets made.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, the “best” eCommerce design software depends on where you are in your journey. Start small, test the waters, and upgrade when your store, and confidence, grows. Your website is your storefront, make it simple, fast, and authentic.
The platform is the container, not the business. A great store built on a merely adequate platform will still outsell a mediocre store built on the most powerful platform available. Choose something solid enough to support real growth, then put the real effort into products, photography, and the customer experience that actually earns the sale.
Once your store is live, don’t forget to keep an eye on its performance and SEO metrics. We’ve covered that in How to Measure Website Performance and Improve Your Design to help ensure your website keeps converting visitors into loyal customers.
No platform on this list is a mistake for the right seller. The real risk is picking based on brand familiarity or a friend’s recommendation rather than an honest look at what the specific business actually needs to sell well, today and over the next year or two of growth.
