The 7 Best Website Builders and Ecommerce Platforms 2021

BigCommerce is big on built-in features. It has everything you need to grow your business already available at no extra cost – unlike the other platforms, which rely on third-party apps.

We found BigCommerce’s multi-channel selling particularly impressive – enabling you to sell via social media and grow your audience with ease – and loved its SEO features, which can help your online store to appear high up on relevant search engine results pages. 

What’s more, unlike Shopify, there is no transaction fee to worry about, which can help you save enormously in the long run.

While it’s the least user-friendly platform we tested (scoring 3.3/5), BigCommerce is brilliant at helping you to manage your entire business processes, not just sell products.

Wix Ecommerce is your best bet if you want total control over how your storefront looks. 

While it only supports multi-channel selling through Instagram as an in-built feature, it does offer lots of creative freedom and brilliant customer support.

However, you can install the app ECWID (£0-£99/month), which unlocks your Wix store to a range of sales features – including selling via Facebook and Pinterest – that can rival BigCommerce or Shopify.

We also liked the SEO Wizard tool, which makes it really easy to improve your store’s ranking on Google’s results pages.

Read Full Wix Review

Shopify places no real restrictions on how to build your inventory system – you can upload single or multiple products, receive daily revenue reports, and use its online invoice generator to make your payment collection days much easier.

It also offers superb multi-channel integration, letting you sell through Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, and other social platforms (which is more than Wix Ecommerce can offer).

However, it’s the only platform to enforce its own transaction fee (2.2% +20p on the ‘Basic’ plan) unless you use Shopify Payments. Shopify also relies on third party apps for much of its functionality, which can see your monthly costs add up quickly.

Squarespace Ecommerce has the best design features of any platform we tested.

Its impressive marketing features can really help build your brand, too. It supports multi-channel selling, the ability to create and brand your Instagram story posts, and built-in social media live feeds on your website – something that costs extra on the other platforms.

Space for improvement? Sure. Squarespace Ecommerce will struggle to keep pace with Shopify or BigCommerce if you want to scale your business (for example, it only supports two payment processors compared to Shopify’s 100+ options), and it’s more tricky to use than Wix Ecommerce.

With over 154 million users in 190 different countries, Wix enables you to build a professional-looking website within a matter of hours, offering 510+ templates and intuitive drag-and-drop design tools. 

Better yet, Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) can generate a brand new website for you in minutes, after you’ve answered a few questions about the type of site you want.

On the downside, Wix doesn’t allow you to switch templates once you publish your website, which can be quite restrictive.

The best website builder for design, using Squarespace is the closest you’ll get to professional web designer quality. It offers the best-designed templates on the market, and powerful design tools.

Due to this creative complexity, Squarespace is harder to use than Wix. If you struggle with tech or have little interest in spending hours – or days – designing your website, then you should try Wix or Weebly instead.

That said, you’ll end up with a beautiful website if you stick it out with Squarespace.

Weebly is another popular drag-and-drop website builder, meaning you can place elements wherever you like on each page. 

It offers affordable price plans and plenty of apps to help you grow your business, as well as strong SEO features to help your website appear higher up on the search engine results pages, making Weebly great value for money.

It can’t match Wix for creative freedom, and it doesn’t have an ADI option. Also, Weebly’s templates are less impressive than those offered by Squarespace, but it’s a good option for small business owners who don’t have much technical skill.