If you want to do a successful small business ecommerce these days, the most important thing you’ll need is a web presence. An ecommerce website presents a potentially lucrative way to become a successful entrepreneur in this new normal. With many people opting to order items online rather than visiting a physical store, you’ll never really run out of customers when you go by the ecommerce route. Fortunately, you don’t need to learn code or web development to set up your online store. You have tons of options for building your online store. You just have to choose the best e-commerce platform for small businesses like yours that allows you to create full-featured web stores in minutes.
Image taken from Strikingly’ user website
5 Best eCommerce Website Builders for Small Businesses
Many websites today claim to be the best e-commerce platform for small businesses. But when you have to choose the best among the best, it can become quite confusing. Thus, we’d like to give you a brief about the best ecommerce website builders for small businesses to make it easier to choose the right platform for your next big ecommerce website.
1. Shopify
Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms for startups trusted by many business leaders around the world. Their intuitive user interface and pricing plans that cater to a wide range of audience are the reasons why Shopify has more than 1 million active users worldwide. It gives you the best tools to design, customize, and market your online business with little-to-no experience needed.
Pros
- Pricing plans that suit all business sizes
- Customizable templates
- Provides sale of ecommerce products
- Free web hosting
Cons
- App-specific functionality requires you to download the app
- Transaction fees will apply if you use a third-party payment gateway
- The cost of enabling a fully-featured online store
2. Wix
Though Wix is primarily a website builder, it has some undeniable benefits over other e-commerce sites. Their focus on delivering the perfect website experience makes it one of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses and startups. Some of the highlights of Wix’s e-commerce plan is a free domain for one year, 20GB of storage, and creative approaches to marketing your online business.
Pros
- Highly interactive drag-and-drop interface
- Wide range of ecommerce website templates
- Unlimited add-ons
- Mobile customization
Cons
- Cannot customize website once it’s live
- Your site isn’t transferable
- Slower loading speed
Image taken from Strikingly’s user website
3. Squarespace
Even the best e-commerce platform for small businesses does not compare to the simplicity of Squarespace. It includes ecommerce platform, announcement bar, donation block, OpenTable block, location management, menu block, promotional pop-ups mobile information bar, Amazon block. While offering these options at a relatively low price. Plus they’re absolutely top-notch when it comes to website design.
Pros
- Over 100 website themes for both phones and tablets
- You can customize the template with HTML and CSS
- Offline selling with the Squarespace Commerce app
Cons
- No app store
- Restricted payment options (PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay)
- Not suitable for a deep menu hierarchy for your online store
4. BigCommerce
If you’re going for the best e-commerce platform for small businesses, it’s sure to boost your chances of making it big. But it will also cost you more than the options mentioned here. BigCommerce is the best ecommerce builder when it comes to accessibility. The website provides a drag and drop editor that lets you quickly build your website. It is perfect for both novices, to build a website for the first time, as well as more advanced users looking to create an intricate site with tons of features. With BigCommerce Website Builder, you can easily add eCommerce products from any marketplace such as Amazon or Etsy.
Pros
- Provides you with 12 free templates for your online store
- No limit for the number of physical or digital products
- No transaction fees
- Reporting tools to track your sales
Cons
- Themes are similar in design and functions
- It doesn’t endorse RSS feeds
- Cannot recover abandoned cart
- $50,000 annual limit on sales for the standard plan
5. Weebly
If you compare the usability of the best e-commerce platform for small businesses, Weebly is one of the most simple. They have made the idea of drag-and-drop as simple as possible where you literally have to drag and drop files into their premade templates, making it super intuitive. While it is a simple, small business ecommerce website builder, it gives almost all of the features associated with some of the best e-commerce website builders for small businesses.
Pros
- Extremely easy to use
- Already integrated with Square, making payments simple
- Business plans include automatic tax calculator, among other perks
- Marketing tools are ready-to-go
Cons
- Abandoned cart emails only with most expensive plan
- No integration with Amazon to fulfill orders
- Optimizing drop shipping can be expensive
This list tells you about the best ecommerce website builders for small businesses but doesn’t mention a new forerunner. That is precisely because when you compare all these platforms with their pros and cons, only one stands out as the best e-commerce platform for small businesses. We could have just included Strikingly in the list of the best e-commerce platform for small businesses and given you a brief about the pros and cons of the website. But that wouldn't give you the whole picture. We want you to really see the wonders of building your ecommerce website with Strikingly.
What Makes Strikingly the Best e-Commerce Platform for Startups?
Here at Strikingly, we recognize the best ecommerce builder needs and the fact that every website building tool serves a specific client and their needs. Becoming the best e-commerce platform for small businesses doesn't mean we give you all the features provided by the website builders or having the lowest prices. Strikingly is not known as the best e-commerce platform for startups for nothing as we understand the needs of such ecommerce businesses.
Here are Strikingly features that makes it the best e-commerce platform for small businesses
Image taken from Strikingly
1. Strikingly’s Simple Store
There are quite a few reasons that qualify Strikingly as the best e-commerce platform for small businesses. Strikingly’s Simple Store is targeted towards small businesses and startups looking to start selling online at a minimal entry cost. With this platform, you can try your hand at online retail for free. Start a single-product business and grow into a multi-category online store as your company starts scaling up. It features everything you need to start your online venture - payment integration, inventory management and content marketing tools. Secure payment gateways including Paypal, Stripe, AliPay, and WeChat Pay are also supported.
Image taken from Strikigly’s user website
2. User Interface
One of the key strengths of Strikingly is its ability to cater to beginners and new entrepreneurs. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive website editor let you set up your online store in minutes and with virtually no coding needed. To create an ecommerce store, all you need to do is add the Simple Store section to your website template and start uploading your inventory and connecting your selected payment gateway.
3. Pricing
Strikingly offers value for money with its free account. Simple Store is available on a free plan so you don’t have to feel compelled to upgrade to get started. Once your business takes off and you start adding new products to your store, you might want to check out our plans and scale up as you go. Subscriptions start at $8 per month.
Image taken from Strikingly
Overall, Strikingly provides a more competitively priced subscription structure. Even if you check out Wix pricing plans or Weebly pricing plans, Shopify can still be a tad expensive compared to these platforms that offer ecommerce capabilities.
4. Website Template
Image taken from Strikingly
Reach customers shopping through mobile devices with a mobile responsive website. Strikingly’s templates are all guaranteed to render well on smaller screens to ensure a consistent user experience. You don’t need to write additional code to make your images and design adapt to various screen sizes and browsing environments. The best part of all is that all templates are available on free accounts and you can switch to different themes if you find that the design is not working for you.
5. Customer Support
A website cannot be considered the best e-commerce platform for small businesses if it does not cater to its users. Strikingly features sufficient support options in the form of live chat, email, and phone (for VIP users). If you like finding things out on your own, each platform has a Knowledge Base that covers some of the most common concerns that users might encounter while building their websites. With Strikingly, however, you have the added option of interacting with other users through a community forum. The platform also welcomes suggestions for additional features from users so feel free to drop them a note if there is a feature or functionality that can further enhance the service.
Image taken from Strikingly
This article would have made it clear as to why Strikingly is one of the best ecommerce website builders for small businesses and startups. If you are a small business or a startup and are not sure where to start, well, you need to create a free Strikingly account right now. We give you an ecommerce experience like no other. Of course, some of the best small business ecommerce website builders have drawbacks related to site speed and options for scaling and Strikingly is no different. But if you look at all the pros and cons listed in this article, you’ll know why setting up your ecommerce store with Strikingly is by far the best choice.
