A famous quote by American author Seth Godin goes like this: “Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.”
In this digital age, when people are spending more time indoors in front of their cell phone screens and less on the streets, the businesses who will transition the fastest from brick and mortar stores to eCommerce platforms, will be the big winners.
You can easily create your online store using online store builder, without having any SEO or Web Designing skills.
Choosing the best online store builder is tough, but we’ll make it easy for you with this list of 20 best online store builders in 2019.
List of Best Online Store Builders
1. Wix.com
With Wix.com, you can create a self-tailored e-commerce website from scratch or use any of the 500+ existing, designer-made templates, with the drag and drop website builder. It boasts of stunning templates, unlimited fonts and total design freedom, mobile optimization and customizable SEO plans for quick listing of your website on Google.
USP:
It provides advanced media features such as animation, video backgrounds and scroll effects such as parallax, reveal, zoom-in and fade-in.
Pricing
Free Version: 0/month
Premium: INR 70/month
2. Shopify
This eCommerce and online marketplace software provide a variety of beautiful, responsive and customizable web design themes. It enables you to freely choose the look and feel of your website by providing a plethora of content, layout and color options. It also helps you sell your products on a variety of platforms, online or on social media.
USP: It provides a complete experience from marketing and payments, to secure check-out and shipping.
Pricing: Shopify offers four pricing modules
Basic Shopify: $29.00
Shopify: $79.00
Advanced Shopify: $299.00
Shopify Plus: $2,000.00
3. 3dcart
This e-commerce store builder provides over 200 built-in features such as website, shopping, blog, newsletters, POS and more. With over 60 device-responsive, free-of-cost themes, real-time computation of shipping charges, generation of print labels and tracking numbers and 100 payment providers supported(Stripe, Braintree, Square, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Visa Checkout), 3dcart is a complete e-commerce solution. You can accept orders, fulfill them, handle inventory and meet customer-needs from a single dashboard.
USP: it provides powerful e-commerce tools such as newsletter system, promotions manager, SEO features, loyalty system, gift cards and many more.
Pricing
For the first 12 months
Startup store: $14.25
Basic store: $21.75
Plus store: $59.25
Pro store: $171.75
4. BigCommerce
This online store builder boasts of 80 carefully curated, fully responsive and visually stunning designs in free and premium templates for all major industries and catalog sizes. Use the storefront editor or HTML or CSS or another code library, to build your completely customized online store. The flexible modular code base, conditional logic, access to language files and faceted search features allow a personalized customer experience. BigCommerce’s real-time computation of shipping rates, speedy shipping, and real-time tracking and notifications enhances customer experience. You can choose from payment gateways like PayPal from Braintree, Square, Ayden, and Stripe among many others. Use the CRO tools to reduce friction, encourage checkout and bring back the shoppers who left your site. BigCommerce is PCI compliant, and thus safe. Also, switching from your existing store builder to BigCommerce is easy and hassle-free.
USP: BigCommerce offers Saas Local Development Environment through which you can quickly test or change or preview you product catalog across different devices.
Pricing: (Billed Monthly)
Standard: $29.95/month
Plus: $79.95/month
Pro: $249.95/month
Enterprise: Custom quote
5. Magento
This e-commerce store builder provides tools for page building, customer segmentation and personalization, content staging and it’s a preview, instant purchase, dynamic rule-based product relations and visual merchandising. Magento enables customer segmentation on the basis of location, gender, order history, lifetime purchase value, and wishlist items and targets them based on the products they have viewed or the items in their cart. It enables you to stage and preview content changes and also to schedule the place and time when the changes should go live. It uses customers’ previously stored payment credentials and shipping details to enable the instant purchase. It sets automated rules to determine the products to be presented as up-sells, cross-sells and related products.
USP:
The Elasticsearch feature auto-corrects customer-misspellings ignores stop words, supports attribute weighting and predicts synonyms to give relevant search results to your customers.
Pricing: Custom quote
Open source version is also available
6. X-Cart
This e-commerce store builder provides more than 80 customizable, mobile-friendly and 100% open source e-commerce site designs at just one-time licensing fee. X-Cart is a PCI and DSS compliant and thus secure. It works on hosting as well as shared services. Also, its integration with various payment gateways helps you sell seamlessly. There are two ways to own a store with X-Cart, the free of cost X-Cart 5 Downloadable version and the X-Cart Hosted version.
USP: The Open Source PHP enables you to add extra features, whenever you want to, without any hassles.
Pricing
Free Edition: Free of cost
Business Edition: $495.00
Multivendor edition: $1,495.00
Ultimate edition: $5,995.00
7. Ecwid
With Ecwid, products can be sold simultaneously on websites, mobile phones, social sites and on Google. With Ecwid, you can reach customers in 175 countries with multi-currency support, real-time shipping integration and support for 50 languages. Ecwid supports 40 payment providers including PayU and COD and all the transaction data are transmitted safely by secure HTTPS protocols. In addition, Ecwid is a PCI-DSS validated Level 1 Service Provider, and thus safe.
USP: Ecwid is the #1 e-commerce app on Facebook with over 40,000 stores.
Pricing: (billed monthly)
Free version: Free plan forever
Venture: Rs. 700/month
Business: Rs. 1,500/month
Unlimited: Rs. 5,000/month
8. Big Cartel
This online store builder allows you to set the look and feel of your store, by customizing one of their many free themes. It enables you to manage your store, fulfill orders, update products, check stats and run promotions, from any device at home or on the go. It also provides features such as images, custom domain, theme code editing, Google Analytics, inventory tracking, offering discounts, bulk editing, and shipment tracking.
USP: It’s an easy online store for artists and makers.
Pricing
Platinum: $9.99/month
Diamond: $19.99/month
Titanium: $29.99/month
9. Drupal Commerce
With Drupal Commerce, you can start building a device-responsive online store with freely available or premium themes, and tweak the CSS and HTML till you find it perfect. You can also use Drupal’s core interfaces to manage your data-objects, page and block layouts, and business logic. This online store builder can process millions of transactions per day. It enables product administration and handles everything from the shopping cart, computation of nation-wise taxes to checkout, in multiple languages and currencies.
USP: Built on Drupal 7, this online store builder introduces newer modules, themes, and versions regularly for you to stay on trend.
Pricing: Open source
10. LemonStand
This e-commerce store builder enables complete design control to web designers using Bootstrap, React, Angular and various open source twig language themes. Free LemonSync tool allows quicker local development and workflow. It provides flexible products and pricing through customizable products with custom fields, unlimited product options, leveraging up-sells or cross-sells or related products, wholesale group-based pricing and advanced discount engine. Among some of the other features, it supports over 95 payment gateways in 100+ countries, provides developed API tools, slack community, integrations via Javascript and Zapier, built-in WYSIWYG editor and PCI/DSS compliance.
USP: LemonStand allows web designers to create lucrative, recurring revenue streams with weekly, monthly, quarterly billed subscription options, and one-time purchase products.
Pricing
Starter: $19/month
Growth: $69/month
Professional: $199/month
11. OpenCart
OpenCart, the open source online store builder has the biggest selection of customizable downloads, updates, modules, and themes at zero monthly fees. Through OpenCart, you can manage the total orders, sales, customers, people online and sales analytics, all under one dashboard. It allows you to set advanced user privileges and separate access for user groups and users. OpenCart enables discounts, coupons, and specials to increase your turnover. Bulk-editing of products and categories is possible too.
USP: It enables you to manage multiple stores, choose different themes for each of them, set product placement for each store, set per store product prices and localize store settings, all under one admin interface.
Pricing: Open source
12. Zen Cart
Zen Cart is a free of cost, open source e-commerce store builder which allows you to modify your source code in whatever ways your application requires. It has various built-in payment gateways and if you need to add a custom module, there are hundreds of community-contributed payment modules that you can select from or you can build your own. You can choose your preferred domain and create and configure it with your hosting company.
USP: This software can be installed on any hosting service including PHP, Apache, and MySQL.
Pricing: Open source
13. Volusion
This e-commerce store builder provides device-responsive customized themes and a custom-domain for your store. Volusion provides tools for adding subcategories, uploading images, managing SEO, enabling advanced search for your customers, promoting your brand through logo and favicon, highlighting discounts and products on the slideshow, easy navigation options, and many more. It manages secure checkout, fast shipping, barcode generation, the creation of vendor codes, inventory status, customer history. sales tickets, tax configuration, product returns, customer reviews, drop shipping, ROI tracking and many more.
USP: With their editable robots.txt file, you can prevent certain pages from being crawled by search engines.
Pricing: (Billed monthly)
Personal: $29/month
Professional: $79/month
Business: $299/month
Prime: Custom quotes
14. GoDaddy
With GoDaddy, you can add up to 5000 products, with up to 10 images per product and manage your entire inventory in just a few clicks. They provide in-built shipping methods, from free shipping to real-time carrier calculated. It encourages the customers who have abandoned the cart mid-way, to complete their purchase by sending them automated reminder emails.
USP: Payments can be accepted via all major credit cards, debit cards, net banking and wallets and which can be automatically transferred to your bank accounts at a fee as low as 1.1%.
Pricing
Rs. $29.99/month
15. Squarespace
This e-commerce store builder enables adding multiple product catalogs, category-wise product merchandising, rich product placement, offering recurring subscriptions, recovery of abandoned checkouts, providing incentives to customers during checkout, and ensuring them with flexible and secure payment options.
USP: Provides free, unlimited hosting.
Pricing: (Billed annually)
Personal: $26/month
Business: $40/month
16. PrestaShop
With PrestaShop, you can choose your colors, your logo and a design from a selection of professional-looking themes. It enables you to manage your products, orders, customer relationships and track your statistics. It supports multiple languages and currencies to ensure a seamless business experience.
USP: It allows you to share your content on social networks, blogs, and other digital assets.
Pricing: Open source
17. Jimdo
This online store builder enables creating the best-suited website for your business in just 3 minutes. Just answer a few simple questions and choose a design, and its AI feature will match your business information and your chosen design with the best-suited professionally crafted content to give you an awesome website.
USP: Website creation through AI technology
Pricing: (Billed annually)
Play: Rs 0
Start: Rs 300/month
Grow: Rs 500/month
E-commerce: Rs 650/month
Unlimited: Rs 1250/month
18. Weebly
This drag and drop e-commerce store builder lets you choose from varied device-responsive, customizable themes. It enables recovery of the abandoned cart, builds brand awareness through Facebook ads, provides analytics and handles shipping, inventory and customer incentives. It also enhances product search, checkout, and payments, and features customer reviews for an all-around experience.
USP: Various skills such as Product Photography, Brand Building, Packaging, Google Analytics, and Email Marketing can be learned through guides and videos provided by Weebly on their website.
Pricing: (Billed annually)
Pro: $12/month
Business: $25/month
Performance: $38/month
19. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open source online store builder plugin that works with WordPress. It enables you to sell anything from physical goods to digital downloads, subscriptions, content, and even appointments. You can choose from among countless themes including each year’s default WordPress themes. It enables you to add unlimited pictures, categories, tags, attributes, reviews, and filters to product description so that customers can find exactly what they want.
USP: It provides Geo-location support to auto-detect your customer’s shipping address, billing address, and your store’s base address, to calculate all major country and state tax rates.
Pricing: Free and Open Source
20. CS-Cart
With over 200 attractive storefront themes, numerous colors and fonts, WYSIWYG editor, product filters, return management, multi-language and currency support, faster page transitions, 50+ payment options, and easy checkout, this shopping cart software is an amazing option.
USP: The Sequential Options feature allows you to let your customers choose options successively, thus allowing them only certain option combinations.
Pricing
Multi-Vendor Software
Multi-Vendor: $1,450
Multi-Vendor Plus: $3,500
Multi-Vendor Enterprise: Custom Quote
Shopping cart software:
CS-Cart: $385
CS-Cart Ultimate: $865
An online store enables you to get better profits, good customer relations and involves lesser competition as compared to selling on marketplaces. Plus it creates a brand entity for your business. So what are you waiting for? Choose the best eCommerce store builder according to your needs, and increase your business turnover by leaps and bounds.
Fretty Francis is a digital marketing and content strategist at SoftwareSuggest, a software recommendation platform. She’s passionate about analytics, conversion rate optimization and ice-cream.