Every day, more and more business is getting done online. More people are shifting from traditional ways of shopping and doing business and leveraging the world wide wave of technology to get things done conveniently.
A report cited by Forbes indicates that by 2026, 24% of retail purchases are expected to take place online. If you have decided to venture into the business of selling products or services online (ecommerce), your decision could not have come at a better time.
This guide is focused on outlining the features and factors that make the best ecommerce website creator. The post will also include a high level review of the top three ecommerce website creators, Shopify, Wix and BigCommerce – and indicate why Shopify is the best ecommerce website creator overall.
Summarised Review of Shopify as the Best Ecommerce Website Creator
Key Shopify Features
| User-Friendliness & Customization | -Intuitive and easy-to-use online store interface -Suitable for beginners and experts users (co coding and design skills required) -Diverse collection of professionally designed templates -Allows for customization to create unique online storefronts |
| Scalability & Flexibility | -Serves businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises -Offers various pricing plans to accommodate growth -Vast ecosystem of third-party apps and integrations -Enhances online store’s functionality across various aspects |
| Mobile Responsiveness & Security | -Ensures mobile-responsive design for optimal user experience -Adapts seamlessly to smartphones and tablets -Provides secure and reliable payment gateways -Simplifies payment process for customers |
| SEO & Marketing Tools | -Equipped with powerful SEO tools and features -Improves store’s visibility in search engine results -Offers 24/7 omni-channel customer support -Ensures assistance and guidance when needed |
| Multichannel & Sales Optimization | -Allows selling on various channels, including social media and marketplaces -Expands reach to a wider audience -Provides automated tools to recover abandoned carts -Potentially increases sales through targeted follow-ups -Offers detailed analytics and reporting capabilities -Allows tracking of store performance, sales trends, and data-driven decision-making |
| Reliability & Innovation | -A robust brand reputation and a history of successful businesses using its platform -Prioritizes security measures to protect customer data -Ensures the reliability of online stores -Regularly updates and addition of new features. Shopify aims to stay at the apex and forefront of e-commerce technology -Provides a wealth of resources, including a community forum, blog, and educational materials -Supports users in their e-commerce journey (Live chat, email, telephone) |
Features of the Best eCommerce Website Creator
Central to the success of your online business is a solid ecommerce website. You need to leverage the best ecommerce website creator to build a ecommerce website with the following features:
User-Friendly Design: The platform must be user-friendly for online store creators to build their stores. The platform must also produce user-friendly store-fronts for customers.
Secure Payment Processing: Online payments are central to ecommerce, you need sufficient and secure online payment options that allow customers to use their credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets.
Product Catalogue and Search: The ecommerce website creator must enable the creation of comprehensive product listings, product catalogues as well as browsable and searchable catalogues.
Inventory Management: Robust inventory management is the backbone of a successful online store business. A solid ecommerce website creator must have powerful inventory management features and functions that enable a seamless balancing of stock levels, avoiding stock outs, deadstock and over stocking.
Customer Accounts and Profiles: A good ecommerce website has functions for customer accounts and profiles where customers can manage their personal information and view their transactions history, view items on shopping cart and be able to contact customer support.
Security Measures: The growth of the internet has also come with the increased threats to cyber security. A good ecommerce website creator must provide solid security measures including Secured Secured Layer(ed) (SSL) transactions.
SEO and Marketing Tools: Digital market is critical for the success of an online business. A good ecommerce website creator has tools for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and marketing. These enable store owners to enhance the visibility of their online brands and build captive audiences/communities around their brands.
Customer Reviews and Feedback: Feedback is crucial in running a successful and growing ecommerce business. A good ecommerce website maker has customer review and feedback features.
This enables bi-directional communication between the brand and the customers. It also fosters social proofing – where prospective customers find confidence in the brand based on other people’s positive experiences with the brand.
In selecting the best ecommerce website creator, also consider analytics and reporting features (for inventory management, traffic tracking and traction). Also assess the efficiency of customer support service and if the platform is accessible via multiple channels (live chat, email, and telephone)
With regards to the growth prospects of your business, it is important to consider whether or not the ecommerce website creator has robust features, functions and capacity for scaling and growing your business.
What you want to avoid is having to switch ecommerce platforms when your ecommerce business is in full swing. This may be detrimental to your business.
Shopify: A Leading Ecommerce Website Creator
Shopify was founded in 2006 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake.
The owners had been dissatisfied with existing ecommerce platforms of the time and aimed at creating a comprehensive, secure, user-friendly and scalable ecommerce solution – tailored for the success of entrepreneurs online.
Over the years, the brand has become a force synonymous with ecommerce – becoming a leader in global e-commerce with more than 25% market share in the ecommerce platform arena globally.
Shopify Features
User-Friendly Interface: Shopify has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to build and customize online stores.
The interface and professional high end design templates produce user-friendly front stores that make possible easy and convenient online shopping for customers.
You do not need any design or coding technical skills to build a solid and professional online store on Shopify.
Versatile and Scalable: Shopify is tailored for businesses of all sizes. The platform is suited for start-ups as well as large enterprises.
The ecommerce website maker also offers a flexible range of pricing plans such that you can start small and only go for higher tier plans and features as your business grows. i.e. the platform is set up such that it grows with your business.
Wide Selection of Templates: Another area where Shopify excels is in the range of templates it provides. The platform offers dozens of professionally designed themes and templates that suit different niches, industries and styles. Store builders are spoilt for choice from both the free and paid theme collections that are tailored for visually appealing and customised store fronts.
Extensive App Store: Relying on an ecommerce website creator to build an online store can be limiting as you can only work with features and tools provided for you: except – Shopify has a vast app marketplace and plugin ecosystem.
You can leverage third party apps from Shopify’s ecosystem to extend the features and functions of your online store.
The apps cover various aspects such as customer support, marketing, inventory management, etc.
Strong Mobile Responsiveness: To keep pace with the burgeoning mobile and social commerce: Shopify provides mobile responsive templates that provide a user friendly and seamless shopping experience across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
Secure Payment Processing: Online payment is central to ecommerce. This is another area where Shopify stands many notches high above other ecommerce website creators.
Shopify has 100 payment gateway options: catering to store owners and customers of diverse needs and locations where they can pay with credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets.
Robust SEO Features: Digital visibility is central to digital marketing – and all this is key to the success of an online store business. Shopify has powerful Search Engine Optimisation features.
With Shopify you can customize your product page titles, meta tags as well as use keywords in product and product image descriptions.
This enhances the visibility of your store pages in search engines and enables your product pages to rank higher and therefore get traffic.
Excellent Customer Support: A choice for an ecommerce website creator is a long term decision. You need to settle for a platform that will hold your hand as you navigate this journey. Shopify has 24/7 customer support service available via live chat, email and telephone.
Multichannel Selling: In this world of interconnected experiences: Shopify makes it possible to sell not only on your online store but also on various channels such as social media platforms and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.
The advantages of Shopify‘s multi-channel selling are:
The other benefit of Shopify‘s multi-channel selling capabilities is that you have the flexibility to choose which channels to sell on based on the type of your product, target market and business goals.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: This is a critically important feature as it helps re-ignite the abandoned purchase intent with potential customers who initiated a purchase and did not complete it for different possible reasons.
Shopify‘s intuitive abandoned cart recovery function will help you to increase your revenue and conversion rates.
Analytics and Reports: Data is the currency of ecommerce business success and growth. The powerful analytics and reports provided by Shopify enable online store owners to track their store’s performance, monitor traffic and sales trends and therefore make data based decisions – such as – which product lines to invest more in, which product lines need to be eliminated or boosted through sales and marketing techniques, etc.
Strong Brand Reputation: If you want to make a fail proof choice for an ecommerce then it must be Shopify. Shopify has a strong brand reputation, with many success stories to its name. Top brands such as Gymshark, Allbirds, Red Bull GmbH, SkinnyDip, Tesla, Nescafe, etc are on Shopify.
Secure and Reliable: Threats to cybersecurity have grown with the growth of the internet. The multitude of opportunities that interconnectedness creates, also opens the floodgates of cyber security problems – and the ecommerce world is not exempted. Shopify has put in place strong measures to protect and secure transactions, and customer data.
With Shopify you will also enjoy constant updates and innovation – without having to worry about hiring a developer for the upkeep of your online store.
The platform runs regular updates and adds new features to its platform to keep pace with new developments and phenomena in ecommerce technology.
The ecommerce website maker has a thriving community forum including a knowledge base of resources, blog and educational material – just to help its users to succeed in ecommerce.
Pro Tip
10 Steps to Set Up and Launch a Shopify Online Store
1. Sign Up for Shopify: You can Click Here to visit Shopify‘s website. Choose the desired plan that suits your needs under-pricing. You can go for the 14 day trial as well as to make sure you test the waters before you commit full swing. Check Shopify‘s pricing below.
| shopify pricing yearly and monthly|
Remember to check Shopify‘s website for updated prices.
2. Choose Your Store Name: The next step is to choose a unique and memorable store name for your online front store.
3. Set Up Your Store: Setting up your online store with Shopify involves choosing a template (free or paid), that matches your industry, style and niche. Customise the template according to your branding and colors, add your logo and contact details.
4. Add Product Listings: Add your products by uploading high quality product images, adding rich, accurate, concise and informative product descriptions. Set the pricing and then arrange your products to easily navigable and searchable catalogues.
5. Configure Payment Options: Add different payment gateway options that are suited for your target customers.
Note that Shopify Payments are an in-built option. You can however choose from various third party payment providers.
6. Set Up Shipping: This involves defining shipping rates, options as well as zones based on your shipping strategy. You should consider offering free shipping discounts to attract customers.
7. Test Your Store: before you can launch your store, you should test the store for user friendliness, (can people make sense of the site’s structure?, is it easy to navigate and find products and contact details)- also test the store for functionality and mobile friendliness.
8. Launch Your Store: Review your online store configurations and make adjustments if necessary. make sure your online store is ready for public access and now make your store live so that customers can access it.
9. Market Your Store: Marketing is central to the success of your online business (any business). Develop a marketing plan or follow through with it as defined in your business plan.
You can consider a multi-channel marketing plan that includes use of social media, content marketing, pay per click advertising and influencer collaborations.
10. Order and Inventory Management: Keep track of incoming orders and make use of inventory tools and reports that Shopify provides. Keep a finger on this data to avoid stockouts and over stocking and dead stock.
It is also important to set mechanisms to provide solid and efficient customer support via email, chat and a help centre.
Comply with all legal requirements applicable to your type of business and make sure to monitor the performance of your online store and leverage data to grow and scale your business.
How Do Shopify, Wix and BigCommerce Stack Up: A Comparative Review
In this section I provide a high level comparative review of what I consider to be the top three ecommerce website creators: Shopify, Wix and BigCommerce.
Ease of Use
- Shopify: Shopify has a user friendly interface for store owners (backend) and for customers on the front store side.
- Wix: Offers drag-and-drop interface that enables more customisations.
- BigCommerce: Has a steeper learning curve particularly for those new to ecommerce.
Pricing
- Shopify: Offers affordable and tiered pricing catering to businesses of different sizes.
- Wix: Has competitive pricing including a free plan for micro ecommerce needs.
- BigCommerce: Pricing is tailored for larger businesses. The platform may not be affordable for small businesses.
Customization
- Shopify: Offers a high level of fine-grained customizations with a vast range of templates and third party apps.
- Wix: Offers excellent design flexibility and customisations with a variety of templates.
- BigCommerce: Offers customizable options however may require more technical expertise.
Scalability
- Shopify: Suited for both small and large enterprises.
- Wix: Suited for small to medium online ventures but may have limitations for growing or larger enterprises.
- BigCommerce: Best suited for mid-sized to large businesses and enterprises.
Third-Party Integrations
- Shopify: Offers a vast ecosystem of third party apps for integrations.
- Wix: Has a growing app ecosystem, though not as vast as Shopify‘s.
- BigCommerce: Provides a range of integration options for e-commerce needs.
User Reviews
- Shopify: Generally well received for its ease of use and features.
- Wix: Appreciated for its user-friendliness, fine-grained customisations and design options.
- BigCommerce: Reputable for its robust feature, mixed reviews regards its learning curve.
Popularity
- Shopify: A leading and most popular e-commerce platform globally.
- Wix: A widely recognized ecommerce website creator with growing e-commerce capabilities.
- BigCommerce: Popular among midsized and enterprise-level businesses.
Final Thoughts
Settling for the best ecommerce website maker is an important decision that will heavily impact the trajectory and success of your online business.
Having considered all the factors of what makes the best ecommerce website maker: you need to consider your unique business needs and requirements.
Selecting the best e-commerce website creator among Shopify, Wix, and BigCommerce – and other options – depends on your unique business requirements.
If you seek an all-in-one solution with a strong reputation and a wide range of customization options, then Shopify is our top recommendation. Shopify is a solid ecommerce platform overall, with a strong reputation and a wide spectrum of customisation options.
On the other hand, Wix has more competitive prices and more fine grained customisations, although not suited for businesses looking to grow and scale.
BigCommerce may be a great fit for mid-sized to large enterprises with big budgets and advanced ecommerce needs.
All the best in your new and exciting endeavour.
