10 Best Website Builders for E-commerce Stores [Shopify Alternatives]

Let’s be real—Shopify isn’t for everyone. It’s a giant for a reason, but it’s not the only game in town. Maybe the transaction fees are eating your margins, or you’re tired of paying monthly subscriptions for basic apps that should be free. Perhaps you just want more design freedom without needing a degree in Liquid coding to move a button three pixels to the left.

Choosing the best ecommerce website builders isn’t about picking the most popular name you see in YouTube ads; it’s about finding the engine that fits your specific business model. Whether you’re a dropshipper testing a new niche, a boutique artist selling one-of-a-kind pieces, or an enterprise handling 50,000 SKUs with complex shipping needs, the “best” platform varies wildly.

This guide cuts through the marketing noise. We’ve analyzed the top 10 platforms for 2025, focusing on what actually matters: flexibility, growth potential, and how much cash stays in your pocket at the end of the month. We aren’t just listing features; we are looking at the day-to-day reality of running a store on these platforms.

Quick Comparison: Top Ecommerce Platforms at a Glance

If you are in a rush, here is a quick breakdown of how the top contenders stack up against each other for 2025.

What Makes a Great Ecommerce Website Builder?

Before you commit to a monthly subscription that could last for years, you need to know what you are actually paying for. The “best” builder needs to score high in five specific areas to be worth your time.

Ease of Use

Time is money. You shouldn’t need to hire a developer just to change a banner image or update a product price during a sale. The best builders offer drag-and-drop interfaces that let you launch in days, not months. We look for dashboards that are intuitive, where the “Add Product” button is exactly where you expect it to be, and where setting up shipping zones doesn’t require a tutorial video.

Design & Customization

It’s 2025—if your store doesn’t look perfect on mobile, you are losing sales. We look for platforms that offer responsive templates and allow you to tweak the HTML/CSS if you want to go deeper. You want a builder that allows you to brand your site fully, rather than looking like a generic clone of thousands of other stores.

E-commerce Features

A pretty site is useless if it can’t sell. Look for built-in inventory management, flexible tax settings, multiple payment gateways, and shipping label integration. The best platforms include abandoned cart recovery and discount code generators on their mid-tier plans, rather than hiding them behind expensive upgrades.

SEO Capabilities

You can’t sell if people can’t find you. Top-tier platforms allow you to customize URL slugs, edit meta titles, and manage redirects easily. We prioritize platforms that generate clean code and fast load times, which are critical ranking factors for Google.

Pricing & Value

Watch out for hidden transaction fees. Some platforms charge a 0.5% to 2% cut on top of your credit card processing fees just for the privilege of using their software. Always calculate the “real” cost of ownership, including the price of essential apps you’ll likely need to install.

10 Best Shopify Alternatives for Your Online Store

Here is our deep dive into the top best ecommerce website builders available right now, detailing why they might be the better choice for your specific needs.

1. Wix eCommerce

Best For: Small businesses, dropshippers, and total beginners who value design freedom.

Wix has completely shed its old reputation as just a “basic” website builder. In 2025, its ecommerce engine is powerful enough to handle serious sales volumes while retaining the easiest drag-and-drop editor on the market. Unlike Shopify’s rigid grid system where you are often fighting the template, Wix lets you move elements anywhere on the screen—pixel by pixel. It’s perfect if you have a specific vision for your brand and want to execute it without writing a single line of code. They have also introduced “Wix Studio,” which gives agencies and advanced users granular control over responsiveness and animations. On the backend, you get a surprisingly robust dashboard that handles inventory, shipping, and even marketing automations like email blasts and social media ads, all from one place.

2. WooCommerce (WordPress)

Best For: Content-heavy sites, SEO experts, and those wanting full ownership.

WooCommerce isn’t a standalone platform like the others on this list; it’s a plugin that turns a WordPress site into a fully functioning store. This distinction is vital because it means you own everything. You aren’t renting your store from a company that can raise prices or ban your account; you host it yourself. It powers a huge chunk of the internet because it is open-source and endlessly flexible. If you want to customize your checkout flow to do something unique, add a specific local payment gateway, or build a complex product configurator, you can do it with WooCommerce. Because it sits on WordPress, it is arguably the best platform for SEO, allowing you to use powerful tools like RankMath or Yoast to fine-tune every single page and product description to rank higher in search results.

3. BigCommerce

Best For: Rapidly scaling businesses and large inventories.

BigCommerce is widely considered Shopify’s biggest rival in the hosted space, and it is built strictly for growth. Out of the box, it offers more native features—like professional reporting, real-time carrier shipping quotes, and ratings/reviews—that Shopify often requires you to pay for via third-party apps. This makes it an incredible value for businesses that are already generating revenue and don’t want to get nickel-and-dimed for essential tools. Its biggest selling point, however, is the lack of transaction fees. If you are doing high volume, Shopify’s fees can eat thousands of dollars of your profit; BigCommerce lets you keep that money. It also has excellent API support, making it a favorite for “headless” commerce setups where brands want to push products to multiple different front-end experiences.

4. Squarespace

Best For: Creatives, artists, photographers, and visually-driven brands.

Squarespace is the undisputed king of aesthetics. If you want your store to look like a high-end magazine spread or a luxury art gallery, this is your choice. Recently, they have heavily upgraded their commerce tools, making them a viable option for serious sellers, not just portfolios. The new “Fluid Engine” editor is a massive leap forward, making mobile editing much more intuitive than before. It excels at unifying content and commerce; if your business relies heavily on a blog, a portfolio, or visual storytelling to sell products, Squarespace manages that balance better than almost anyone else. It’s less about “high-volume retail” and more about “brand experience,” making it perfect for influencers, artists, and boutique brands selling curated items.

5. Zyro (by Hostinger)

Best For: Budget-conscious users, side hustles, and speed freaks.

Zyro is a newer player owned by the hosting giant Hostinger, and it is disrupting the market with aggressive pricing and lightning-fast speed. It uses a grid-based editor that ensures you can’t “break” your site layout, making it mobile-perfect every time without you having to tweak settings constantly. While it lacks the massive app ecosystem of Shopify or Wix, it covers the basics remarkably well for the price. You can run a fully functional store for less than the cost of a coffee per month. It also distinguishes itself with AI tools, such as an AI Writer that can generate product descriptions for you and a Heatmap tool that predicts where visitors will look on your page, helping you optimize your layout for conversions before you even launch.

6. Square Online

Best For: Brick-and-mortar stores, cafes, and local businesses.

If you already use the Square Point of Sale (POS) system (that little white card reader) in your physical shop, Square Online is the logical next step. It syncs your offline and online inventory instantly, so you never accidentally sell an item online that someone just bought in your store. The beauty of Square Online is that it allows you to start for free. Unlike other “free” trials that expire, Square allows you to sell unlimited products on their free plan—you only pay the standard credit card processing fee when you make a sale. It specializes in features for local businesses, like curbside pickup scheduling, local delivery driver management, and even tipping options during checkout. It’s not the most design-flexible builder, but for operational efficiency, it’s a powerhouse.

7. Ecwid by Lightspeed

Best For: Adding a store to an existing website (WordPress, Wix, Weebly).

Ecwid (short for Ecommerce Widget) is fundamentally different from the others. It isn’t a website builder first; it’s a store builder that you can plug into any existing website. If you already have a loyal following on a WordPress blog or a portfolio on Weebly and don’t want to rebuild everything from scratch, Ecwid is the solution. You paste a snippet of code, and boom—you have a fully functional store embedded right into your current pages. It’s incredibly portable; you can even mirror your store on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon simultaneously, managing all sales from one central dashboard. While it has an “Instant Site” builder for those who have nothing, its real power lies in its ability to live anywhere on the web.

8. Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)

Best For: Enterprise-level brands, developers, and massive catalogs.

Adobe Commerce is the heavyweight champion of the ecommerce world. Formerly known as Magento, it is an open-source platform designed for businesses processing millions in revenue. This is not a “DIY” builder for a weekend project; it is a complex, powerful system that requires a dedicated development team to run. However, that complexity brings power. If you need to manage multiple stores under different brands, in multiple languages, with different currencies and tens of thousands of product variants, Adobe Commerce handles it without breaking a sweat. It offers advanced B2B features like custom price lists for different clients, bulk ordering, and credit limits, making it the top choice for wholesalers and large manufacturers.

9. Volusion

Best For: Data-driven businesses and analytics lovers.

Volusion is one of the “OG” ecommerce platforms, having been around since the late 90s. While it has fallen behind competitors like Squarespace in terms of modern design templates, it excels in data and back-office management. It gives you deep insights into your store’s performance right from the dashboard without needing to integrate Google Analytics immediately. The platform focuses heavily on the “selling” aspect, with features like a built-in “Deal of the Day” tool and a CRM system to manage customer relationships. It’s a solid choice for merchants who care more about inventory logistics, ROI reports, and operational workflows than having the trendiest-looking homepage on the internet.

10. Shift4Shop

Best For: US-based businesses looking for a free enterprise solution.

Formerly known as 3dcart, Shift4Shop offers a unique value proposition that is hard to ignore: The entire enterprise-grade platform is free if you use their payment processor, Shift4 Payments. We aren’t talking about a stripped-down free version; you get features that would cost $300/mo on BigCommerce or Shopify—like advanced shipping modules, unlimited product variants, and B2B wholesale capabilities—for $0/mo. The catch? You must be a US merchant and process at least $500/month through their payment gateway. If you can live with that restriction, it is arguably the best value in the industry. It’s a bit clunkier to use than Shopify, but the savings can be reinvested into marketing or inventory.

How to Choose the Right Shopify Alternative?

Picking the right one among the best ecommerce website builders comes down to four critical questions. Be honest with yourself about where your business is today and where you realistically want it to be in 12 months.

1. Assess Your Technical Skill

Do you know what CSS is? If the answer is “no” and you don’t want to learn, stick to hosted platforms like Wix or Squarespace. They handle all the security and updates for you. If you are tech-savvy or have a developer friend, WooCommerce opens up a world of possibilities but requires you to manage your own server health and plugin updates.

2. Budgeting for Growth

Don’t just look at the monthly fee; look at the “success tax.” Transaction fees can be a silent killer. If you sell $10,000 worth of goods, a 2% fee is $200—that’s more than the subscription cost of most platforms! BigCommerce and Shift4Shop are great for avoiding these extra fees as you scale up. Also, consider the cost of apps; Shopify users often spend hundreds a month on apps that are native features in other builders.

3. Scalability Needs

Are you planning to sell 10 products or 10,000? Platforms like Ecwid and Zyro are fantastic for smaller stores, but they might struggle or become cumbersome to manage with massive catalogs. If you plan to drop 5,000 SKUs next year, start with a platform built for that volume, like BigCommerce or Adobe Commerce, so you don’t have to go through a painful migration later.

4. Support & Community

When your site crashes at 2 AM on Black Friday, who do you call? Hosted platforms like BigCommerce and Wix offer 24/7 dedicated support teams who can look into your account. With open-source options like WooCommerce, you are often reliant on community forums, YouTube tutorials, or your hosting provider’s generic support, which might not be enough during a crisis.

Final Thoughts

We have covered a lot of ground, and if your head is spinning a little, that is completely normal. Choosing the best ecommerce website builder is one of the biggest decisions you will make for your business. It is the digital foundation of your entire brand. But here is the bottom line: Shopify is not the only way to win.

The market has evolved. In 2025, you have platforms like Wix and Squarespace blurring the lines between “easy” and “powerful,” offering design capabilities that used to cost thousands in agency fees. You have challengers like BigCommerce and Shift4Shop proving that you don’t need to pay a “success tax” in transaction fees just to scale your revenue. And you have the open-source freedom of WooCommerce, reminding us that sometimes, owning your house is better than renting it.

Don’t get stuck in “analysis paralysis.” Most of these platforms offer free trials. Pick the two that sound best to you, spend an hour on each, and see which dashboard clicks with your brain. Your store isn’t going to build itself—go get started.