The 8 Best Ecommerce Platforms Will Help You Build Your Online Store By 2025

When you build an eCommerce website, it will help broaden your reach and visibility of the business, just as converting more leads can bring growth.

Opting for an eCommerce platform can be a tough call and demands plenty of time and effort from your side. We are pleased to help.

For each eCommerce platform, we will summarize the one or two key features, pricing plans, pros and cons, and our overall verdict.

We will also explain the elements that you have to take into account when choosing the best eCommerce platform for your business, such as customer support quality and usability. Shall we get started right away?

The Top 8 Best ECommerce Platforms for Your Online Business

Here is a whole list of the 8 most widely used eCommerce platforms for starting an online business. We will review pricing and features.

Massive and Enterprise-Level Businesses: Adobe Commerce (Formerly Magento 2)

What is Adobe Commerce?

Adobe Commerce, previously known as Magento, serves as an ecommerce platform, enabling both B2C and B2B merchants to establish diverse online storefronts. It is the engine of Magento.

It offers self-hosted solutions, of which there are two versions: Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. The first one is free, and the second is purchasable. It also comes with an enterprise-grade cloud-based solution called Adobe Commerce on Cloud.

Here are the key Adobe Commerce features in terms of extensibility, integrated B2B functionality, live search and product recommendations, and out-of-the-box recommendation building with full API-driven commerce capabilities coupled with payment services.

Users can also extend the platform by using available extensions and themes in the platform marketplace. Personalized experiences due to the integrated B2B functionality, such as customer-specific catalogs, pricing, content, and promotions that merchants can offer

Powered by Adobe Sensei, Live Search offers personalized and accelerated search results. In the meantime, product recommendations suggest relevant products by studying customer behavior, trends and similarities.

Payment Services, the integrated payment service of the platform, supports secure worldwide retail sales on eCommerce using the newest encryption standards and 3DS transaction security in PCI DSS. The payment methods that JumpSend accepts include the vaguest of them all: PayPal, Venmo and Apple Pay, as well as debit and credit cards, in addition to the fact that it supports local currencies.

Users can make requests via a ticketing system with this B2C and B2B e-commerce platform. Keep in mind that this ticketing support can only be accessed and taken care of if you are an Adobe Commerce user.

Pricing and Planning

Magento Open Source is just free to download and use, but for Adobe Commerce, pricing hasn’t been mentioned; they provide this on request. Everything in the Standard offering, plus security compliance and additional goodies like dedicated escalation management, go-live process guidance and dedicated cloud infrastructure resources

Although a clear price is not provided, Adobe Commerce presents two main pricing packages: Managed Services and Commerce Pro. You can see a demo before getting the subscription.

WooComerce: One of the best WordPress eCommerce store plugins

Top WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin that allows you to sell anything beautifully. The eCommerce platform is so popular that more than 12% of all online stores use it, earning WooCommerce the title of the most widely used across the industry.

The plugin should connect basic e-store features with your existing WordPress website. Once you install the plugin, activate it and now your awesome WooCommerce store is controllable from within WordPress.

WooCommerce provides several eCommerce features, including inventory management and payment processing. Further enhancing it, larger numbers of thousands of extensions are available, like admin’s tools for stores and shipping options, as well as the most common marketing aspects.

WordPress also has a huge number of free themes and styles in its plugin directory. There are also WooCommerce themes, both free and premium, that can be found on external websites like ThemeGrill.

It also comes with live chat support (available for premium extensions of this free e-commerce platform). It also provides online support forums and tutorials, giving the chance for WooCommerce professionals as well as everyday users to get advice.

Pricing and planning

You can download and install WooCommerce for free. However, you will need a site with WordPress installed on it, hosting and a domain name.

Note: Kindly note that the free plugin needs a WordPress.org website for installation. Commerce (WordPress Commerce Plan) comes with WooCommerce.com and retails for $45 per month.

Themes and plugins: If you don’t want the completely free themes, there are some excellent ones on offer for a price. This is another cost that needs to be considered. WooCommerce extensions store: You can find both free and paid add-ons here, with premium plugins up to $299/year. Premium WordPress themes on alternative sites will cost between $30 and $400 per year.

PrestaShop is an advanced open-source e-commerce platform

PrestaShop Basic Edition: A free open-source e-commerce installation Prestashop You need to just buy a PrestaShop hosting plan to have the ecommerce software installed on your shared hosting account.

Features: The platform provides several functionalities, such as customizable checkouts, multiple payment processors, and a product management system.

It also offers a set of modules called PrestaShop Essentials, which boost sales and conversions. These modules are PrestaShop Checkout, Marketing, Paylater, Social and Metrics.

With PrestaShop Checkout and Pay Later, shoppers enjoy seamless payments that are both secure and personalized. Meanwhile, merchants can improve the visibility of their brand by connecting their product catalogs with Google, Facebook, and Instagram via PrestaShop.

Marketing and social.

Along with a summary of store performance and sales data, PrestaShop Metrics for eCommerce analytics syncs with Google Analytics.

Check out our free website templates and modules on the PrestaShop Add-Ons Marketplace.

PrestaShop Experts are one more unique feature of this e-commerce platform. It helps to create channels for merchants like third parties or vendors who can help their businesses with particular operations, e.g., content management, design, etc.

Support also offers a paid plan for technical support at a cost of $272.

Pricing and planning

PrestaShop’s software installation is free of charge. You just need a domain name and a hosting plan. However, as usual with WordPress add-ons, you may have to pay for extra templates and modules.

In addition to that, the platform offers its own hosting service, which is fully managed by them and priced at €250–650 per month. This saves around-the-clock hosting support, more resource pools, daily or hourly backups, and many other features to benefit from.

Shopify: All adept ecommerce site builders

BuiltWith estimates that over 600,000 Shopify stores utilize their website builder to create a visually appealing online shop within minutes using its intuitive drag-and-drop designer and pre-made templates.

It has gained multiple benefits. This includes its abandoned cart recovery to email the customers and remind them that they are leaving their purchases.

One more valuable feature to mention is a fraud analysis from Shopify. Identifying orders that are potentially fraudulent or paid with credit cards where charge-backs are high will make it hard for you to reduce the charge-back rate.

More than 100 payment solutions work with Shopify. However, a fee of 0.5–2% is charged for transactions, depending on the scheme committed to it. Merchants located in eligible jurisdictions can avoid this fee by using Shopify Payments.

This platform offers 24/7 email, live chat, and phone support. It is especially suitable for those who self-manage their sites since Shopify offers some of the most powerful tools on the market, and he or she does not need to be an expert user.

Pricing and planning

Shopify offers three pricing plans. Shopify charges $29/month for Basic (billed annually) and $299/month for Advanced. This version costs $2,000 per month. It also offers a free three-day trial.

The Basic and Advanced plans are for small to medium-sized businesses. Meanwhile, Plus is ideal for large transaction volumes in businesses. It makes it stateless as a separation of the front-end and back-end of the store.

Moreover, this e-commerce platform is offering a Shopify Starter Plan. This membership allows you to create a customizable product that can be shared as a text message or social media post with shareable product links for a monthly fee of $5.

BigCommerce: The Best E-Commerce Platform for Medium to Large Businesses

BigCommerce is a SaaS e-commerce platform that offers extensive functionality to build any wholesale or B2B business, including the ability to easily create a storefront from which you can sell your products anywhere.

One of its most distinguishing features is also the one we cover here: omnichannel selling. Utilize this tool to link your ecommerce store with numerous marketplaces while holding stock administration at a single point.

Being a well-known and hugely popular ecommerce platform, BigCommerce offers customer segmentation around online purchasing behaviors and backgrounds. You can also provide a personalized sales experience by simply providing promotions and merchandise suggestions.

BigCommerce also offers SEO tools and social media integration to help with search engine optimization and increase traffic.

It boasts a ton of headless commerce. This means that the platform resource will be used to handle your online commerce, while a content management system (CMS) is responsible for all other non-commerce-related concerns, like, you know, just regular web pages of the sort.

Pricing and planning

BigCommerce Most photos are from Wikimedia Commons. Jump to Pricing BigCommerce offers three main pricing plans, ranging in price between $29 and $299 per month. Enterprise plan, priced at Custom

The platform does not charge any transaction fees, but there is an annual sale threshold. Each tier has its own cap, with the standard plan starting at $50k per year. Site owners will need to upgrade their plans once they reach this cap.

BigCommerce comes laden with defaults. BigCommerce Marketplace: Integrations, Apps and Themes The Bigcommerce App Store offers a wide range of store integration apps and themes to enhance your online experience.

Optimum Cart: Great for Multi-National Sales

OpenCart is an open-source, self-hosted eCommerce software with a range of tools available out of the box. Its dashboard is extremely user-friendly and brings in all the required information to keep track of how effective your store-motivated sales analytics are.

This ecommerce platform utilizes a module system to facilitate customization. It is not as intuitive as a drag-and-drop builder, for sure, but if you are a novice in e-commerce, it would be simple enough to run your online store.

OpenCart is a self-hosted shopping cart software. It also comes with several advanced built-in features, including multi-store admin, unlimited products, and product-based filtering in the marketing analytics tool, which sets it apart from other self-hosted solutions. These are usually supplements to existing solutions or are unavailable.

A multistore feature allows you to manage multiple stores on a single admin panel, each with its own theme, pricing, and other settings.

OpenCart has an in-built affiliate system that provides you with the option to set individual prices for each partner. The tool has 36 payment solutions, like bank wire, PayPal, and check.

Engzen is an ecommerce platform that offers extensions for several purposes, including advanced shipping solutions and abandoned cart recovery, among others. If the payment processors included by default are not enough for you, it is possible to download additional payment options from this website.

Furthermore, OpenCart comes with a large number of pre-installed currency and language selections. When using other popular e-commerce solutions (like PrestaShop or WooCommerce), this functionality is only available through a plugin.

Pricing and planning

OpenCart is available for free and can be installed on Windows or Linux servers; there are no monthly fees. You only need a domain name and web hosting to get started.

The marketplace consists of both free and paid extensions, which users can use to develop a well-featured e-commerce store. Premium extensions cost $20 or more.

It also gets a high-value e-commerce tool called OpenCart Cloud, built on Amazon Web Services, ranging from $59 to $199 per month. Users can also take advantage of a 7-day free trial period.

Volusion: Ideal for Drop-Shipping Businesses

You need to use a user-friendly Volusion interface. This comes with the drag-and-drop site builder and free themes for different specializations, which drive these features together to allow you to launch your eCommerce stores using sites in just a few minutes.

It is one of the best drop shipping platforms out there due to its specialized ivory slipper tools. Volusion also provides abandoned cart reports, ratings, and reviews for products.

It has a powerful inventory tracker, which allows users to set low-stock alerts and keep an eye on the status of their store’s inventory. It provides analytical tools with detailed reports that help it understand the optimization of business operations and readiness for expansion.

It also has a mobile app, so you can run your ecommerce business on the go. Sellers can easily check their stock, modify prices, and take product photos from their smartphones.

Volusion’s customer service team is available 24/7 by email, live chat, or phone whenever you need help. However, the personal plan does not have phone support for its customers.

Pricing and planning

There is a 14-day free trial, and some of the three primary programs available cost $35–$299 per month for Volusion. The limits for the annual gross merchandise volume (GMV) are different from plan to plan. Businesses with a larger volume can also benefit from Prime. Prices are available on request.

Overall, the more advanced plans have other products off-limits for you to list on your plan and will add how many staff accounts you can create. Volusion Payments is the platform’s Stripe-powered payment solution, which does not charge transaction fees at all. Unfortunately, it is only available for US-based merchants. Transaction fees are between 0.35 and 1.25%, but available third-party payment gateways.

E-commerce Site Builder with Hosting: An AI-powered site builder for small to medium-sized businesses

Hostinger website builder is an intuitive drag-and-drop site builder that allows anyone to create more awesome-looking websites in less than 9 minutes without having to know any codes. For the rapid and easy initiation of an online business, it is a suitable choice.

It comes with two easy ways to build a site. You’ll have over 150 responsive, designer-made and fully customizable website templates to choose from. Or you can have AI create a website completely customized with unique images, copy and alt text.

The platform also incorporates a host of AI-driven utilities. Using the AI Logo Maker, you can create a logo in seconds, and with its AI Writer tool, it is possible to write website content for your site.

Commerce functions as the constructor. It is a feature-rich e-commerce administration suite with, most importantly, an intuitive user interface for managing inventory and orders. You can sell up to 500 products fee-free and offer as many on a global scale using over 20 payment methods.

Additionally, Hostinger Website Builder supports many third-party integrations to make your site more functional. For example, Google Analytics helps track how a website is performing.

Hostinger provides support by email or live conversation. Moreover, it provides a plethora of learning resources through written tutorials and YouTube instructional videos on its Hostinger Academy channel.

Pricing and planning

Hostinger Website Builder can be incorporated with hosting, and you have to pay $3.99/month. It includes unlimited bandwidth, e-commerce features, marketing integrations, and custom communications. It also offers a free domain. On top of that, all Hostinger web hosting plans (even the cheapest ones) include a site builder for free. You’ll also get one free credit to design a logo with Hostinger AI Logo Maker. From that point on, 50 more credits would cost $5.

How can you choose the right eCommerce platform for your business?

Ecommerce platforms make it simple to build an eCommerce website. As part of your investigation, you have to ask the vendor or yourself: which one is best for our organization.

Select the option that is most intuitive for you

Running an online store is one of the most challenging professions. Therefore, it is essential to find an ecommerce platform that will make the process simple and more pleasant for mobile shoppers. Look for an interface that is easy to understand and use, so you can list your items easily and also start accepting payments online and managing the inventory as well.

If you choose the SaaS route, this is as simple as getting an account and choosing a plan to start building your new website. This kind of eCommerce platform is extremely useful for beginners, as it normally takes care of a lot of security and updates.

You will need a host if you decide to go with an open-source eCommerce platform (more on the difference between proprietary and open-source software here) before downloading the program. You will also be responsible for deploying proper security settings and upgrading features. Therefore, this solution better fits more experienced users.

Focus on the Basic Features of E-Commerce

An Important Question to Ask: How Many Products Can You Sell? In some of the less expensive plans, e-commerce platforms limit the number of product listings. Make sure that the platform permits you to list all of your products in its online shop.

• Be sure to identify capabilities that enhance the customer experience, like a shipping tracker or product recommendations tailored just for them.
• The important e-commerce features that the platform should have to help you manage your online store.
• Product filters and grouping speed up finding some particular product among the others, especially if there are a lot of them in an online store.
• Product Variations: If you sell items that come in specific sizes or colors, the platform should allow for product variations to be added.
• Promos, discounts, and coupon codes (Holiday time): They also offer promos for a discount approach to increase your sales during the holiday season.
• Inventory management is the process of continuously overseeing how much quantity is available in stock to meet market demand.
• Abandoned cart recovery: The platform should be able to send consumers automated email cart reminders. This can help recover lost revenues.
• Shipping: Offer multiple shipping options so customers can choose the way they would like their orders delivered, thus reducing cart abandonment.

Customization and design review

Web design greatly improves the experience of online shopping for customers. It encourages longer shopping sessions on your online store, resulting in purchases. In fact, according to research, over 38% of people on an eCommerce website will leave your site if they feel the web design or content is boring.

A reliable eCommerce platform provides customizable templates or themes, so users do not need to build a site from scratch. Tip: Choose a platform that offers responsive modern design so that it can be viewed easily on mobiles too.

Most e-commerce platforms also have the option to use an intuitive drag-and-drop visual builder. This helps in the quick creation of a website without having to change code. Great for people who are new to web dev/ design.

Look for third-party integrations and the right payment methods.

Another important factor in this area is the way an online platform handles payments. Insights on selected payment options can improve the customer purchase experience and vendor conversion rate in your online store.

Identify your peer-to-peer rental platform’s native payment gateways; see if you would have to bid adieu to some famous processors just by paying for their integration. This is because choosing third-party payment providers can make or break a sale.

Check if there is a transaction fee to consider when determining the pricing strategy. But some platforms take a percentage of your revenues after you sell more than the plan offers.

SEO, integration, and marketing functions

An eCommerce website must have e-commerce marketing features, as they enable you to grow your customer base, build a brand image, and expand your reach.

This post will cover the recommended types of marketing tools to drive awareness and conversion on an e-commerce platform.

SEO: boost organic traffic to your e-commerce store by ranking it higher in search engines. We created this title tags and meta descriptions hyperlink toolkit to provide you with URLs ready-to-process.

Integrate Your Social Media: How to better connect with your customers and sell more by integrating social media?

Newsletters: create newsletters with e-mail campaigns and subscriber-only material for better communication. Newsletter distribution of promotional images, product releases, and special offers, as well as sign-up buttons or banners.

Analytical: understand the amount of traffic coming to your website and how visitors engage with it to manufacture a more effective growth strategy. Get the website’s content, design, and marketing to boost sales.

Blogging is another outstanding feature that every e-commerce platform should have. Blog posts are a fantastic way to support marketing and SEO efforts. However, if you wrote excellent posts related to your business on the website and used important words that might describe how someone could search for it, then people may be able to find you more easily (but this is still subject to many different strategies, which are too vast to list here).

Determine the best value

Take heed of these supposed hidden costs when choosing the right eCommerce platform for your business, since market availability alone is not enough. Shortlist those e-commerce platforms or plans best suited to you and investigate their features as well as pricing.

If you choose an eCommerce platform using SaaS, it will cost a monthly or yearly subscription fee. On the other hand, a free and open-source platform requires you to purchase a domain name along with hosting services; they both come at a cost for renewal.

Keep in mind that marketplace integrations, themes, or extensions can cost you extra.

To sum it up, always find an eCommerce platform that is scalable with your budget and can help you grow continuously throughout your business.

Assess the quality of their customer support

Your website’s development and maintenance could face issues. Hence, make sure to use a platform that provides healthy documentation and excellent customer support in case you face any trouble.

There are different degrees of support offered for each eCommerce platform. While some providers may provide 24/7 phone or live chat support, others may only offer email and ticket-based support.

Any type of support is better than none, but you must consider where your specific needs and expertise level fall. So let’s say you’re a first-time e-commerce store owner without any experience working or building an online shop. Would 24-hour support be more beneficial to you?

Conclusion

The best eCommerce platforms for your business depends on its size and requirements. Doing your homework on a platform that will provide features you can use to improve your business is half the job done.