The Best Ecommerce Website Builders, Ranked and Compared

Choosing between ecommerce website builders is a pricing decision disguised as a design decision. Every platform will show you a storefront that looks good. What separates them is what you pay when the orders start arriving, what you have to bolt on to get basic things working, and whether the thing can describe how your products actually reach people.

That last part gets skipped in most comparisons, and it’s the one that bites businesses that deliver their own orders. A bakery taking Saturday cake orders inside a ten-mile radius needs a delivery zone, a cutoff time and a delivery date picker. Some builders do that out of the box. Some need a paid app. One or two will fight you the whole way.

This post is only about the purchase decision: which platform to sign up for. Once you’ve picked one, the step-by-step of building the store is a separate job, and where the store fits in the wider plan is covered in our guide to ecommerce marketing strategies for local delivery.

The Bottom Line

• Shopify leads the US hosted market at roughly 30% share, followed by Wix Stores at 23%, Squarespace at 16% and WooCommerce at 14% (MobiLoud, retrieved 2026-09-24). Globally the picture inverts: WooCommerce runs more stores by count, Shopify runs more of the big ones.
• Shopify’s published US plans run $27, $72 and $399 a month on monthly billing, dropping to $19, $54 and $299 on annual (Shopify, retrieved 2026-09-24).
• BigCommerce Core starts at $39 a month monthly or $29 annual, and charges nothing extra on orders processed through its embedded payment providers (BigCommerce, retrieved 2026-09-24).
• Shopify handles local delivery natively, with a radius of up to 100 miles or postal-code matching, minimum-order rules per zone and no app required (Shopify Help Center, retrieved 2026-09-24).
• The sticker price is rarely the real price. Transaction fees on third-party gateways, paid apps and hosting decide what you actually spend.

How to choose an ecommerce website builder

Five questions settle this faster than any feature list.

• What does it cost at your order volume? A $29 plan with a 2% fee on a third-party gateway costs more than a $79 plan with a 1% fee once you’re past a few thousand dollars a month.
• Who is maintaining it? Hosted platforms handle updates, security patches and uptime. Self-hosted ones hand you that job along with the savings.
• Can it express your fulfilment? Delivery zone, cutoff time, pickup location, delivery date at checkout. If your orders go out on your own vehicles, this is not a nice-to-have.
• What’s the exit cost? Products and customers usually export cleanly. Design, URL structure and app configuration do not.
• What does it plug into? Your accounting, your email tool, your delivery software. A platform that doesn’t integrate with what you already run turns into daily copy-paste.

Two things that feel urgent are not. Template choice is reversible in an afternoon. So is the theme. Payment processing rates and fulfilment capability are the ones you’ll be living with in two years.

Shopify: the default for stores that deliver their own orders

Shopify is the safe answer for most small merchants, and the local-delivery support is the specific reason it’s the safe answer here.

Local delivery is built into the shipping settings, not sold as an app. You define a zone by radius (up to 100 miles, or 160 kilometres) or by pasting in postal codes, with wildcards for ranges. You can set a minimum order value per zone, tier the price by distance across up to ten zones per location, and stack up to three conditional pricing rules on top (Shopify Help Center, retrieved 2026-09-24). One caveat worth knowing before you build a checkout around it: local delivery works with Shop Pay but not with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay or PayPal’s accelerated checkout.

Pricing is $27 a month for Basic, $72 for Grow and $399 for Advanced on monthly billing, or $19, $54 and $299 on annual (Shopify, retrieved 2026-09-24). If you use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments you pay an extra 2%, 1% or 0.6% depending on plan. That is the number that should drive your plan choice, not the headline.

Best for: a business doing meaningful volume that wants delivery zones, cutoff logic and an app for everything else without hiring a developer.

Skip it if: your catalogue is six items and you’d rather not pay $27 a month forever.

WooCommerce: the cheapest builder to run, if you have the time

WooCommerce is the open-source commerce plugin for WordPress, free to download, and you supply the hosting, the domain and the maintenance (WooCommerce, retrieved 2026-09-24). There’s no platform fee and no transaction cut. You pay your payment processor and nobody else.

The catch is that “free” describes the software, not the project. You’re buying hosting, you’re choosing and paying for extensions, and you own the update cycle. Shipping zones are built in, and local pickup is one of the core shipping methods you can attach to a zone, defined by country, state or specific zip codes (WooCommerce, retrieved 2026-09-24). Conditional logic on top of that generally means a third-party plugin.

Best for: someone who already runs WordPress, or who has a developer on call and wants no ongoing platform fee.

Skip it if: nobody at your business wants to be responsible when the site breaks on a Sunday.

BigCommerce: built for big catalogues without app sprawl

BigCommerce’s pitch is that more is included, so you install fewer apps. Core is $39 a month monthly or $29 annual, Growth is $105 or $79, and Scale is $399 or $299, with a Performance tier starting at $1,499 on annual billing (BigCommerce, retrieved 2026-09-24).

The fee structure is worth reading properly. BigCommerce charges 2%, 1% or 0.6% by plan only on “open payment providers”, meaning ones outside its approved list. Orders through embedded providers like Stripe, PayPal, Adyen and Klarna carry no extra order fee on any plan. Plans are also capped by trailing-twelve-month sales and upgrade automatically when you pass the threshold, so budget for the step up rather than being surprised by it.

Best for: a wholesaler or distributor with a large, variant-heavy catalogue.

Skip it if: you have 30 products and the extra configuration depth is just more surface to get wrong.

Wix and Squarespace: design-led builders for small catalogues

Both of these sell the same thing: a good-looking site you can build yourself, with a store attached. Wix Stores holds about 23% of the US market and Squarespace about 16% (MobiLoud, retrieved 2026-09-24), which is a lot of small merchants voting with their card.

Wix tiers its commerce features across Core, Business and Business Elite, with basic ecommerce on the entry tier and advanced features higher up (Wix, retrieved 2026-09-24). Squarespace splits its commerce plans into Basic, Core and Advanced; the Basic plan carries a 2% Squarespace transaction fee on ecommerce sales, while Core and Advanced carry 0% (Squarespace, retrieved 2026-09-24). Both platforms localise their pricing page by region, and the figures we were served were not US dollars, so check the number on your own screen rather than trusting any comparison post, including this one, on the monthly price.

The honest limitation for a delivery business: local delivery on both is shallower than Shopify’s. You can usually restrict shipping by region and add a flat local rate. Radius-based zones, per-zone minimums and delivery-date selection tend to mean an app or a workaround.

Both are also common picks in hospitality, where the storefront is often secondary to the menu and the booking. If that’s closer to your situation, our roundup of restaurant website builders covers that set specifically.

Best for: a florist or small food brand where the site has to look beautiful and the catalogue is short.

Skip it if: the delivery rules are the hard part of your business.

Square Online: for a counter business that already runs Square

If your registers are Square, Square Online is the path of least resistance: one product catalogue, one payout, one dashboard. We could not pull current plan pricing or processing rates from Square’s online store page when writing this, so treat the specifics as something to confirm on Square’s own pricing screen before you commit. What’s safe to say is that the appeal is the integration, not the storefront flexibility: it is a better fit for a café adding online ordering than for a store whose catalogue is the whole business.

Ecommerce website builder pricing compared

Sources: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, all retrieved 2026-09-24.

Which builders handle delivery zones and cutoff times

This is where the ranking changes shape if you put your own orders in your own vehicles.

A delivery business needs four things from its platform: a zone that matches where you’ll actually drive, a cutoff so Saturday orders stop arriving at 11pm Friday, a date picker so the customer chooses a day you’re running, and a rate that reflects distance. Shopify covers zone, minimum and distance-tiered rate natively; the date picker is usually an app. WooCommerce gives you zones and pickup free and asks you to plug in the rest. Wix and Squarespace can restrict where you ship, but the radius-and-window logic is the part you’ll be working around.

Whatever you pick, the platform is only the order-taking half. The driving half, which covers routing a day’s stops, notifying customers and capturing proof of delivery, sits in delivery software alongside it. Metrobi integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce directly, along with Zapiet and Zapier, so orders can flow from the storefront into a planned route rather than a spreadsheet.

Free ecommerce website builders: what the free tier really costs

Free plans are real and they are also a business model. Expect some combination of platform branding on your storefront, a restricted catalogue, no custom domain, and a higher processing rate. The free tier is a fine way to test whether people will buy from you. It’s a poor place to be when they do, because the migration you’ll eventually run is more expensive than the fees you avoided.

WooCommerce is the exception worth naming, because the software really is free and the costs move elsewhere: hosting, extensions, your own time.

Frequently asked questions

Which ecommerce website builder is cheapest? WooCommerce, on software cost, because there isn’t one. On total cost including hosting and your time, an entry Shopify or BigCommerce plan is often cheaper for a small store.

Can I move my store later? Products, customers and orders export from all of these. Your theme, your URLs and your app setup do not, so a migration means rebuilding the front end and mapping redirects.

Do I need a separate app for local delivery? On Shopify, not for zones and rates. On most others, yes for anything beyond a flat local rate.

Should I hire someone to do this? For picking and standing up a builder, no. For the marketing that follows, possibly. We’ve written about when hiring an ecommerce marketing agency is worth it and when it isn’t.

Picking one and moving on

Whichever you land on, set a baseline once the store is live so you can tell whether later changes helped. Benchmarking your website against your own past numbers and against comparable stores is more useful than another round of platform comparison.

Most businesses over-research this and under-research what happens after launch. If you deliver your own orders and want the fewest fights, start with Shopify. If you already live in WordPress and have the appetite, WooCommerce costs less to run. If your catalogue is large and complex, look hard at BigCommerce. If the site is mostly a beautiful shop window for a short list of products, Wix or Squarespace will do fine.

Then get on with the parts that produce orders: an email programme customers actually open, and live chat that answers the delivery question before someone abandons the cart. The builder is the easiest decision you’ll make this quarter.