Which Online Store Builder is Best?

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At Style Factory, we’ve tested tons of ecommerce platforms – so you don’t have to. Here are the top three platforms we think you should consider using to build your store.

#1 Shopify — best overall

Of all the ecommerce platforms we’ve tested, Shopify consistently comes out on top. It gives you outstanding features for selling internationally, in physical locations or via dropshipping. It’s easy to use, scalable, and the best choice for new merchants.

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#2 Squarespace — best for wow factor

With its stunning templates and highly flexible approach to content management, Squarespace is a good choice for sites involving creative projects. In particular, it’s great for selling online courses.

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#3 Wix — a decent all-rounder

Wix offers a nice mix of content management tools, ecommerce tools and marketing tools at a lower price point than its rivals. It also gives you a larger range of free templates to choose from.

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Most people aiming to build an online store typically look at three key DIY store builders: Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. In this post, we compare them and help you make informed decision on which one is right for you. Read on!

At-a-glance feature comparision

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Shopify — the best solution for most sellers

Of the three products being discussed, Shopify is the only one that started out as a dedicated ecommerce platform — the other two are website building tools that gradually introduced online selling features over time.

As you might expect then, Shopify’s ecommerce features are by far the most developed and sophisticated of the three platforms — especially where international selling, dropshipping and in-person selling are concerned.

Unlike Wix and Squarespace, Shopify offers true end-to-end multicurrency transactions; the range of dropshipping apps it provides is significantly larger than the Wix and Squarespace offerings; and its point-of-sale technology (which lets you sell in a physical location like a retail outlet, market stall or pop-up shop) is more extensive and more advanced.

Another standout feature of Shopify is its abandoned cart saving features; they are extremely sophisticated and bundled with nearly all its plans.

And, it’s worth noting that as your ecommerce business develops, Shopify’s enterprise grade edition — Shopify Plus — can truly handle growth and significant scaling. Similarly, the huge range of apps available for Shopify (16,000+) mean that you can develop the platform in any way you like or integrate it with a host of important third party services.

Overall, it’s hard not to view Shopify as the most sophisticated and scalable of the three products, and you can access a free trial of the platform here.

Squarespace — the store builder with a wow factor

If design aesthetics are your thing, there’s a lot to be said for using Squarespace. Its templates are superb, and the tools it gives you for laying out content in an attractive way are brilliant. Of the three platforms, it’s arguably the easiest to use too.

Its selling tools are a bit more basic than those provided by Wix and Shopify — particularly where in-person selling (point of sale) is concerned. But the tools it does give you are very easy to get started with.

Squarespace is often a good choice for users who want to sell courses and gated content on their site. Its ‘Courses’ and ‘Membership Sites’ features are great for that (although note that you will need to pay extra to access these features).

Squarespace is not the best choice for international selling however — it doesn’t boast any multi-currency selling features and translating a Squarespace site into multiple versions involves using expensive add-ons.

We typically recommend Squarespace as a good solution for ‘creative’ users like musicians, artists and photographers, who value top-class aesthetics and want some simple selling features on the side. It’s also a good choice for those who wish to monetise their content via selling online courses.

Wix — a decent all-rounder

Wix is a good all-rounder. The main reason to use the platform is that it gives you a lot of value for money — for a fairly low monthly fee, it lets you build a site that includes an online store, a blog, galleries, appointment booking and more (you also get email marketing tools as part of your subscription too).

Wix’s drag and drop editor is more a bit more flexible than Shopify’s — you have more control over how your site looks on both desktop and mobile — and its blogging tools are a bit more sophisticated too (because they let you categorize content in more way, and feature auto-save and backup features).

Key things to watch out for with Wix however are its underpowered multicurrency features (while it lets you display prices in lots of different currencies, the checkout process only supports one) and the way that it doesn’t let you switch templates once you’ve picked one.

Additionally, its templates aren’t fully responsive, meaning that you may need to tweak the mobile version of your site a bit more than you’d like to get it to appear the way you want it to (responsive templates reformat themselves automatically to suit all device types).