10 Best Ecommerce Platforms For Small Businesses In 2023

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform that helps small businesses scale their online presence and increase sales. It provides tools for creating an online store, managing products, and processing payments, as well as providing analytics and insights into customer behavior.

BigCommerce offers various tools for creating an aesthetically pleasing website with a professional look. It has a drag-and-drop editor that makes designing the storefront easy. There is also an in-depth style editor that allows users to change colors and fonts within the template without needing any coding knowledge. This includes customizable templates that can be used to create unique designs that reflect the business’s brand identity and style. The templates are also mobile responsive, allowing customers to browse the website from any device without compromising on quality or design.

BigCommerce offers powerful marketing tools such as product reviews, discount codes, gift cards, and automated email campaigns. These features help businesses reach new customers by increasing visibility through SEO tactics. The platform allows businesses to create customized product pages which provide detailed information about each product so that customers can make informed decisions when purchasing items from the store. It also has built-in email marketing capabilities so users can easily create campaigns and send out newsletters or promotional emails directly from the platform itself.

Additionally, it integrates with Google Shopping Ads so businesses can list products on Google’s search engine results pages without having to manually upload each product individually. BigCommerce provides built-in payment processing services which make it easy for customers to pay for purchases quickly and securely using a variety of payment methods such as credit cards or PayPal. The platform also integrates with other popular payment providers such as Stripe or Amazon Pay so that businesses can accept payments from more customers around the world.

Features include customizable templates, built-in SEO, marketing tools, shipping & fulfillment, inventory management, reporting features, mobile-friendly design, responsive checkout, multiple payment gateway options, extensive third-party integrations, and 24/7 customer support.

Integrations include LiveChat, ShipStation, Georgias, Mailchimp, Quickbooks Online, Yotpo Product Reviews, Justuno, Brightpearl, Acumatica, ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, Klavyio, Shopgate, Printify, and dozens of other apps.

BigCommerce costs from $29.95/month and offers a 15-day free trial.

WP Engine is a web hosting provider that’s primarily used for blogging due to its superfast site speed. Recently, they have started offering their Genesis pro subscription plan that comes with a feature-packed website builder. The framework comes with built-in marketing features.

The Gutenberg-ready site builder can be used to create reusable modules and enable next-level customization on headers, logos, or any aspect of your ecommerce website to match your design language. There’s an open-source community of developers that audit the framework and add new security features.

You can use the sample child theme that sits on the top of the framework to beautifully edit the design of your site without affecting the underlying site code.The community also provides for hundreds of useful integrations, plugins, add-ons, and extensions. It integrates with WooCommerce and other major ecommerce apps.

With WP Engine as the web hosting provider, the sites load super fast, which in turn can be great for the site to rank on Google.

The pricing for WP Engine’s startup plan starts at $25 per month.

If you have read my other articles on ecommerce platforms, you might have noticed that Shopify is a frequent feature in them. From storefront to inventory management to marketing tools, Shopify equips an ecommerce site with all the necessary tools to launch and scale an online store in 2021.

The product has features like SEO tools, email marketing, search optimized product pages, shopping cart, and more. The Shopify SaaS is known in the industry for its stability and always-on availability. Shopify lets you perform all the necessary inventory management tasks like tracking and adjusting inventory, exporting or importing inventory via CSV files, and more. Shopify’s analytics give you critical ecommerce insights like store visits, transaction data, site speed, and more.

The product works with other commonly used ecommerce business apps like Oberlo, Facebook Messenger, Amazon, Stocky, Apple Business Chat, and 3k other apps including marketing, reporting, shipping, and customer support. The Shopify mobile app lets you sell products and manage your ecommerce store on the go.

Shopify has direct support via chat and email. Also, it is backed by one of the largest active communities of ecommerce entrepreneurs. You can engage with the community via the Shopify community forum or via social media groups dedicated to the product.

Shopify costs from $29/month when paying monthly, with 2.9% + $0.30/transaction. Shopify offers a 3-day free trial from their website. If you shop around, you can find affiliates who offer 14-day free trials.

Square Online is the result of Square, the payment processing giant, buying Weebly and creating the Square Online builder. It lets you sync inventory from other channels and with the Square Point of Sale solution. The product has a free ecommerce plan, which is perfect for a small business just starting out.

The dashboard is simple and lets you track product sales, customer journeys, and abandoned cart recovery. In terms of customization, the product falls behind with limited editing availability. The product integrates nicely with apps like WooCommerce, WordPress, Magento, BigCommerce, and more.

Customer support is available by phone, email, and live chat. Also, there is an extensive knowledge base filled with over 180 articles.

The professional plan starts at $35 per month with a free forever plan that lets you take a small business off the ground.

Being one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, BigCommerce plans are structured around how much you can sell on their platform. The inventory management feature lets you track orders and understand order trends over time. Next, it gives you accurate reports on stock levels and adjusts pricing.

The back-end dashboard is one of the easiest to use compared with other platforms on this list. The analytics make it fairly simple to track insights like Average Order Value (AOV), identify your biggest customers, and view other marketing data that will help you scale your product fast. The site editor lets you easily edit the look and feel of the site according to your brand’s design language.

BigCommerce works great with popular apps like Webgility, ActiveCampaign, Avalara Tax, Stripe, and 100s of other essential integrations. You can also integrate with marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, as well as list your products directly on these sites by using the BigCommerce control panel. The support team is available 24/7 via email or phone.

The BigCommerce standard plan starts at $29.95 per month with a 1-month free trial option.

The bandwidth of BigCommerce plans depend on how much you can sell on the platform.

Wix is known for its beautiful design templates. Wix’s drag-and-drop website builder comes with 800+ free themes that you can customize based on your brand tonality. The Artificial Design Intelligence tool helps you automate the website design process based on insightful questions about your product.

The dashboard seems well-organized, with everything you need organized in the right order. Wix integrates seamlessly with apps like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, and other essential B2B business apps.

The product comes with a Help Center, but a live chat option seems to be missing.

Wix’s ecommerce and business plans start at $23 per month.

Lightspeed eCom is a feature of Lightspeed HQ, a cloud-based retail POS system. Lightspeed eCom lets you import stock from your physical store to your ecommerce platform with a one-click system. It gives shoppers live updates on quantity on hand levels.

Apart from that, the tool lets you make mass updates to your inventory data with spreadsheet imports and exports. The analytics dashboard gives you data on daily, weekly, and monthly performance. The tool also provides a special conversion report that tells you where your store needs optimization to increase sales.

Support is available by phone with varied time listings based on its different offices. Apart from that, the support can also be reached by email. Lightspeed integrates with apps like Mailchimp.

Restock, Stripe, and other retail ecommerce apps. The pricing for the plan that includes the ecommerce features starts at $99 per month.

Swell leverages headless ecommerce technology to create customized customer experiences for your online store. Swell offers ecommerce features like unlimited pages, real-time shipping quotes, payment processing, and more. In terms of inventory management, you can add unlimited product options, variants, and attributes. It also comes with features like bulk editing and product bundling.

Apart from that, you can track item shipment, and edit order items before finalizing orders. The product gives you in-depth sales reports that you can filter by product, customer, coupon, and more. It also comes with PayMotion, a multi-channel ecommerce platform that provides revenue optimization features designed to boost sales.

Swell offers support via phone, email, and live chat. The basic plan starts at $59 per month with a 14-day free trial.

Elavon is a merchant service provider selling a wide variety of financial products like payment processors, point of sale hardware, and payment gateways.

Elavon allows you to take both online and in-app payments. The tool’s end-to-end payment solutions help minimize risk for ecommerce store owners by protecting cardholder’s credit card data with EVM authentication, encryption, and tokenization.

Elavon offers Payments Insider, a customer portal with customizable reporting, providing critical insights on all your payment activities.

The product offers 24/7 multilingual customer support via phone and email. Pricing is available upon request and based on the custom needs of a business.

CloudShoppy is an affordable eCommerce solution for small businesses. It comes with pre-integrated features like payment gateways, SMS marketing, logistics, order management, and more. The product lets you sell physical products and digital goods. It offers a range of variety in terms of website themes. Its inventory management lets you add multiple variants to each product with the ability to set quantity-based or location-based pricing.

The analytics dashboard gives you insights on sales reports, abandoned cart details, inventory reports, customer reports, orders by location, logistics reports, and more. Support is available by chat, phone, and email. The help docs and knowledge base come with clear instructions and screenshots. Having said that, the instructions can feel jarring at times. Ecommerce businesses operating out of India have their own nuanced ecosystem that often does not work with run-of-the-mill ecommerce platform solutions.

CloudShoppy solves that. CloudShoppy integrates with 6 payment options including CCAvenue, CitrusPay, PayU, PayPal, and India-focused Instamojo. Integrations with all the major logistics companies in India like FedEx, Aramex, Delhivery, India Post, and DTDC, along with India-focused payment gateways, make it one of the best eCommerce platforms for small businesses in India.

The pricing for the starter plan is Rs.3000 per month or approx $41 per month.