Ecommerce website templates reviews

You can drag and drop elements to add cool videos, functionality, and create the website you want. They have over themes of which 72 are free.

Since its release to the public in , 3dcart now Shift4Shop has served over 22, online businesses with clientele including PCMag. They have some practical features like unlimited storage and no transaction fees. You can also use their POS, and they support multi-channel selling.

In , the company rebranded as Shift4Shop. Although there is a nice onboarding video when you log into your dashboard, the whole operation is hard to figure out; the builder is not very visually appealing. The templates they have are more industrial, but they feel outdated. I think one of their strongest points is in shipping; they provide advanced shipping solutions with no API required.

Similar to BigCommerce, Shift4Shop restricts the volume of sales you bring in on each plan. The value overall is great. Shopify made a move to make it included — really undercutting the competition. Nevertheless, it still has more features out of the box than Shopify. Zyro is an affordably priced SaaS platform targeted at small businesses.

In addition to a website builder, they offer a variety of AI tools to help business owners:. In addition to a drag-and-drop builder to customize your site, there are a variety of free themes to use as a basis for your design. It allows for you to sell both digital and physical products. Pricing wise, you must use either the Ecommerce or Ecommerce Plus plan to take advantage of the online store features. WooCommerce is the best single platform to run ecommerce and affiliate site under one roof.

But the true ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify sell better, but not by much. It works with WordPress to turn any website into a functional ecommerce stor e. Also, there are extensions available for integrating payment gateways, social media, email marketing, 1-click selling, and shipping. The biggest problem though is not the setup; that can be solved with YouTube tutorials. The problem is scalability. Most users have reported it slowing down as they get more products and customers.

For cost, it is free. Few extensions have prices attached to them, and some WordPress themes are expensive. However, you might not need those extensions, and there are good free themes.

If you are familiar with the WordPress platform, then WooCommerce is a breeze for you. You only have to install it, add your own products and fix your settings. That includes buying hosting, installing WordPress, setting up your theme and plugins.

If you want to use WooCommerce , but need a bit of help on the hosting side, Nexcess StoreBuilder is an option. We cover it in more detail in our section on other builders to consider. Volusion was founded in but launched in as an ecommerce solution provider. Volusion provides an easy to use website builder with drag and drop and in-page editing.

There are 11 free themes and a good number of premium themes. That is a hefty extra cost that some other platforms provide for free.

The dashboard is nicely structured with all of the main action areas in the top navigation menu. You can also manage inventory and work marketing from there. Their prices have a limitation to the number of products you can sell. That may change at some point because they used to have a limitation on bandwidth, but that is no more.

The constant improvements give us hope. Dropshipping is also good but not print on demand. I would rate it higher if the Amazon integration were better, but that might not matter to you at all. Sellfy was founded in as an ecommerce platform exclusively for digital products. Compared to other ecommerce platforms, Sellfy is one of the most affordable options. Considering the features and ecommerce functionality you get standard, you can save a lot of money compared to Shopify.

While there are limits on the number of and types of products you can sell on the Free plan, upgrading to a paid plan means you can sell unlimited products, digital products, and subscription products, too. Sellfy includes its own print-on-demand platform, so you can sell a variety of POD products without relying on a service like Printful or Printify.

Squarespace is another one of those platforms that offers drag-and-drop. Founded in , they have sleek templates and design capabilities. The prices are quite low. The top plan allows you to get abandoned cart auto recovery, sell subscriptions and gift cards, and give flexible discounts. The website design part is not that easy though. You might have to try your hands on it a few times before you get the hang of it. Squarespace integrates ShipStation and allows you to install Printul and ShipBob from the app section.

The biggest downsides are payment processors and third-party applications. They only support Stripe and Paypal. As for the apps, they only integrate with very few third-party tools.

Coding is an integral part of the package. So, if you have a developer or the budget for one — and want something truly customizable and powerful — Magento is a solid choice. You can do and undo till you get the feature-rich online store you want. A big part of Magento is the community. It is expensive; the annual licensing fee runs in tens of thousands of dollars.

Things like discounts, recurring payments, ability to grind SEO, adjust content per user, membership subscriptions, unlimited products, and more.

Asides the cost, the pricing structure of the platform is important — be it month to month or yearly payments and other fees. In our testing, we also checked scalability. That looks at the features that help your website grow. That means going multi-channel, selling on other platforms and even countries. You might also need apps made just for your business as you scale.

The e-commerce market is booming, and internet-savvy individuals want to have an online store to connect with customers. Starting an ecommerce business also means coming face to face with every new trend that seems a basic necessity and high expectations from e-commerce platforms.

Like small businesses, startups also need a platform that allows them to scale effortlessly and break through the already existing guys. Since you might be entering the market as a big store owner, your platform needs to be able to handle what you bring in initially while giving room for more growth.

Our testing checked the functionalities that startups need. That includes SEO, good UX design, marketing inputs, and the ability to sell on multiple platforms like mobile apps and social networks. First-time ecommerce entrepreneurs should be able to launch and run a store on their own without having to call a developer for every last thing. So we gave extra weight for the ability to set up and run your store code free. From our analysis, BigCommerce and Shopify are at par in ease of use scores.

SEO is crucial. Many platforms offer some SEO tools to boost your website. Nevertheless, some are better than others. In our testing, we based the best ecommerce platforms for SEO on page load time, mobile and desktop speed, SEO, and average organic traffic of top online stores using each platform.

Excuse me while I rant, but you need to know your SEO. Good SEO, on the other hand, is alive and well. SEO is a crucial part of site design and performance, and there are plenty of ranking criteria to consider for your ecommerce enterprise. Making it easy for humans and robots to navigate is a good first step — and that takes using the right URL structures.

Site promotion and honest, white hat backlinking are also smart. Search engines like to keep things simple and easy for the end user. Short, relevant URLs are an important ranking factor. Good for usability. WooCommerce is by far the best for SEO. They still need lots of improvement. Load time is a pretty straightforward indicator of how fast your site is. A slow site is a killer in ecommerce — potential customers run away from slow sites, and as we mentioned earlier, each second you gain in site loading speed translates directly into sales gained.

According to research by Akamai, most consumers want sites to load in 3 seconds or less. The median load time for the top ecommerce sites is 10 seconds. According to our data, the load time for average ecommerce sites is 3. For example WooCommerce sites tend to load in 3. Forget collecting any credit card payments with that slow site. An out-of-the-box solution that offers great loading speed is a secret weapon in your ecommerce arsenal.

Speed performance is so important; we collected multiple types of data from ecommerce website domains to determine how well a site performs. The average score is Marketers and developers are really starting to feel the mobile speed crunch. Mobile users expect pages on their mobile devices to load faster than desktop. Companies like Google are focusing on projects like AMP to make mobile pages load faster.

Google PageSpeed tests desktop speed as well. Check out the data below on the performance of various platforms. Most local brick and mortars only need a basic simple store. So, we looked at the ability to create a website and add a payment gateway easily. No advertising or shopping cart recovery here. If you run a large ecommerce business, you might want complete control and server autonomy. We also considered platforms that enable multiple currency and store, allows integration with Google services, and 3PLs.

Your website should deliver a rich and smooth experience that entice customers to visit your site, make them stay, and convince them to buy. One crucial place that starts is the design. Too often, online stores go all out with complicated designs that do nothing more than slow down the load time and annoys visitors.

Every design you choose should be with the aim to hook potential customers. About that, Shopify checkout process is limiting. The changes you can make to the checkout pages are minimal except if you pay for Shopify Plus. This is one place that self-hosted platforms do well. The drag and drop builder plugin is very powerful when combined with the BigCommerce or WooCommerce plugin.

You can create advanced price tables, price list and products widgets, customize your checkout page, order tracking, and optimize the mobile view of the website without coding.

Your theme is the frontline for any tweaking you will do. Another thing is cost. While you can get a large number of free WordPress themes, Shopify and BigCommerce are restricted to 9 and 7 respectively. What is it about mobile?

Mobile-friendly sites are a must have for all e-retailers, and with good reason —. To get the most out of mobile site design, you need to make sure your online platform is easily upgradable. In this regard, WooCommerce, Shopify, and Weebly wear the crown. And about half of the traffic to ecommerce stores come from mobile devices. Mobile ecommerce is growing so fast that you need to not only think about responsive design but also the best possible experience. This score tries to mimic how a real user interacts with the page.

According to a post on Moz , five key factors to consider for mobile user experience include:. Founded in and with about 40 million customers, Weebly is a great option for someone looking for a simple store with marketing automation built in. Nevertheless, it remains an excellent choice for startup entrepreneurs or those who do not wish to hire a developer.

Founded in , Prestashop is an open-source and cloud-hosted ecommerce platform that gives the best overall value. Nevertheless, that open-code allows extensive integration with couriers, payment gateways, accounting , warehouses, ERP, and more.

You have access to the 16 days trial or pay straight away. It comes with the SSL certificate. There are ten themes all free available in the admin. The dashboard is straightforward and simple. However, you can achieve most needs through modules that you enable with one click.

It combines managed hosting, the WooCommerce WordPress plugin, and additional plugins and tools to make it easier for new ecommerce business owners to build and maintain a store.

Choosing the best ecommerce site builder is really based on your needs. We do want to recommend that you consider a few as front-runners — BigCommerce was by far the best overall platform for any business model and performs excellently for SEO. WooCommerce is catching up with market leaders like Shopify in terms of features and apps. Awesome for affiliate marketing. Shopify is the best platform for dropshipping, including print on demand. Wix works for simple stores.

Wix has come a long way in a few years and its perfectly priced for soloprenuers or small stores. Plus it has made a lot of investment in expanding the product and brand in recent years. Most ecommerce platforms do a decent job. There are much better options available at similar price points. Still, many people use and love these platforms. Finally, if you are in the process of switching platforms, check out Shopping Cart Migration. My partner and I have more than different products, which requires a competitive website to support such a magnitude of gender as well as the possible online sales by the clientele that we already have loyalty, which would result in greater traffic of Internet users Is WIX a viable option considering these features?

This is so strange.. Sound like these are 2 completely different discussions? My audience is mostly beginners, non multi billion dollar companies. Ill do another article on the best enterprise solutions and include those.

Darren Dematas, I am so confused with the e commerce stores. BigCommerce is extremely scalable, with tons of built-in apps to help you reach your full potential. We recommend BigCommerce for stores planning for growth in the long term. While builders like Shopify offer a better integration between the two, BigCommerce makes products and design feel a little disconnected.

You can filter themes by industry and store size to narrow down your options. Each theme comes in multiple shades, so you can have some control over the general color scheme. Sales Features BigCommerce has the best built-in sales features of any builder on this page.

Reach Your Potential With BigCommerce This powerful builder has the in-house tools and ecommerce-ready themes to help you succeed. Read our Shopify vs BigCommerce article here. Constant Contact is a pretty limited platform, but the features it does offer are high quality. We recommend Constant Contact for small projects and side gigs, because it has quality features but limited growth potential. Constant Contact is actually primarily an email marketing tool — its website builder is kind of like an additional offering.

But the upside to this is that its website templates are made with good brand-building and marketing techniques in mind! We also really liked its LogoMaker tool, which will generate a stylish logo for your business based on just the industry and name. But you can sell unlimited products on its paid plan, which is a nice plus.

Constant Contact Gallery Click the image below to expand Close Constant Contact has a convenient, automated design option that builds your site for you, based on a few questions. Constant Contact will create a website layout that you can tweak later on.

Constant Contact also offers its own email marketing software, so you can manage your website and your promotional emails in one place. In this section:. We recommend WooCommerce for anyone selling on WordPress. However, if you need the more advanced capabilities of a WordPress site, then WooCommerce is as easy as ecommerce will get.

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress, meaning you can add it as an additional feature to any WordPress site.

Sales Features WooCommerce comes with a decent amount of features built-in, like the ability to add unlimited products and users. But the real benefit of this software is the huge amount of additional functions you can add if you want to. Just note that not all of these extensions are free, so be sure to budget for the ones that you really want!

WooCommerce Gallery Click the image below to expand Close WooCommerce offers plugins that cover most ecommerce functionalities. WooCommerce integrates with WordPress. WooCommerce is an open-source software that requires more technical knowledge than a website builder. Want to Start Selling on WordPress? Bluehost Pricing Review — A full breakdown of all the costs you can expect when you sign up to a Bluehost plan. Magento Best for enterprise-level businesses Magento Best for enterprise-level businesses.

However, the payoff is that Magento is the most powerful ecommerce platform on this list. We recommend Magento for very large stores who already have a strong base of loyal customers. Design Only one of the themes in the Magento Marketplace is free, and the rest cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of dollars. Just note that you can expect to pay at least a few hundred dollars for this option! Magento has the powerful tools that big companies like Samsung need to power their sites.

Magento is the most powerful and the most complicated platform on this list. Need an Enterprise Ecommerce Solution? Magento is the best ecommerce platform for very advanced stores — it can help you take your online store to the next level!

Magento vs Shopify — A complete comparison of two very big players in the ecommerce world. Are there any other free software options? In fact, there are over 13, OpenCart integrations available. PrestaShop is an open-source software that pitches itself as more of a website builder. Unfortunately, while a good platform, PrestaShop kind of misses the mark on both fronts. The ones we featured at the very top of this article will be a safe bet.

Unlocking extra features is key for a successful online store. In short, upgrading to a paid plan will upgrade your business. How is that so? Well, like any subscription, if you pay more, you get more. Ecommerce platforms withhold premium features, like the ability to send abandoned cart recovery emails, for paying members — and with good reason.

Even upgrading to the cheapest ecommerce plan will get you a ton of better features. Most free ecommerce plans put a cap on the number of items you can sell. Paying customers tend to be able to access support in more ways, such as over the phone. Paid plans typically allow you to connect more payment methods. We recommend Bluehost across the board for this, although SiteGround also has brilliant Magento-specific plans. Our top tip would be to review your hosting plan on a regular basis, rather than signing up and considering it a job ticked off.

As your ecommerce business grows, this can put a strain on your hosting plan, which in turn can lead to problems such as:. Providers like Bluehost are great because they cover websites of every size, and offer excellent customer support to walk you through the different stages. This post has walked you through the key pros and cons of the best free ecommerce platforms and software on the market.

By now, we hope you have a really clear idea of which will work for your budget and your store. While free plans make perfect sense for money-conscious business owners, they do have their limitations.

Firstly, with Wix , you can only build your store for free. So why should you think about upgrading? The most important include more sales tools, better customer support, and the ability to actually sell more products. Overall, we recommend signing up to a free ecommerce plan today — or testing a free trial — to really get the most out of selling your products online. Yes — nearly all ecommerce platforms offer a free trial, so you can start building an online store for free.

According to our research, Shopify is the best all-around ecommerce platform. It has the most comprehensive range of sales tools, a huge app market, and excellent customer support. It depends on the platform. Creating a Shopify store takes a couple of hours, thanks to the visual cues and simple language, BigCommerce normally takes a day or two, owing to the initial learning curve, while GoDaddy uses ADI Artificial Design Intelligence to build your store in minutes.

Written and researched by. Natasha Willett Researcher. Maura Monaghan Author. Updated: Dec 06, Comments: Overall Rating. Free Ecommerce Product Limits. Free Ecommerce Product Types. Payment Options US. Ease Of Use. Transaction Fees. Number of Templates. Visit Square Online. We have tried other so called solutions only to find that if you really want it to perform as you desire you must continually purchase MODs. In the process of modifying and updating these other carts, you will have spent more than what a shopping cart cost at Ecommerce Templates.

We strongly recommend others who are searching for a complete e-commerce solution to purchase the Ecommerce Plus software. The Ecommerce Plus software is not just a template it is a complete shopping cart! The guys at Ecommerce Templates have created a great product for all walks of web designers. From beginners to pros, this cart will give you the advantage over those using the more expensive, less adequate carts.

The possibilities are pretty much endless, especially if you are familiar with the code. It provides a lower learning curve for the beginner, and an effortless quality resell product for the pro. The support is excellent. Vince and Andy work hard to satisfy their clients.

They have provided forums, to allow their users an opportunity to voice their opinions and seek help from others. They continually update the carts with new functionality. Making an already excellent product better with each update. What more can we say, it is the best shopping cart on the net! Excellent templates, excellent asp coding for the ASP Store. As an e-commerce developer, I am very impressed with what I have purchased from e-commerce templates. The ROI on this purchase is yet to be matched by any other business on the internet.

I would definitely recommend e-commerce templates. Just a note to say thanks, I have purchased many different packages and source files etc over the net, however this product of yours is outstanding, I have not had a package that was as easy to install, setup and edit, not to mention I have found your product to function perfectly now that is rare , and when I have been unsure of anything, no matter how trivial I know absolutely nothing about PHP your product support has been instant and helpful, combined with the online help and tutorials for us beginners it really is a great product and is something anybody can recommend with confidence.

Thanks again for a great product. Craig - Australia. I spent several weeks evaluating many e-commerce solutions, from add-on programs, to e-commerce ready web site services. I chose www. I can kick myself for not using these templates on a previous e-commerce project. It would have saved me hundreds of hours. The template is an incredible piece of software.

Why would anyone try to roll their own when it's already done? Especially considering the low price. I just wanted to tell you guys Thank You! Thanks for a great product and all of your fast and extraordinary support in helping me get my site going in time for my busy Christmas season. I could not have chosen a better template or company which to do business.

I truly believe it was due to the new template and the added Payment options for my customers. I could not be more pleased with your product and the truly dedicated and helpful team at ECommerce Templates. I forgot to mention that I have gotten lots of hits from your website - people checking out the template. I get lots of emails from the lookers asking about my experience with and about the product.

I always give them all the best feedback I can because I am so happy with my purchase. I hope my feedback to the inquiries leads to many sales for your business. You deserve it. Regarding www. This was our first experience of setting up an online store and with 'time to market' being the primary concern for us, being able to use a smart-looking ready made template with inbuilt store integration was a 'no brainer'.

We also purchased the Customer Survey and Spooky login plugins, which integrated superbly. Without appearing to over sell the company, our experience was excellent, the few headaches we did get due almost entirely to our lack of web design experience was handled in both a timely and professional manner and totally without any fuss or hidden charges.

Steve - www. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your kind understanding support….. Great customer service. I want to also tell you that I have never built any web page other that goofing around with Frontpage a week ago.

Your ecomm template is truly a work of art! It installed in minutes. Eddy - Rogers Web Design. I just wanted you to know about all the nice compliments I have received this week regarding my website. Everyone that has ordered from me this week has made a the remark of "what a nice web site and it is so easy to use".

Some have said that they placed the order with me because the site was so easy to get around in and was so very user friendly. I got a lot of feathers in my hat this week because of the great work that you guys did in building the site and I just wanted to stop everything and take the time to say "thank you". As a complete internet novice I was so pleased with your superb product and excellent support service. Thank you for your patience in answering my often stupid questions.

You could not have been more helpful and made the whole process as painless as possible. Most of my problems were due to my own ineptitude and I would advise other novices out there to take advantage of your "setup site" tool which is worth every dime and will save a great deal of threshing about in the dark. My ecommerce plus template website is up and running and performing superbly.