Build your business on Shopify, get a site up and running fast with Wix or make everything beautiful with Squarespace templates. With so many options, how do you pick the right platform to grow your business?

Here we break down the most common e-commerce and website platforms.

Wix and Squarespace – easy to use, not scalable

These platforms have some key differences, but are functionally the same – the only major difference between them is in their user interfaces. Both Wix and Squarespace are relative newcomers to the e-commerce game and started as tools for building an attractive website. That means both have limited integration and functionality options.

Best suited for: new businesses and side hustles

Wix or Squarespace are fine if you’re just starting, or you need a site for a hobby or side hustle. They’re cheap and easy to use, even if you have zero coding skill, but neither scales very well. Order fulfilment is a bit clunky, payment gateway options are heavily limited, and the checkout process isn’t that user-friendly. If your business takes off, you’ll need to rebuild on another platform.

Shopify – the best all-rounder

Shopify is the shining star of e-commerce platforms, and for good reason. Shopify was built specifically to sell online, offering well-rounded tools for businesses of all sizes. It will also grow as your business does.

Best suited for: most e-commerce-focussed businesses

Shopify is a great choice for most businesses, with inexpensive plans to get you started and more options you can add on as you scale. Shopify is also designed to simplify e-commerce. Order fulfilment, shipping, collecting tax, and creating export papers are all better streamlined than on other systems. If you’re moderately comfortable with computers, you’ll find managing sales and orders fairly simple. For most businesses, a Shopify site will also be easy to maintain and use for day-to-day operations. If you have products that can be heavily customised or thousands of variation sets, you can dip into the extensive app store to cope with that complexity. While this can add up on your monthly invoice, it’s unusual for a store to need so many add-ons that it becomes unaffordable.

If e-commerce isn’t the focus of your business, Shopify might not be the platform for you. Since you don’t need the full functionality of a seamless e-commerce experience, it might suit you better to use a platform with a better page builder. This will give you more options for designs, especially for internal pages, which are pretty limited on Spotify.

WooCommerce – maximum flexibility

WooCommerce is the largest e-commerce plugin for WordPress, which is an opensource web-build system. ‘Opensource’ means anyone can build plugins and extensions – that means almost any functionality you need is probably already out there. The downside? You’ll have to sort through some rubbish to find it.

This system has nearly infinite options – whatever you need, it can do. That means you can set up products following any logic you can think of. That flexibility also makes for a more complicated site that’s difficult to use, and you’ll need base-level website building knowledge to manage it. You should also expect small things to break on the site now and then – it has to be manually updated to account for internet browser updates and security changes.

Best suited for: complicated set-ups with in-house web skill

WooCommerce is a great choice for online stores with complicated business needs. For example, your store might require multiple payment gateways to pay different people, or to be integrated with niche product management software). WordPress and WooCommerce require the most maintenance and if you don’t have web skills, that will mean paying a web company to manage updates and changes. You should only consider WooCommerce if you need a specific functionality or design element.

BigCommerce – too big for SMEs

Most users find BigCommerce pretty difficult but it does come with more built-in features, so it doesn’t rely on an app store nearly as heavily as Shopify. This also means more settings you have to configure on each product. For most smaller businesses it’s wasted time and energy.

Best suited for: larger businesses with complex integrations

BigCommerce isn’t easy to use, or robust enough to work for most smaller businesses. It can suit larger companies with in-house web skill, that also need complex integrations to many providers. BigCommerce can handle 400 API calls a minute compared to Shopify’s 10. (Don’t know what that means? It’s a good sign you don’t need that capability). That capacity is important if, for example, you supply multiple companies and need to update inventory levels in real-time.

Our overall recommendation: Shopify

For most businesses, Shopify is going to tick the boxes: it’s easy to use, cost-effective, and has a good mix of functionality and scalability. It’s also great if you really need your online store to be an easy extension to the business. For businesses with more specific requirements, WooCommerce is our pick.

We still offer marketing, support, and more for our clients who use Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, or any other e-commerce systems. Regardless of the system you choose, once your e-commerce site is up and running you need a marketing plan to make sure it actually gets sales, and we are here to help you with that!