Best Free eCommerce Website Builders

We ranked Squarespace as the number one e-commerce platform because of its mobile-optimized sites, custom domain, and SEO features. Almost one-third of those using the internet in the United States make a mobile purchase every week, which is why optimizing your ecommerce site for mobile is so important. A custom domain helps brand your site, and SEO features help drive potential customers to your site.

While it doesn’t have a completely free plan, Squarespace has a 14-day free trial so you can test-drive the platform and see if it’s right for you. With the free trial, you get full access to all of Squarespace’s features, but you won’t be able to accept Squarespace Commerce payments, and your site is password-protected. To get the most out of your trial, try to have your entire e-commerce site built early on, so you can see how it will look and function when live. Plans start at $16 per month (if billed annually).

Learn More: Read our full Squarespace review.

Who should use it:

Small businesses and entrepreneurs who want an e-commerce website that’s easy to use.

Square Online offers a completely free plan, which comes with unlimited products, SEO tools, omnichannel selling, ordering via QR code, multiple shipment and delivery options and it syncs with Square POS. And if you want to test drive a paid plan, you get a 30-day free trial, and these plans start at $12 per month, billed annually. For a custom URL, you’ll need a paid plan.

Even on its free plan, Square Online lets you accept Afterpay, which is a pay-in-four option for your customers. As a seller, you get access to the funds right away (minus a small fee), and the customer gets their product right away, too. Afterpay assumes the risk since each customer who signs up starts off with a small amount they can borrow, and as they make on-time payments, the amount they can borrow increases with subsequent purchases.

This pay-in-four option is an ideal feature for ecommerce stores whose average shopping cart totals $35 or higher, as that’s the cart minimum for using this feature. On any of its plans, you can also accept donations, Google Pay, Square Pay, Cash App, and Apple Pay.

Learn More: Read our full Square Online review.

Who should use it:

Small businesses that want free e-commerce website hosting with no strings attached.

Powered by Square, Weebly is an e-commerce website builder with an easy-to-use interface. It offers free and paid plans, but the free plan has unlimited physical items, inventory management, coupons, an automatic tax calculator, Square gift cards, SEO tools and lead capture. Upgrade for pop-up notifications, phone support, shipping labels and a shipping calculator.

Paid plans start at $10 per month when billed annually. With paid plans, you can set up a custom domain, sell digital products, get a shipping calculator, print shipping labels and set up pop-up notifications. Higher-priced plans will remove Square ads, give you unlimited storage, allow you to accept PayPal payments and get phone support.

Learn More: Read our full Weebly review.

Who should use it:

Small businesses and entrepreneurs who want a free e-commerce website with inventory management features.

Ecwid stands for e-commerce widget, and that’s exactly what it is—a shopping cart plugin you can add to your existing WordPress website. It offers a free plan with features such as a limit of ten physical products, unlimited bandwidth, an instant site builder, a mobile-responsive cart and Apple Pay checkout. To sell digital goods, you’ll need a paid plan, which starts at $14.08 per month when billed annually.

A paid plan will also give you features such as inventory management, live chat support, an app to manage your store, coupons, integrations and Google shopping. Its highest-priced plan even lets you create a custom shopping app. One of the coolest paid features is ‘pay what you want,’ where a customer can pay whatever price they want for a product. This works great for digital products in particular.

While the Ecwid plugin is free, hosting a WordPress site is not. To build a proper e-commerce store, you’re looking at buying a domain name (although some web hosts offer it free for the first year), paying for a web host and paying for themes or templates to customize the look of your entire site.

Learn More: Read our full Ecwid review.

Who should use it:

WordPress users who want to add e-commerce functionality to their existing website.

Similar to Squarespace, BigCommerce does not offer a free forever plan but it does give you 15 days to test-drive its plans. Paid plans start at $29 per month and come with unlimited products, staff accounts, bandwidth and file storage. With unlimited staff accounts, you can give each member of your team their own login to make changes to the store as needed. This way, you can easily see who made what changes and when.

You can also sell via social media, online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon, and even set up Google Shopping. It supports multiple currencies and comes with a sleek drag-and-drop website builder.

Learn More: Read our full BigCommerce review.

Who should use it:

Those building large e-commerce websites as well as small businesses with large teams gives its inclusion of unlimited staff accounts.

With the abandoned cart recovery feature with Wix, an email can go out when your customer has an email on file, they’ve added products to their cart and haven’t made changes to the cart in an hour. What makes this automation unique is you can view what a customer has added to their cart by clicking on the ‘Abandoned Cart’ tab on your dashboard.

To sell online, you must have a paid Wix plan. These start at $27 per month and come with 50GB of storage space, 24/7 customer support, a custom domain, unlimited products, abandoned cart recovery and social selling. Wix also has a free plan, but it’s not for e-commerce websites.

Learn More: Read our full Wix review.

Who should use it:

Small businesses and entrepreneurs who want abandoned cart recovery, which sends automatic emails to customers who abandon their shopping carts.

Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce website builders, and for good reason. Merchants can access an entire catalog of integrations, including those for dropshipping, which is an easy way to sell products to your followers without ever taking on inventory. Each plan lets you sell on social media and other online marketplaces. With discount codes, you can offer your followers an exclusive code for following you, or you can even leverage codes for influencers to promote your site. You can track their sales manually or use a Shopify integration, such as Refersion, LeadDyno or UpPromote, to automate the process.

If you want to print on demand, Shopify makes this easy too. With integrations to print providers, such as Printful or Gooten, you can design custom products and have them automatically fulfilled when someone purchases from your store. With an integration, such as Etsy Marketplace Integration, you can have a storefront in both places and have your inventory sync automatically.

Shopify offers a free 3-day trial. After that, plans start at $29 per month. The cheapest plan doesn’t have full-fledged e-commerce features and, instead, only lets you sell through social and messaging apps. The next plan is $79 per month and gives you an online store, a point-of-sale (POS), 24/7 support and multiple sales channels.

Learn More: Read our full Shopify review.

Who should use it:

Small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to build a dropshipping or print-on-demand business as well as those looking to heavily sell via social media given its helpful social selling integrations.