Choosing the Right Online Store Platform for Your Business
The short version
There is no best e-commerce platform, only the one that fits how you actually work. Shopify is the safe default for most small stores: $29/month billed annually, everything handled for you, and it scales without a rebuild. Squarespace Core at $23/month is the best value if you sell a handful of products and care most about how the site looks. Wix Core at $29/month launches fastest if you want to drag and drop it yourself. WooCommerce has no platform fee but real hosting and plugin costs of roughly $500 to $3,000 a year, and it only makes sense if you need control the hosted platforms will not give you. Before comparing any of them, answer four questions: how many products, how complex are they, who updates the store, and where do you want to be in three years. Then compare total annual cost at your real order volume rather than the headline monthly price, because payment processing and apps usually cost more than the subscription. The most expensive mistake is not picking the wrong platform. It is picking one you outgrow in eighteen months and having to rebuild. One thing that reassures people: you can migrate later. It takes care with product URLs and reviews so search rankings survive, but stores move all the time. Do not let fear of getting it wrong stop you launching, because a store that exists and takes orders beats a perfect plan that never ships. If you want a shortcut through all of this, work out your realistic monthly order count, multiply by your average order value, and compare total annual cost across two or three candidates at that number. The ranking usually reverses once apps and processing are included, and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.
Most people choose an e-commerce platform the wrong way round. They watch a comparison video, get impressed by a feature they will never use, sign up, and discover six months later that the thing they actually needed costs an extra $49 a month in apps.
The platform is not the decision. How you want to run your store is the decision. The platform falls out of that.
Start with four questions
How many products do you sell? Twelve products and two hundred products are different businesses. Under about twenty items, almost anything works and you should optimise for how the store looks and how quickly you can launch. Over a few hundred, you need real inventory management, bulk editing and proper search, and the cheap end of the market stops being viable.
How complex is each product? A t-shirt in five sizes and three colours is fifteen variants. Add a personalised name and you need custom fields. Sell something that ships in a crate and you need weight-based or freight shipping. Sell a subscription and you need recurring billing. Every layer of complexity narrows the field.
Who updates the store? This one gets skipped and it matters more than any feature. If you are adding products between jobs on your phone, you need something genuinely simple. If you have someone who handles it, you can afford a system with more depth. Be honest about who is really doing this work in six months.
Where do you want to be in three years? Not a business plan, just a direction. If you expect to stay small and local, optimise for low cost and simplicity. If you are aiming at serious volume, choose something you will not have to leave.
The real fork: hosted or self-hosted
Everything else is detail. Hosted platforms - Shopify, Wix, Squarespace - run the software for you. Security patches, uptime, PCI compliance and backups are their problem. You pay monthly, forever, and you live inside what the platform permits.
Self-hosted - overwhelmingly WooCommerce on WordPress - means the software is free but you are responsible for it. You choose the hosting, you keep it updated, you fix it when a plugin update breaks checkout at 9pm. In exchange you can change literally anything.
For most small businesses, hosted is the right answer, and there is no shame in that. Paying $29 a month to never think about a security patch is a bargain. Self-hosted earns its keep when you have a genuine requirement the hosted platforms will not meet, or when you already run WordPress and the store is a small part of a larger site.
What the four main options actually cost
Those are platform fees only, on annual billing. Two things to know before you compare them.
First, Shopify Basic went from $29 to $39 a month on monthly billing. Annual billing holds it at $29, which is a meaningful difference over a year and worth committing to if you are confident.
Second, watch transaction fees, which are separate from payment processing. Shopify charges 2% on Basic unless you use Shopify Payments, which drops it to zero. Squarespace charges 2% on its cheapest plan and nothing from Core upward, which is exactly why Core is the plan worth having. Wix and WooCommerce charge no platform transaction fee at all.
Shopify - the safe default
If you are unsure, this is the answer. It is built for selling and nothing else, it handles growth from your first order to genuinely large volume, and every payment provider, shipping company and accounting tool integrates with it. The app store fills most gaps.
The costs are that apps add up quickly, and the design is harder to make distinctive without a developer. If your store is a section of a broader marketing site, Shopify can feel like a walled garden.
Squarespace - best when design matters most
Squarespace makes the best-looking sites out of the box by a clear margin, and Core at $23 is the cheapest serious commerce plan of the four. For a studio, a boutique, a bakery, a photographer selling prints, it is often the right call.
It is not built for scale. Large catalogues, complex variants and deep inventory work are where it strains.
Wix - fastest to launch yourself
If you want to build it yourself this weekend and not call anyone, Wix has the friendliest editor of the four. Core at $29 includes no platform transaction fee.
The freedom of drag and drop is also its weakness. It is easy to produce something that looks slightly off and hard to explain why. Sites also tend to get heavier, and speed is a ranking factor.
WooCommerce - control, at a price
The software is free. The store is not. Realistically you are looking at $500 to $3,000 a year once you count decent hosting, a theme, and the plugins that do what the hosted platforms include as standard. Hosting alone spans a wide range depending on traffic.
What you get is total control and no platform fee. What you take on is responsibility. Someone has to keep it patched and monitored. If that someone is not you, budget for a care plan.
Add up the whole cost, not the sticker price
Work out what you will actually pay in a year at your real order volume. A store doing $4,000 a month pays roughly $1,400 a year in payment processing alone. Against that, the difference between a $23 and a $29 platform is noise, and choosing the cheaper platform to save $72 while it costs you sales in lost conversion is a bad trade.
Apps are where budgets quietly break. Subscriptions, advanced shipping rules, review widgets, abandoned cart recovery - each is $10 to $40 a month and they accumulate. Before committing, list the features you genuinely need and check which are included versus which are paid add-ons. That comparison often reverses the ranking.
How to actually decide
| If this is you | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 products, design matters most | Squarespace Core | Best looking, cheapest serious plan, no transaction fee |
| Serious about selling, want room to grow | Shopify Basic | Purpose-built, scales without a rebuild, everything integrates |
| Building it yourself this weekend | Wix Core | Friendliest editor, no platform transaction fee |
| Already on WordPress, or need real customisation | WooCommerce | No platform fee, full control, real maintenance cost |
| Genuinely unsure | Shopify Basic | Hardest to regret. Migrating away later is easier than outgrowing something. |
One more thing worth saying plainly: you can move later. It is work, and product URLs and reviews need care so you do not lose search rankings, but people migrate stores constantly. Do not let fear of a wrong choice stop you launching. A store that exists and takes orders beats a perfect plan that never ships.
Where we come in
We build on all four. We have no incentive to steer you toward one, because we are not resellers for any of them. What we usually do is sit down with the four questions at the top of this article, look at what you are actually selling, and give you a straight recommendation with the total annual cost written down.
Sometimes that recommendation is that you do not need us at all, and Squarespace and an afternoon will do it. We would rather tell you that than build you something you did not need.
Not sure which one fits?
Tell us what you sell and how you want to run it. We will give you a straight recommendation and a real annual cost, free.
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