The top 8 e-commerce platforms for 2023

BigCommerce is a high-end e-commerce solution that makes site building and order management easy. It is great for B2B and B2C sales, with a rich platform that supports wholesale selling, bulk pricing, and various payment gateways for wholesale. It also has useful features for bulk editing and product importing/exporting, and it meets several security standards.

BigCommerce can work for any business, but smaller ones may not need its advanced features. It may also be hard to customize your website without paying for apps and templates (it only has 12 free templates). Plus, it has sales caps on its plans (for instance, the $39/month Standard plan has a yearly online sales cap of $50,000).

CoreCommerce is a simple e-commerce solution, offering the Core Platform, which gives you ready-made tools for creating a shopping cart and taking online payments.

CoreCommerce is ideal for businesses that value data-driven decision-making. Among its many features, real-time data reporting and analytics stand out, covering everything from sales and taxes to affiliate statistics and keyword/search term reports.

While businesses that focus on marketing may appreciate the data-centric design, CoreCommerce falls short in other areas — like POS offerings. Paid plans also restrict how many products you can have, with 10 allowed in the $29 Pioneer plan and 300 in the $79 Pro plan.

Square Online is designed for brick-and-mortar stores that want to sell online and offline with ease. It has a simple system that lets you handle orders from both channels. It also has a quick and easy setup process and many helpful features — such as POS integration, various delivery options, and mobile-friendly theme designs.

You can use Square Online for free, but you’ll have to pay 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction. If you choose a paid plan, which costs $29 or $79 per month if billed yearly, you’ll get more customization options, a free domain for a year, real-time shipping rates, and a lower transaction fee depending on the plan.

Square Online works best with physical stores. It has some e-commerce-only features, but they are not as valuable without the POS software. It also has limited customer support hours and no integrations with Amazon and other big marketplaces.

Squarespace is a website builder that allows business owners to pick a template and customize it. It also has various tools for selling, marketing, and SEO to boost your sales after your site is ready.

Squarespace has over 160 modern and high-quality templates that appeal to businesses that care about visuals. It also keeps updating and releasing new features that enhance the creative side of building an e-commerce site.

Its Fluid Engine editor lets you drag and drop elements to create your site while giving you enough tips to ensure good results. And with Squarespace Blueprint, which came out in mid-2023, you can make unique sites from more than 1 billion different design options.

Squarespace is known as an easy and beginner-friendly e-commerce platform. But it has fewer templates than some other platforms in our guide (for example, Wix has about 900). And you need to pay $65 per month to access advanced e-commerce tools, like advanced shipping and discounting options. The Business plan, which costs $33 per month, only gives you basic e-commerce features.