Shopify for almost everyone. Squarespace Commerce or Wix Stores for under-50-product brochure-with-shop sites. WooCommerce only if you already use WordPress and want maximum control.
**Shopify** is the default recommendation in 2026 for one simple reason: it has the lowest "I don't know what I'm doing" failure rate. Setup is intuitive, payments work out of the box, the app ecosystem covers nearly every need, and there's a thriving community of designers, developers, and educational content. Pricing starts at $39/month for the Basic plan, scaling to $399/month for Advanced. Most small ecommerce businesses run on Basic or Shopify ($105/month) for years.
**Where Shopify wins decisively:** - Inventory management, taxes, shipping, fulfillment all built in - POS integration if you have a physical retail presence - Best-in-class checkout (Shop Pay) with industry-leading conversion rates - Excellent app marketplace for everything from email to subscription billing - Native multi-channel sales (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Google Shopping, eBay)
**Where Shopify struggles:** - Transaction fees if you don't use Shopify Payments (avoid this — use Shopify Payments) - Less flexible than WordPress for content-heavy sites with shop attached - Apps add up — many businesses spend $200-500/month on apps on top of the platform fee
**Squarespace Commerce ($23-49/month):** good for portfolio + small shop combos. Designer-driven aesthetic, simpler than Shopify but with a lower ceiling. Best for fewer than 50 products and businesses where the website is more brochure than commerce engine.
**Wix Stores:** competitive with Squarespace. Slightly more flexibility, slightly less polished. Reasonable if you're already on Wix.
**WooCommerce (free + hosting):** WordPress plugin that turns any WordPress site into a store. Pros: maximum flexibility, no monthly platform fee, you own everything. Cons: you're responsible for hosting, security, plugin updates, and figuring out the right combination of plugins. Total cost of ownership often higher than Shopify by month 12-24 once you factor in plugins and developer time.
**BigCommerce:** Shopify's biggest competitor for mid-market businesses. Strong for B2B and high-SKU stores. Less popular for small businesses than Shopify.
**Etsy + your own site (combo approach):** still common for handmade/crafts/vintage. Etsy provides built-in audience but takes 6.5% transaction + listing fees, and they own your customer relationship. Run an Etsy shop for discovery and a Shopify shop for repeat customers.
**Amazon FBA:** completely different beast. You're a vendor on Amazon's marketplace, not running an independent ecommerce business. Massive built-in traffic but Amazon owns the customer, sets the rules, and competes against you with their own brands. Useful as a channel; risky as your only channel.
**Headless commerce (Shopify Hydrogen, Saleor, commercetools):** custom storefronts built with React/Next.js consuming a commerce backend via API. For mid-market+ businesses with custom requirements. Don't go here as a beginner.
**The single biggest mistake beginners make:** picking a platform on price alone. The real cost of an ecommerce platform isn't the monthly fee — it's the opportunity cost of slow load times, bad checkout flows, and integration limitations. A "free" WooCommerce setup that takes 3 months of developer time to launch costs vastly more than $39/month Shopify launching in a week.
- **Shopify vs WooCommerce — which should I choose?** — Shopify if you want to focus on selling, not on platform management. WooCommerce if you already run on WordPress, need maximum customization, or have specific compliance requirements that hosted platforms can't meet. - **How do I price a product for ecommerce?** — Start from required margin (cost × multiple based on category), then validate against competitors and customer willingness-to-pay. Cost-plus alone fails; competitor-matching alone fails; do all three. - **What is product-page SEO and how do I do it?** — Optimizing each product page to rank for searches buyers actually use — combining keyword research, original product copy, schema markup, customer reviews, and internal linking from category pages. - **How do I reduce ecommerce cart abandonment?** — Average cart abandonment is 70-80% — improving it by even a few points has huge revenue impact. The big levers: faster checkout, fewer surprises (shipping, taxes), trust signals, and abandoned-cart recovery emails.