The Best eCommerce Platform in 2022 – Rapyd’s Top Picks

Use our comprehensive guide to select the best ecommerce solution for your business needs.

Choosing the best B2C ecommerce platform to grow online sales is a key decision for a merchant. It’s hard to choose between the skyrocketing number of ecommerce platforms, so the Rapyd team put together our list of 12 of the top ecommerce platforms.

What is a B2C eCommerce Platform?

B2C ecommerce platforms differ from standard website builders like WordPress or Squarespace because they provide specific features for online sellers. They include features like payments application integrations, comprehensive product catalogs, and in-platform seller marketing. Traditional website platforms and CMS systems are built for a wider range of needs but lack the specialized functionality that ecommerce platforms provide.

Ecommerce platforms from WooCommerce, Magento, Wix, Shopify, Ecwid, Prestashop and others are dramatically simplifying online selling globally for merchants and making it easy to launch stores online. Many platforms also let enterprise merchants customize their ecommerce stacks to best suit their needs.

The Best eCommerce Platform in 2022 – Rapyd’s Top Picks

The Best Free eCommerce Platforms

Many ecommerce platforms cost little to nothing to get up and running. If you have a limited budget — or just want to get set up to sell online fast — you can consider the following free options. These can also be a good starting point for businesses moving from brick-and-mortar to online sales or start-up businesses. While these solutions are free, merchants will still pay transaction fees.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce describes itself as ‘an open-source commerce solution built on WordPress’. Meaning you will need to have hosting and a WordPress site to use it. Its ubiquity on WordPress ecommerce sites gives it a massive market share (23%) which comes with a robust support community of developers, plugins and resources (Statista).

WooCommerce has no setup charge or monthly fees. Businesses pay 2.9% + $0.30 for each transaction made with U.S.-issued credit cards or debit cards. For cards issued outside the U.S., there’s an additional 1% fee. Other payment gateways are also available for international transactions and local payment methods.

• Key features: Storefront design, order management, product search and filters
• Pros: Great for WordPress and rich in-store themes
• Cons: Not suitable for non-WordPress websites

Ecwid

Ecwid is one of the best ecommerce platforms and eCommerce plugins that lets merchants integrate selling capabilities into their existing website. Ecwid integrates into existing sites with detailed, customized metrics and clear insight into e-commerce KPIs, a rare feature among ecommerce solutions. Most merchants will need to use Ecwid’s paid plans solutions. The costs of these tiers is determined by the number of products sold.

• Free: Up to 10 products for $0/month
• Venture: 100 products for $15/month
• Business: 2500 products for $35/month 
• Unlimited: Unlimited for $99/month 

Merchants will also need to select an Ecwid payment plugin that accepts international payments, and offers comprehensive global coverage and a true range of local payment methods, like the Rapyd Ecwid Payment Plugin.

• Key features: Makes selling digital goods easy, transparent pricing
• Pros: Make it to sell digital goods like ebooks, PDFs, video files. Easily processes large digital file products and bulk product imports and updates. Makes localization simple with its storefront that automatically displays in your users’ language, professionally translated into 53 languages. 
• Cons: Will require some developer support, has limited template options.

Magento Open Source – Adobe Commerce

Adobe offers two ecommerce platform solutions, Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. While Commerce will set you back over $20,000 a year, you can self-host the slimmed-down, open-source platform for free. It won’t include Magento Customer support or many of the features that make Magento Commerce a powerhouse enterprise ecommerce platform, but it’s great for companies who want to start small and upgrade down the road without switching platforms.

With Magento Open Source, you will need to pay for hosting from a third-party hosting provider. Magento Open Source doesn’t charge transaction fees, other than the fees charged by the payment gateway, which can vary.

• Key features: SEO, promotions and discounts, shipping options
• Pros: Large developer community and support forums, a large selection of extensions
• Cons: Requires technical expertise to implement and maintain

 

The Best Website Builders for B2C eCommerce

Choosing the right website builders can help you move quickly with templates and basic online sales functionality. With these kinds of solutions, there’s no need to hire designers and developers or worry about hosting.

Squarespace Commerce

Squarespace lets businesses sell online, track their inventory, and connect with customers on the go. While Squarespace is known mainly as a website builder, it’s gaining traction with small and medium online retailers that place a high value on design and ease of use.

• Key features: Unlimited products, sales tax configuration, and order status emails
• Pros: Slick drag and drop design and good inventory system
• Cons: Steep learning curve initially
• Pricing: From $26 per month

Wix eCommerce

Wix offers an easy-to-use website builder with over 500 templates. You can add a blog, galleries, SEO tools and a custom domain. Wix ecommerce is reasonably priced and easy to use. Its functionality can be limited and unable to support multiple sales channels or a robust feature set. However, it can be augmented using Wix’s many third-party plugins and extensions for functionalities like reviews, marketing tools, and payment gateways.

• Key features: Robust plugin marketplace, SEO
• Pros: Great store editor, user-friendly interface, abandoned carts recovery
• Cons: Limited inventory management and multichannel capabilities
• Pricing: From $23 per month

Prestashop

Prestashop is ideal for small to medium-size businesses looking for an easy to setup ecommerce platform. It offers many out-of-the-box options and themes and its pricing is affordable for non-enterprise businesses. Prestashop merchants can choose a free, open-source edition and get relatively inexpensive hosting through one of their partner hosting partners. With Prestashop, your transaction fees will be determined by your choice of PrestaShop payment plugins like Rapyd for Prestashop.

All Prestashop themes are paid and range from tens to hundreds of dollars. Merchants can add key functionalities with both free add-ons and paid ones. However, merchants should understand the capacities they need before signing up for Prestashop, as the cost of paid add-ons can add up. 

• Key features: Thousands of pre-built themes and addons
• Pros: Ease of use, affordable pricing
• Cons: While Prestashop payment gateway is the less costly option for larger enterprises, it also offers fewer capabilities and cannot scale significantly as your ecommerce site grows.

OpenCart

G2 describes Opencart as “an easy-to-use, powerful, open-source online store management program”. OpenCart can support multiple stores from a single interface while customizing and localizing each store. This can be especially useful for merchants with multiple independent brands and retailers that sell cross-border.

OpenCart has a $99 per month service available for businesses that want dedicated customer support. Transaction fees can also vary based on the payment methods, and the gateway(s) used.

• Key features: Shopping cart management, email integration, reporting, localization
• Pros: More than 13,000 modules and themes, easy administration
• Cons: Some extensions have security vulnerabilities and the costs of extensions can add up quickly

 

The Best All-In-One B2C eCommerce Platforms

As your business grows,  you’ll need a solution built to grow and scale too. You’ll want the ability to customize your store and checkout experience more deeply, especially if you’re a business selling a wide range of products online. This is where robust, all-in-one ecommerce platform solutions come in.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is owned by WordPress, making it a strong ecommerce platform for sellers already hosting their site there. WooCommerce offers a robust ecosystem of plugins and excellent SEO features. The WooCommerce Subscriptions feature also makes it an outstanding subscription ecommerce platform to launch your subscription business.

• Key features: More than 400 extensions, built-in blogging, product ratings and reviews
• Pros: Built for WordPress, enables unlimited customization and unlimited products
• Cons: Many extensions can add costs
• Pricing: WooCommerce has no setup charge or monthly fees

 

Shopify

Shopify is one of the most robust tools businesses can use to create their online store with no technical expertise. With comprehensive tools, easy usability and point-of-sale and online payment acceptance, Shopify is an excellent offering for virtually any use case. 

Shopify offers features including selling, order management and shipping. They also offer solutions that help businesses get started, such as custom logos, names and web domains. A wide range of third-party plugins allow customers to easily extend Shopify’s capabilities and expand their business internationally.

• Key features: POS, SEO, product management, dropshipping, omnichannel integration, branding
• Pros: Highly scalable, has comprehensive features, plus lots of highly satisfied customers
• Cons: While excellent for non-technical users, developers and retailers with technical expertise can find it limiting
• Pricing: From $9 to $299 per month

 

BigCommerce

Website BuilderExpert describes BigCommerce as “one of the most powerful and scalable ecommerce website builders on the market.” That’s because BigCommerce provides a powerful SaaS platform and a curated app store full of API-enabled solutions. The company targets brands that use their customer experience to stand out. 

They are known for delivering a great experience to their clients, along with an interface that is easy to use, customize and extend. Its curated app store provides support for clients at all growth stages, but its generalist approach means there aren’t a lot of vertical-specific apps or support.

• Key features: Multi-currency, real-time shipping quotes, mobile app
• Pros: Curated app store, excellent A/B testing capabilities
• Cons: Limited support for vertical-specific needs, and weak inventory and promotions offerings
• Pricing: $29 to $300 per month, with special full-service enterprise pricing available

 

The Best B2C Platforms for Composable Commerce

Composable or ‘headless’ commerce are two increasingly common terms in ecommerce technology. Composable commerce is an approach where a company takes different commerce components and then packages them together for a customized, best-of-breed solution. While composable or ‘headless’ commerce can be more costly than off-the-shelf commerce solutions, companies gain significantly more flexibility in building their ecommerce experience and delivering a better multi-channel customer experience. 

 

commercetools

commercetools provides cloud-native APIs for large enterprise clients as an alternative to a fully custom build. It is a developer-friendly solution that utilizes a microservices approach. It is versionless, elastic and extremely cost-effective.

commercetools relies on a customer’s existing enterprise BPS system for workflow management and requires deep developer expertise. It’s best for technical organizations with a strong, agile developer culture and an API-first approach. It is not a good fit for companies looking for an all-in-one solution.

• Key features: Conversion tracking, content management, API
• Pros: A fraction of the cost of building a similar solution in house, highly elastic
• Cons: Relies on customers’ existing enterprise BPM system for workflow management, limited availability of out-of-the-box integrations
• Pricing: See vendor for pricing

 

Elastic Path

Elastic Path was an early leader in headless commerce. Its hypermedia REST API gives developers the flexibility to build almost any ecommerce experience imaginable, with virtually no limit on partner integrations.

• Key features: Omnichannel support and store search
• Pros: Incredibly flexible and customizable
• Cons: Requires a developer-focused culture and is difficult for business and marketing users to utilize
• Pricing: See vendor for pricing

Magento Commerce – Adobe Commerce

Adobe’s Magento Commerce has a large, loyal customer base and support ecosystem. Magento’s outstanding customizability, robust A/B and multivariate testing, and support make it suitable for mid-market and large enterprise clients. It’s also one of the best platforms available for companies with rapidly evolving needs – and those who value the customer experience.

Its PWa studio makes it easy for companies to design Progressive Web Apps that deliver an app-like experience to the growing population of mobile shoppers.

• Key features: PWa Studio, on-premise and hosted solutions
• Pros: Intuitive page builder, customer segmentation and personalization
• Cons: High-cost, complex and unintuitive upgrades and customization
• Pricing: Magento Commerce prices start around $22,000 per year if you’re using Magento 2. Prices increase if your GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) is more than $1 million

 

The Best Suite-Based B2C eCommerce Platforms

If your business is already in an ecosystem like Salesforce or SAP, it may make sense to use the ecommerce platforms they provide. In this way, the solutions can share data, and your company will benefit from existing technical expertise.

Salesforce B2C Commerce

Our recent B2B ecommerce platform guide explains that Salesforce can be a good option for those already using products in its wide ecosystem. These are likely to be businesses with more sizable budgets.

• Key features: Merchandising tools and one-touch payment options, integration with Salesforce CRM and ecosystem
• Pros: Easy integrations with other salesforce products and comprehensive pricing, orders, and customer data.
• Cons: Steep learning curve, high cost
• Pricing: See vendor for pricing

Oracle CX Commerce

Oracle CX Commerce is a solid entry point into the world of cloud commerce for mid-market and enterprise companies. Its Sales, Marketing and Configure, Price Quote clouds provide a comprehensive solution that integrates with Oracle’s other ERP and financial clouds.

• Key features: Site development in familiar frameworks: JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, and NodeJS
• Pros: API-based approach makes it easy to integrate with other solutions
• Cons: Oracle CX Commerce only supports English on the backend
• Pricing: See vendor for pricing

SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud might be worth considering if your business is using other SAP solutions and wants a highly customizable platform that can handle high volumes of products and customers. Some reviewers have noted that it requires specialist IT knowledge to implement well — and that can take time to learn.

• Key features: Catalog and search, product recommendations, discounts and promos.
• Pros: Bulk product upload
• Cons: Some customers express a desire for deeper integration with other SAP Customer Experience Components
• Pricing: See vendor for pricing

 

Other Important eCommerce Platform Features

If you’re still unsure which platform is the best for your business needs, here’s some additional information and other important features to consider to help you choose.

The Best eCommerce Platform for SEO

Based on considerations such as social shareability, blog integration, auto XML sitemap creation, ease of creating redirects and other technical capabilities, these are the best ecommerce platforms for SEO.

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Magento
• BigCommerce
• Wix

 

The Top All-In-One eCommerce Platforms: A Features Comparison

	Subscriptions	Testimonials	Reward Points	WYSIWYG Editor	Form CAPTCHA	Rapyd Local Payments Plugin
BigCommerce	N	Add-On	3rd Party	Y	Y	N
Magento	Y	Y	Yes (Enterprise Edition)	Y	Y	Y
OpenCart	Y	Y	3rd Party	3rd Party	Y	N
Shopify	N	Y	Y	N	Y	Y
WooCommerce	Y	Y	Y	Y	Add On	Y

Source

Statista. Global market share of leading e-commerce software platforms and technologies worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/710207/worldwide-ecommerce-platforms-market-share/