Top 9 Shopify Alternatives for Small Ecommerce Businesses

Pros

• Fully hosted and requires no maintenance or a separate hosting service.
• Superior to Shopify when it comes to managing your business
• Unless you’re in the cheapest plan, Bigcommerce won’t charge transaction fees for using different payment methods.
• Integrates with Amazon, eBay, and Facebook marketplace.
• Can be used with WordPress.
• There’s a 24/7 support team and helpful learning guides.
  

• Website themes have higher prices. So having a beautiful website will cost you money.
• Customization is not as flexible as Shopify.
• It’s a bit more complex than Shopify when setting up your website and designing.

Pros

• Price is cheaper than Shopify. And offers a free plan where you can test things out and see if it fits your needs.
• Its website builder and templates give you full control over website looks.
• Has an HTML5 editor for complete customization.
• It’s fully hosted, no need to use a domain registrar or a hosting service.
  Supports multiple payment methods without charging fees.

• It’s not made specifically for ecommerce businesses. Features like product attributes aren’t too flexible.
• Not great for B2B businesses.
• Too many templates and design options might feel overwhelming.

Pros:

• It is fully hosted—no need to know about domains, servers, or maintenance.
• Well-made website templates and design customization.
  Great tools for online marketing, SEO, and analytics.
• Zero transaction fees.
• Integrates with third-party tools for additional capabilities.
  Unlimited product catalogs.
• More affordable than Shopify’s cheapest plan.
  

• The platform is made for websites in general. Not for ecommerce exclusively.
• Can’t contact the support team via phone call in cases where immediate response is needed.
• Design tools can be so in-depth that they can get overwhelming for new users.

Pros:

• It’s free.
• It’s an excellent option for people who want to use WordPress.
• Highly customizable since it’s open-source.
  Integrates with almost any app.
• There’s an active community of experts and developers who keep updating it.
• The platform is made for ecommerce businesses. So it’s complete in features and options.

• Requires web hosting and WordPress, which isn’t free.
• While most plugins are free, the top-quality tools are premium.
• You’ll need to work with a developer if you want to make the most out of the platform (for customizing the code, adding specific plugins, etc.)

Pros:

• It’s open-source, meaning it’s completely free and can be modified as you want.
• It integrates with an ocean of third-party tools to help you integrate wanted features like SEO, blogs, web personalization, and so on.
• Has a large community that keeps the platform up-to-date and provides support.
• Scales well, as it offers unlimited categories, products, languages, product reviews, currencies, tax rates, and more.

• Despite being open source and customizable. It can be challenging without technical knowledge, and you’ll need a developer to modify its internal code to your liking.
• The platform is not SEO-friendly unless you install the right plugins.Even if the platform is free, you’ll still need to pay for high-quality themes and apps to optimize it and scale.

Pros:

• It’s straightforward. Anyone can open an online store.
• It’s very affordable and has a freemium plan.
• Despite being simple, it doesn’t compromise the quality of their templates. They all look modern and engaging.
• It lets you edit the site’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript code without issues (you’d need to know code).
• The platform is SEO-friendly and has a high-quality backend.
  Integrates with Facebook Marketplace.
• Supports discount codes.
• No transaction fees.

• Lacks advanced features for fast-growing businesses.
• Even basic features like a search function are not supported because the platform works for stores with smaller catalogs that don’t need to expand.
• Payments are limited to Stripe and Paypal.
• Overall less flexibility than most platforms. You’d have to tweak the website code to customize your site further.

Pros:

• It is fully hosted—no need to pay for any other service.
• Customer support is available 24/7.
• The platform is fully customizable and user-friendly.
• Offers many high-quality templates.
  Great product management tools like its top-notch inventory integration.
• Includes marketing features for SEO, social media, and marketplace selling.
  Allows for a more extensive and more diverse catalog than Shopify.

• Has a complicated fee structure for fees and secondary costs like bandwidth usage. Making it a more expensive choice than you’d think.
• Forces you to pay for your SSL certificate and integrate it into your site. Which adds to the additional costs of using the platform.
• Despite having beautiful templates. Premium templates cost hundreds of dollars if you want to change your theme.

Pros:

• It’s a comprehensive platform. Offering strong management and marketing capabilities like multi-channel retail, marketplace integrations, SEO, customer reviews, and more.
• Scales excellently with unlimited products, upsells/cross-sells features, categories, SKUs, and more.
• Chat and phone technical support that’s available 24/7.
• Multiple payment options, flexible checkout, and no transaction fees.

• It’s harder to learn than other platforms.
• The free templates aren’t as attractive as Shopify’s. You have to pay for the premium options to reach the highest standards.
• It charges you for additional features. So it can become pricier than you’d have expected.

Pros:

• It’s a complete solution for those who need full-stack capabilities to scale a business as fast as possible.
  
• Scales perfectly, you can increase your number of products and customers as high as you can.
• It’s free to get started as long as you own your web server.
• It’s widely used and has an active community of developers willing to help.
• Finding new hires specializing in Magento is way easier than with other platforms.

• It’s too complicated for small businesses.
• Requires technical knowledge to make the most out of the platform, including essentials like SEO, marketing, and analytics.
• The free plan requires hosting, which can be a bottleneck on its scalability.
• It gets expensive when it comes to the development and maintenance costs of the website. You either hire a team to handle your business or pay five figures per year for the enterprise plan.