11 CommentsEvery ecommerce platform has a section of their website devoted to showcase some of their best online stores. This is where DIY online store builders can show off their big brands, high-profile merchants and best designed websites.
I’m often asked which ecommerce platform has the best stores. Here’s my answer:
1.Shopify
Shopify now has over 40,000 active online stores, and in my opinion host the best designed shops in the industry. This is in part because they have a great selection of high quality ecommerce templates to choose from. It’s also because a lot of high profile designers choose Shopify for their personal stores and for their clients stores (example: design legends Jeffrey Zeldman and Tina Eisenberg both use Shopify).
You can check out their “examples” section to see all their featured stores. You’ll immediately see why I rank Shopify #1. Platforms like 3dcart, Corecommerce, and osCommerce don’t even come close to comparing.
Here are my favorite stores built and hosted on Shopify:
Good As Gold
Hard Graft
Tattly
2. Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce now has over 25,000 active online stores. Now, in my full review of Bigcommerce I note that the quality of ecommerce templates that Bigcommerce offers is quite low, and that’s true, but they’re getting better.
Bigcommerce is also attracting a lot of funky and stylish boutique type shops which are generally easier on the eye than say, a wholesale electronics shop.
Many of the stores in Bigcommerce’s showcase are custom built, so don’t expect to get a shop like this out of the box – you will likely need to hire a designer to get results like this. But that’s really the case with most platform ‘showcase’ sections, so I can’t hold that against Bigcommerce.
Here are a couple of my favorite Bigcommerce stores:
Torie & Howard
Undrest
3. BigCartel
BigCartel has extremely easy to use and well designed templates. You don’t get many templates to choose from and some are very outdated, but they have a few staples that are quite good.
You can check out all of BigCartel’s store examples here.
Two of my favorites are:
Rapping Paper
Parachute
i notice that you don’t have a review of Ultracart. do you have an opinion of Ultracart? i’d like to go with shopify based on your reviews, but my client is attached to ultracart – what do you think?
Honestly Amy I have no idea about Ultracart. I’ll look into it in the future.. If your client is hell-bent on using it, what can you do?
I was using OSCommerce but the do-it-yourself solution give me to many headache. So I swith to hosted solution by BigCommerce and I’m very happy with theri service.
May: I’m glad you got rid of osCommerce. They are horrible. Hope you have a great experience with Bigcommerce. Do come back and let me know how your ecommerce store is growing.
This one was a tough one for me Rachel. I know how you feel about Shopify. I agree with you to a certain extent because Shopify seems to have a lot more app support, SEO support (SEOmoz see to think highly of Shopify along with Bizelo). They also have better looking stores . But from a startup small business who’s really never sold anything ecommerce wise, I have to give the nod to Bigcommerce. I set up trial accounts with both Shopify & Bigcommerce. A Bigcommerce rep called me with 48hours and asked me if I needed any help, where I heard nothing from Shopify (not a real big deal, but when you are comparing and contrasting the 2, it’s hard not to give Bigcommerce the nod in the customer service category. Email account was another big thing that BigCommerce gets the nod with. I’ll have to pay $50 a year to have one email address through GoogleApps if I choose to continue with Shopify, whereas BigCommerce gives you unlimited emails. Also, BigCommerce has an abundance of free templates and though they are not the greatest, they are free and further help you in the decision making process when trying to decide between the 2 sites.
The pricepoint was the last thing. Maybe I am missing something, but you have to pay a 2% transaction fee to Shopify for each item you sell. When you add this to the CC transaction fees you end up with close to 5% in transaction fees alone. If you sold $1000 in a month $20 bucks goes to Shopify on top of the $29.99 you are already paying them.
Hey Wedding Corner Store! Thanks for such a detailed comment – I’m happy to see you have read my reviews. Honestly, both Shopify and Bigcommerce are great. One gets the edge in some things, and the other gets the edge on others.
Some things, like Bigcommerce’s aggressive telephone sales department could be considered a negative for a lot of people, but I’m glad you appreciated the attentiveness.
As far as templates go, although Bigcommerce does offer lots of free templates, Shopify’s templates (they call them themes) are significantly better. You really can’t compare.
You’re right about the transaction fee – they do charge 2% on their least expensive plan – so yes, you likely will end up paying a bit more.
Please come back and let me know how things are going with your store, and let me know how you’re enjoying Bigcommerce! You’re selling some BEAUTIFUL jewelry!
Just about ready to scream. We have spent countless hours (and nearly a year) rebuilding our site on the Magento Go platform, only to find out many of the things that we were used to having on our Prostores site, no longer exist.
Help! Read your review of Shopify, and we are thinking about going that way. What can you recommend about them for help migrating an existing catalog?
Just curious, why isn’t Amazon’s webstore on your list of ecommerce platforms?
Because I think it sucks.
Haha. That’s an adequate review. Short and un-sweet.
Hi Rachel-
Great reviews, very helpful. I have narrowed it down to Shopifly and BC. I am also looking at Pinnacle Cart and Shopping Cart Elite. Do you have any opinions on either of them? Thanks for your time!
Mike