Recommend a good ecommerce platform for a small business?

Factual Questions
1

I’m a front-end web dev / designer who occasionally does freelance work. Someone I built a website for has an associate who wants an ecommerce site, and he’s asking me if I want to take on the project. I’m strictly a front-end guy, so I’d need to use an ecommerce platform. I’ve never worked on an ecommerce site as a freelancer, so I did some googling for the best ecommerce platform sites. There are plenty out there. Anybody have any experience, advice, recommendations?

Some details: I won’t meet with the actual (potential) client until next week so I don’t have all of his requirements, but I don’t think he has a huge number of different products to sell. Maybe a dozen-ish? And I don’t know much about his product requirements, like personalization, sizes, colors, etc. but I think the products and their requirements are pretty simple. Selling will be US only, or possibly US & Canada. Any recommendations for what specifics to ask the client when I meet with him will be very much appreciated as well!

I’ve heard good things about Wix.com: very easy to use, relatively inexpensive. I want something with very little learning curve, and something that will have as little maintenance as possible down the road. But since I am a front-end dev, I’d like something that is not JUST themes and no-code editors, but also allows me to get “under the hood” and directly work with the HTML and code if I want. Similar to Wordpress-- you can work just with themes and no-code editing in WP, you can alter existing themes, or you can write your own theme from scratch. But NOT WP itself. I know there are ecommerce plugins for WP, but I don’t want to use it for several reasons-- I find WP kind of bloated and slow, and very annoying in terms of constant maintenance and updates. But change my mind on WP if you want.

2

I don’t know how closely this matches your desired feature checklist, but up until about 3 years ago we used BigCommerce and I was quite happy with it:

I did some basic level tweaking (beyond themes), but I am not sure it offers the fine level of control you want. Still, worth checking out.

3

…it will really depend on the needs of the client. If the client is wanting a turn-key comprehensive ecommerce solution then I would suggest a dedicated platform like shopify. They have free trials, plenty of themes, and you can customize to a degree. But the real power of the platform is the back-end, its robust and very easy for a client to use, but is scalable and should be able to do anything you want it to do. The downside is, like with all template based sites, they all tend to look a bit like each other.

I personally build in webflow.

Its a no-code website builder, if you know HTML and CSS then it will be very easy to use, instead of typing code you use a drag-and-drop interface to pretty much design what you want. The key difference with template sites is that there is no bloat: you aren’t dragging and dropping template elements, you are adding sections, inserting a div block, using flexbox or CSS grid. You are coding the site without having to type any code which makes it (for most people) a much faster way to build.

And it has an ecommerce platform as well: but it isn’t a fully mature platform (it came out of beta a couple of years ago) and it has a few gaps, for example (and its a big one for me) I live in NZ and can’t (without custom coding) set my own tax rates (this isn’t a problem if you live in the US) You can convert to a shopify theme, but doing so takes away some of the advantages of using webflow. I love webflow, but if the client needs something complex and robust then it might not be the best.

If you do use Wordpress then woocommerce is IMHO the most robust and scalable ecommerce plugin.

I’ve built a couple of sites with this, and it does the job pretty well. Its the most popular ecommerce plugin in wordpress and its well supported: but as always there is potential for conflict with wordpress themes/other plugins, etc, but it tends to be a pretty robust solution.

I haven’t used Wix but from my understanding is the ecommerce is good enough, but (for me personally) it suffers as a platform from its early days where it was seen as the poor cousin to wordpress. You might want to consider squarespace as well.

So ultimately it depends on what your client needs.

4

This is handy information for me, Banquet_Bear.

Our company has three small apparel stores which need to get set up with e-commerce sites in the next month or so. At first I was looking at Wix since we use that four our main corporate site, but I’ve heard that site performance suffers a bit if you’re trying to sell a wide range of items. (I’m not certain what the threshold is before this happens.) Shopify seems to fit our needs in that regard, it’s also scalable, has good shipper integration, and it supports the payment processor that we’re currently using at our stores. Site management and design looks straightforward, which is definitely a plus. I also like the looks of their in-store POS packages in the event that we want to jump ship from what we’re currently using.

Thanks for the info!

5

Thanks for the replies so far!

Do you have direct experience with Wix through your company, Guy_Incognito, and if so what do you think about Wix?

6

We use Wix for both for our Corporate home page as well as a general information page that we set up for our retail apparel stores. We’re not doing any kind of e-commerce on either one. Pretty basic stuff, but we no longer have a real web department to handle this kind of thing. It’s relatively easy to maintain whenever we have to do minor changes here and there. Unfortunately, most of those changes were because we closed a lot of business units pre-Covid, but now we mainly change out banner images and modify store hours when needed.

All in all it works okay for us, but we’re not really asking it to do too much when you think about it.

7

If it’s simple enough, Wix is probably fine. But Shopify has quickly become the de-facto ecommerce standard for anything that doesn’t live on Amazon. It’s stable, feature-rich, easy-to-use, and has a huge ecosystem both in terms of add-ons and developers. It made all the other options obsolete.

Shopify hits the sweet spot between managed services (read: you never have to worry about PCI compliance ) and customizability (theming, templates, products, etc.). It is really exceptional at what it does, while still being very powerful. Wix is just easy to use but not very powerful. If you’re a front-end dev, you can write entire Shopify themes in twig its templating language Liquid, with basic loops and conditionals, while Shopify does all the heavy lifting. Look into it; there’s a reason it’s so popular.

And word of warning: Stay far, far away from Magento. If someone even mentions that word, run away as fast as you can.