The Best Website Builder for an Online Store, by the Commerce Clause

Weighted for commerce, the ranking inverts. Shopify takes 5 of 5 on ecommerce and extensibility — the only full mark issued on that clause — and finishes fourth overall at 28 of 40, because the rubric allocates selling 5 points of 40. Where the site exists to sell, the standard's own instruction is that this clause overrides the headline total outright, and this page applies that instruction. On the same clause Wix takes 4, Squarespace and Webflow take 3 apiece, and Hostinger and GoDaddy take 2. Every mark and every fee quoted below is copied from the scorecard that awarded it, verified in August 2026.

Why the headline total is the wrong number for a store

The rubric caps ecommerce and extensibility at 5 points on a deliberate and stated ground: most people buying a website builder are not selling products, and weighting selling as heavily as ease of use would hand the entire ranking to one platform on behalf of a majority of readers who will never open a store. The same passage adds the correction that makes this page necessary. A 5-point criterion that governs an entire project is still the deciding factor for that project.

• Read the commerce cell first, then the total — not the other way round.
• Price the fee structure at your own volume, because a percentage is not a rank.
• Check the documented catalogue ceiling before the design gallery, because ceilings do not move.

Applied to the current revision, that instruction reorders the table. Wix leads the standard overall at 32 of 40 and takes 4 of 5 here, held off the fifth point by an ecosystem that runs past 500 titles rather than an economy. Squarespace is second overall at 31 and third on this clause, because what it charges on digital sales is a business-model decision imposed on the seller rather than a fee. Hostinger and GoDaddy share the floor at 2 by the same route: a serviceable store with no ecosystem behind it, and no route to a requirement the vendor did not anticipate.

The commerce marks, and the fees behind them

Two costs decide a store's economics and only one of them appears on a pricing page. The first is the platform's own cut of each sale, which is not the card processing rate and sits on top of it. The second is what the vendor charges for capability it did not ship — an app subscription, or nothing at all if no marketplace exists. The table records both, alongside the documented ceiling each platform publishes. Where a figure was not confirmable at the time of checking it is stated as a range rather than rounded into a number that reads more confident than the evidence.

One row deserves reading twice. Squarespace's entry plan takes 2% on physical goods and 7% on digital content and memberships, and only Advanced at $99 a month clears both to zero. A seller of courses on the cheapest tier is therefore losing roughly a tenth of revenue before card processing is counted, which is why the standard treats the cheap plan as the expensive one for that trade. Hostinger's 7 of 7 on value does not rescue its commerce mark either — the whole extension story there is a box into which custom code may be pasted, as the Hostinger scorecard records.

Choosing by catalogue and by what you sell

The first hard number to check is catalogue size, because it is the one constraint no configuration can move. The documented ceilings in this revision cluster at 500: Webflow's Ecommerce Standard caps there and lifts to 5,000 only on Plus at $74 a month, and Hostinger's ceiling was put between 500 and 1,000 at the time of checking. Below those figures a general builder is a legitimate answer. Above them, or where inventory, multi-currency and multi-channel selling are part of the brief rather than an ambition, the commerce clause has already decided: current Shopify plans start at $39 a month on Basic, and the standard's advice is to budget the app subscriptions separately from the outset rather than discovering them in month three.

What you sell matters as much as how much of it. For physical goods attached to a service business — a workshop with twenty items, a studio selling prints — the platform fee is the whole question, and three platforms answer it with zero. Wix charges no platform fee on paid plans and pairs that with the deepest ecosystem outside Shopify, which is the reason it holds 4 of 5 rather than 3; a Wix Business plan is the tier the storefront sits on, and its complete card is published in the Wix scorecard. For digital products the calculation is different again, and it is the one case where the entry tier of a design-led platform is the most expensive option on the table.

Where a general builder still wins

The store is a shelf, not the shop

A brochure site with a small catalogue behind it is the case the commerce-first platforms answer badly. The two ease points withheld on the Shopify scorecard are charged precisely at the moment an operator wants an ordinary page, because the primitives there are products and collections rather than sections and copy. Where the site is mostly pages and occasionally a checkout, the general builders are not a compromise; they are the correct instrument.

Design is the reason the sale happens

The Squarespace scorecard holds 8 of 8 on design, one of two perfect marks in the standard, and the storefront underneath it is capable and better looking than most. The two points forfeited on commerce are charged to the fee ladder and the absent marketplace rather than to the shop itself. Reaching Squarespace's Core plan removes the platform's cut on physical product sales entirely, which for a maker selling forty items is the whole difference.

The plan fee is not the bill

Value carries 7 points against commerce's 5, and on a store the two interact. Shopify takes 3 of 7 because a working store commonly runs $30 to $80 a month in app subscriptions against a plan fee of $348 a year — the plan is not the expensive part. The two-year arithmetic for all six is set out in the pricing analysis, and the full standings sit on the best website builders ranking.