Top 8 Shopify Alternative for Your Online Store
If you want to launch an online store, Shopify is an ideal option. It is one of the dominating e-commerce platforms. Then why to choose a Shopify Alternative? Shopify provides excellent features but there are some limitations to Shopify. It doesn't have features for updating inventory stocks. The blogging platform is very poor and product categorization is way too difficult. The extra transactional fees are also a big problem. Therefore, you would need some good alternatives to Shopify. We have compiled a list of the best alternatives to Shopify which includes paid as well as free Shopify alternatives. If you don't want to use Shopify to create your website then refer to its alternatives.
Source: Pixabay
But for choosing a good alternative for creating your website you need to know what kind of website you'll make and what sort of website builder you'll need. For this, you need to make a prototype for your website first. That'll help you see how your website will look like and what website builder will work better for your desired website. In this way, making a prototype of your website can help you find a good alternative to Shopify.
Here is one of the best prototyping tool: Wondershare Mockitt.
Before building your website make a prototype for your online website. Making a prototype helps you check what your final website will look like. It also saves you from future problems as you can find every problem before launching your website. Mockitt is one of the best prototyping tools. You can create impressive interactive prototypes for your website using Mockitt. It provides the best features:
- It is a fast prototyping tool. It can create a good prototype for your website in just 10 minutes.
- It provides a lot of resources, 500 icons, components, templates, and screens.
- Mockitt is a cloud-based prototyping tool which means it allows you to test, share, and gather feedback while saving the data.
- It also provides access to previous projects. You can get access to your previous 10 prototyping projects.
- And above all your prototyping projects are secured. It provides multi-level management privacy.
Mockitt is a user-friendly prototyping tool. Beginners can also create highly interactive prototypes using Mockitt. The best thing about Mockitt is you and your team can work on the same project on Mockitt and also share your progress making it the best collaborative tool.
Once you have decided how your online store will look like it's time to choose the best Shopify competitor to build a website.
Here are 7 best Shopify alternatives
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce is the best Shopify alternative providing a full-cycle solution for a website. It provides a very smooth and flexible drag-and-drop editor. Bigcommerce offers the best SEO features, an unlimited number of products, and amazing theme designs. The biggest thing is it requires no transaction fee. Therefore, it is best for running a bigcommerce site.
Source: Bigcommerce
Magento
Magneto is a free Shopify alternative. You would just need to pay for hosting, themes, and plugins the content management software will be free. It is a CMS platform that lets you sell all your products in an open ecosystem. Magento is quite flexible, scalable, and mobile-friendly. It can be the best alternative to Shopify.
Source: Magneto
Woocommerce
It is a self-hosted and free Shopify alternative. Woocommerce is best for entrepreneurs who want full control of their content. It's the dashboard is built in WordPress which makes it easy to use. As compared to Shopify it provides the best SEO features for content marketing. And it provides a huge variety of free plugins and extensions.
Source: Woocommerce
Squarespace
Squarespace alternative is the best choice for those who want a flexible online store builder as Squarespace is extremely easy to use. It provides very well-designed templates. For e-commerce services it lets you take payment in multiple currencies and provides automatic tax calculation. It provides advanced reporting features and many inventory management options. It also offers two weeks free trial so before paying for it you can check whether it's the best Shopify alternative or not. It also provides similar Shopify features.
Source: Squarespace
3dcart
3dcart is another good Shopify competitor. It is a cloud-hosted shopping cart platform and provides robust features at reasonable prices. It supports 70+ payment gateways and provides unlimited product storage. For 3dcart you won't have to pay any extra transaction fee. It has versatile functionality and also offers in-house web services. It also provides more features than Shopify which makes it one of the best Shopify alternatives.
Source: 3dcart
Volusion
This cloud-based alternative is serving around 200,000 businesses.
It is a beginner-friendly tool. Anyone with little tech skill can use this tool. It provides a vast library of templates at a very reasonable price. However, you would need coding skills to set your e-store backend or you would need to hire a developer. It's loading
time is also very slow as compared to Shopify.
Source: Volusion
cart
cart was started in 2003 and was designed for small to mid-sized businesses. It lets you build a professionally designed online store and display your products in the best light to compel people to buy your products. As a Shopify alternative, it provides more SEO features such as custom URLs and schema.org tags and gives you more control over your storefront. In its every plan, it provides unlimited products and categories. It also offers some tools that increase the website's traffic, increase conversions, and achieves success in its competitive sector.
Source: cart
Wix
Compared to Shopify, Wix websites are easier to build and allow you to design your website using very simple tools like drag and drop. And you don't need to pay any extra transaction fee for using Wix. Even though their paid e-commerce plans are very cost-effective making Wx easily accessible to small businesses as well. Wix provides very good features but it can't be considered the best Shopify alternative as it lacks some e-commerce features and doesn't provide multiple payment methods. It doesn't provide POS (point of sale) which means if you are selling both online and in-person, you would need to handle both individually.
Source: Wix
Conclusion
Shopify might be an ideal tool for building an online store, but it doesn't work for everyone. Still, you don't need to worry about it as there are a lot of Shopify alternatives out there. They provide similar Shopify features and some even provide more features than Shopify. However, while choosing a good alternative make sure that the platform that you are choosing is providing good e-commerce features. It should provide multiple payment methods, limited transaction fees, and real-time inventory management. You can also try these different Shopify alternatives for free to check which one will work better for your online store.