About CartCraft

CartCraft exists because store-builder pricing is designed to be compared badly: teaser rates, annual-only prices presented as monthly, platform fees in footnotes, and 0% claims with conditions attached. All of it yields to a ledger. So that is what this site is — reviews written as audits, pros posted as credits, cons as debits, and every verdict a balance with the workings shown.

The method

Every rate on this site is read from the vendor's published fee schedule or pricing page, dated, and re-verified monthly. One rate table feeds everything: the fees calculator and every review draw from the same figures, and when a vendor reprices — and in 2026 they repriced constantly: Square in January, Ecwid in March, BigCommerce in June, Squarespace in July — the calculator and the copy are updated together. A number you read in a review always matches the number the tool computes. Where we cannot verify a figure, we say so in the text and soften the claim; where we make an assumption, such as hosting cost for a self-hosted store, we label it.

Independence

No builder pays for placement, a score, or an adjective. The rankings come out of the arithmetic plus each product's documented capabilities, and the worked math is printed so you can check it — a review you cannot audit is just an opinion with fonts.

How we make money

Some outbound links are affiliate links; if you sign up through one, the vendor pays us a commission at no cost to you. Those commissions differ wildly between vendors — which is precisely why the rankings are anchored to published fee schedules rather than payout tables. The itemized version lives in the affiliate disclosure.

Corrections and contact

If a figure here disagrees with a vendor's current fee schedule, we want that discrepancy on our desk — a bookkeeper's favorite email is the one that finds the error. The contact page has the details.