The Best Ecommerce Website Builder, Audited by Fees Per Sale

The best ecommerce website builder is the one whose entry balances at your volume, and that answer changes at knowable points on the revenue line. Shopify Basic holds first place in our ledger at 9.3 and is the correct default for a store that intends to become a business. It is also, at $2,000 a month in sales, twenty-one dollars more expensive than a free plan that scores nearly two points lower. Both statements are true because a builder charges you in three separate ways and only one of them appears on the pricing page. This audit prices all three, on one identical month, for every builder we track.

Three fees, three different behaviors

Every roundup that ranks builders on a monthly price is auditing one line of a three-line invoice. The first line is the plan fee, which is fixed: $29 a month on annual billing at Shopify Basic, Wix Core, Squarespace Core, and BigCommerce Core, $19 at Squarespace Basic, and $0 at Square Free. The second is the processing percentage charged by the gateway on every order — 2.9% at five of the eight builders we track, 2.59% at BigCommerce on default Braintree pricing, and 3.3% at Square Free since its January 2026 repricing. The third is the platform surcharge, the cut the builder itself takes on top of processing.

The three behave differently as your numbers change, which is the whole reason they cannot be averaged into one figure. The plan fee is regressive against revenue: amortized over 40 orders a month, $29 adds $0.725 to every order, which is nearly half again the processing cost on a $50 sale. The percentage is flat — it costs the same share at every volume. The fixed cents are regressive against order size: $0.30 is 0.6% of a $50 order and 3% of a $10 one, so a sticker shop pays roughly double the effective rate of a furniture shop on an identical schedule. That is why a $0-plan builder with a worse rate genuinely wins at low volume, and genuinely loses at high volume, without either vendor changing a price. We keep all three columns separate in our fee table for exactly this reason.

The ledger at $2,000 a month

Our house test store does $2,000 a month across 40 orders at a $50 average, on annual billing, paying US standard cards through each builder's own or default gateway. Same sales, same order count, seven receipts. The spread is $51 a month before a single feature has been compared.

Two entries deserve a note. The cheapest plan on the list produces the most expensive month, because Squarespace Basic's 2% physical-goods commission costs more than the $10 upgrade to Core past roughly $500 a month in sales. And every figure above assumes annual billing: month-to-month, Shopify Basic and BigCommerce Core step to $39, Wix Core to $36, and Squarespace Basic to $25.

Picking by volume, not by feature grid

The crossovers are arithmetic, not opinion, and there are four worth knowing. Square Free versus Shopify Basic: both charge $0.30 fixed, so order count cancels and what remains is 0.4 points of rate against $29 of plan fee. Set them equal and the answer is $7,250 a month in online sales. Below it, take the free plan and bank the $29 — a free Square Online store is the correct entry for a side seller or a business already running Square's registers. Above it, Shopify Basic is cheaper and the gap widens by $4 for every additional $1,000 of monthly sales, so open the Shopify Basic plan and stop paying rate for the privilege of saving plan fee.

The second crossover is inside Shopify. Moving from Basic to Grow buys 0.2 points of processing — $2 per $1,000 of card volume — against a $50 monthly plan difference, so the rate alone clears at $25,000 a month and not a dollar sooner. Upgrade for the five staff accounts if you need them; do not upgrade for the rate. The third is Squarespace's $500-a-month line between Basic and Core, described above. The fourth is Wix, where nothing crosses: Wix Payments charges the same 2.9% + $0.30 on every plan, so the $10 step from Core to Business buys automated sales tax, printed shipping labels, and a 250-product dropshipping ceiling instead of 25 — labor, not rate. Run your own sales and order count through the fees calculator before you take any of these lines as yours, because order size moves the total more than most sellers expect.

Where the fee ledger stops being the whole ledger

Digital goods change the ranking

Squarespace runs two separate fee ladders, and roundups routinely blur them. Physical sellers escape the commission at Core. Digital sellers do not: the platform fee on downloads and memberships is 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus, and 0% on Advanced. At $2,000 a month of digital sales, Plus at $135.00 beats Core at $199.00 and even beats Advanced at $161.00 — an order the plan prices do not suggest. Our commerce review works that ladder plan by plan.

The second bill nobody forecasts

Shopify's app catalog is both its moat and its leak. Typical stores run 5 to 15 paid apps, and a realistic basic stack — reviews, email, upsell, SEO — books $50 to $150 a month, with $300 or more common at scale. A $29 plan carrying a $120 app stack is functionally a $149 platform. Budget it as a band on day one and audit the list quarterly, as we do in the full Shopify audit. Wix inverts this: abandoned-cart recovery, product reviews, and marketplace channels are inside the $29, which flatters its all-in figure in ways the rate card alone does not show — the Wix Core plan is the cheapest honest storefront for a first store that wants to be selling this week.

The hours column

WooCommerce posts the lowest structural cost in the table at about $85.00, and it collects the difference in hours: core updates, plugin updates, security patches, backups, and plugin-conflict debugging when checkout breaks on a Friday. Price three hours a month at $50 an hour and the $14 structural saving becomes a $136 deficit. The saving is real only when the hours are cheap to you.