16 Best Ecommerce Platforms for UK Small Business 2025

Online shopping has seen a significant boost in the last few years, thanks to the increased adoption of smartphones and the internet. Consequently, the number of eCommerce users in the United Kingdom is reported to increase from 50.3 million in 2024 to 52.8 million by 2025.

As this number rises, so do the eCommerce UK sellers. In fact, the UK recorded 580,000 eCommerce websites in 2024. This growth will demand the adoption of eCommerce platforms catering to businesses of all sizes. 

Choosing the right eCommerce platform that fits your business size, budget, and required features is crucial for your business. It helps boost visibility, enhance operations, and drive the right sales. 

So, which is the right one for you? To help you out, I tried 24 popular solutions and shortlisted the 16 best platforms for UK small businesses, based on factors such as pricing, features, scalability and more. Below, I’ll discuss the 9 out of the 16 solutions! 👇

• 1. ShopWired – UK’s Leading eCommerce to Build eCommerce Website
• 2. Wix – Easy-to-Use AI-Powered Store Design
• 3. Shopify – Global Player, Popular in UK Too
• 4. Ecwid – Sell on Website or TikTok, Your Choice
• 5. WooCommerce – Best for WordPress Lovers
• 6. Squarespace – Built-In Payment, Scheduling & Marketing Tools
• 7. OpenCart – Top Open-Source eCommerce Choice
• 8. Square – Best for Ecommerce Site and POS Integration
• 9. BigCommerce – Best for B2B Ecommerce Sites
• Show moreShow less

Best eCommerce Platforms for UK Small Businesses Compared

Before we check out the platforms in detail, I’ve compared my top picks in the table below, in terms of AI features, payment integrations, pricing, free plans, and more.

I’ve reviewed each of these eCommerce platforms in detail, with their functionalities, pricing, pros, and cons!

1. ShopWired

ShopWired is an easy-to-use online store builder with powerful features and vast customisation. During my test, the interface looked similar to WordPress. You’d find all the menu elements on the left side of the dashboard—order management, product management, customers, and marketing tools. 

The main dashboard gives you details such as the number of store visitors, total orders with sales, and a graphical order tracker visualisation. 

ShopWired offers various pre-made responsive themes, allowing you to customise the styles, typography, headers, and colour themes. What I liked most is that it gives you complete control over your website design. For instance, you can edit the website header and add new logos or favicons. You can also drag a section up or down or add a new section to your website. 

Even better, ShopWired lets you test your design for different devices: computers, mobile phones, and tablets. 

I’m also impressed by its checkout management capabilities. It gives you a Yes/No field box to check how you’d like to view your checkout cart. For instance, choose if you like to prompt customers to log in to an account after confirming their shopping basket. 

Overall, ShopWired is an amazing eCommerce platform if you need a range of features within a single platform. 

ShopWired Features

• High-grade security features such as 256-bit encryption and PCI compliance.
• Automatic sales tax calculations using TaxJar’s API.
• Ability to create custom data points for categories, brands, products, website pages, blogs, and orders.
• Select shipping zones and set your shipping rates and delivery time.
• Integrates with 35+ UK payment gateways, including credit cards.

ShopWired Pricing

ShopWired’s paid plans start £31.46/month. Here are its plans in detail:

• Essentials plan costs £31.46/month, billed yearly
• Advanced plan costs £71.96/month, billed yearly
• Premium plan costs £134.96/month, billed yearly
• Enterprise plan costs £299.95/month

The platform offers a 14-day free trial as well to test out its features.

Try ShopWired

2. Wix

Wix is an AI-enabled website builder that caters to small businesses. It offers a range of eCommerce features, such as inventory management & catalogue builder, and a plethora of marketing tools. 

Templates are at the heart of the Wix website builder. You can choose from more than 900 pre-made and fully customisable templates in a range of categories, such as fashion, beauty, electronics, food and drinks, and more. 

Its highlight feature is the AI chatbot, which uses pre-set questions to help you with a personalised dashboard. You can either choose AI assistance or continue to build without it. 

For example, I used Wix’s AI chatbot to create a personalised dashboard for a mountain gear website. Once the Wix AI understands what your digital storefront is about, it recommends the products to add to your catalogue. 

Here’s what it suggested for the mountain gear website: 

If you want to design your store, you can either generate it using AI or pick a pre-made template. My results with the AI website designer were impressive. It gives you a ready-made website with a short brief. 

Additionally, you’ll love the vast range of Wix automations and functions. Choose from a range of pre-made automation templates or create a workflow automation from scratch.

You can also create functions for specific actions, such as charging additional fees or checkout validations.

Wix Features

• Unify messages from Facebook, Gmail, live chat, and other platforms in one place.
• Comprehensive SEO dashboard for auditing and tracking issues.
• Run marketing campaigns through Google ads, emails, social media, and Google Business.
• Real-time tracking and analytics of your live visitors.
• Design a business mobile app for iOS and Android.

Wix Pricing

Wix offers pricing plans beginning at £9/month. Let’s check them out below:

• Light plan costs £9/month
• Core plan costs £16/month
• Business plan costs £25/month
• Business Elite plan costs £119/month

Wix allows you to start building and publishing websites for free—it will have a wixsite.com subdomain. Once your needs increase, you can switch to one of the premium plans, which comes with a free custom domain for 1 year, additional storage, multi-cloud hosting, 24/7 customer care, and other advanced features.

Try Wix

3. Shopify

Shopify is a top-rated eCommerce platform for global and UK businesses. It strives to become an all-in-one solution for selling online, from payment gateways to email marketing services and finance management. 

Based on my hands-on testing, I can confidently say that Shopify is one of the best platforms for scaling businesses. It offers a personalised guide with a 12-step checklist to get started with your store, including the initial setup and design. 

What I liked most about Shopify is its full-fledged customisation of your online store. If I don’t find a feature, I can explore the massive app marketplace to find the right app to improve functionality. 

Also, Shopify offers around 240 pre-made website templates in various categories—arts and crafts, clothing, hardware, electronics, and more. However, only 13 of them are free to use. 

Another highlight is the Shopify checkout and payments. Shopify Payments allows you to add various payment methods, such as credit cards, PayPal, and ShopPay. I’d also pick Shopify Payments since it charges no transaction fees but a minimal credit card fee.

Furthermore, ShopPay works with Shopify payments to create an express checkout experience for customers. It offers a dedicated checkout link for customers to pay you via email, chat, social media, or the commerce site. 

Shopify Features

• Use pre-made marketing automation templates.
• Ability to use pre-set or create custom discount offers.
• Get insights into live visitors, active carts, and total sessions.
• Set up custom shipping rates based on specific locations.
• Segment your customers using pre-made templates.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify offers pricing plans starting at £19/month. Check them out in detail:

• Basic plan costs £19/month, billed yearly
• Shopify plan costs £49/month, billed yearly
• Advanced plan costs £259/month, billed yearly

You also get a 3-day free trial. Shopify’s pricing plans offer features such as competitive card rates, 24/7 chat support, localised global selling, and 10 inventory locations.

Try Shopify

4. Ecwid

Ecwid is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform with a strong presence in the eCommerce space. It differentiates itself from competitors by allowing customers to sell on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. However, you’ll need to place a few lines of HTML code on an existing website or social media.

Like Wix, the onboarding starts with a few questions to create a personalised dashboard. The setup guide gives a to-do checklist with the ability to set up digital storefronts, add new products, choose currencies and languages, and set up shipping.

After setup, Ecwid gives you a pre-made catalogue of products. I like its flexibility in customising every aspect of the product.

For instance, I could upload the product images from different angles, customise the weight and dimensions, and set up pricing.

Plus, you can manage the product stock and turn it off when a product is unavailable. I would have loved to see automated inventory management, but Ecwid gives you greater control over your catalogues, which compensates well.

I’m also impressed by Ecwid’s flexibility in integrating with various payment gateways and shipping providers. For instance, I could add the cash-on-delivery option or integrate the store with Lightspeed Payments, Stripe, PayPal, and Square. Ecwid gives you access to more than 120 payment processors and some payment providers in the UK.

Another standout feature is its custom landing page. Create a responsive mobile landing page and use the link to embed it on your social media channels. That’s what most small online stores do.

However, there were a few caveats, such as the limited customisation in the editor. Also, there is no blogging functionality, and the lower plans lack SEO functionalities. Still, Ecwid is a perfect choice for stores that need basic functionality and power for social selling.

Ecwid Features

• Launch automated ad campaigns on Google.
• Build a mobile app for iOS and Android.
• Create automated email campaigns for different occasions.
• Built-in reports and analytics with easy-to-use charts and graphs.
• Add product badges like ‘New’ or ‘Free Shipping. ‘

Ecwid Pricing

Ecwid offers four pricing options, starting at £25/month. Here are the plans in detail:

• Free plan
• Venture plan costs £25/month, billed yearly
• Business plan costs £45/month, billed yearly
• Unlimited plan costs £105/month, billed yearly

The pricing increases depending on the number of products, the types of goods you want to sell, and the places you want to sell to.

Try Ecwid

5. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is built on top of the WordPress ecosystem. Use the WooCommerce plugin to convert your existing WordPress website into an eCommerce site. You can also create a dedicated online store using the WooCommerce website builder and choose to host it on your preferred web hosting provider.

My experience with WooCommerce was decent, with a few initial hiccups. The platform offers vast customisation capabilities, but these customisations are fuelled by plugins and extensions.

Similar to the WordPress plugins, WooCommerce offers over 1,000 extensions to extend your store’s functionality. Plus, you get access to more than 107 pre-built themes.

However, none of these themes are free. Most WooCommerce themes cost $79-$99 annually. WooCommerce also allows you to customise your existing WordPress theme.

What I liked most about the WooCommerce was its powerful automation, powered by Automate Woo. It offers a wide range of features by building specific workflows, such as follow-up emails, abandoned cart reminders, automated SMS notifications, and more.

Overall, I’d suggest WooCommerce for the small and medium-sized businesses that need a flexible and customisable eCommerce solution, especially the ones familiar with WordPress.

WooCommerce Features

• Create a customised checkout experience with WooPayments.
• Print and manage shipping labels for USPS, UPS, and DHL.
• Create customised discount coupons and rewards to improve loyalty.
• Free Android and iOS app
• Use Jetpack to enhance site security and automate backups.

WooCommerce Pricing

WooCommerce is free to use. The costs are associated with the hosting, extensions, themes, and additional tools that you use. That said, if you already host a WordPress site with a paid theme, WooCommerce won’t cost you much.

Try WooCommerce

6. Squarespace

Like Shopify, Squarespace is a comprehensive eCommerce platform that caters to medium- and large-sized businesses. It has a vast range of website themes and eCommerce functionalities for marketing, blogging, and invoicing.

Based on my testing, SquareSpace offers an easy-to-use website editor, with my favorite feature being its pre-set styling colours. You can choose from a range of pre-set styling themes to reduce time spent on selecting colours.

I like the fact that Squarespace gives you every feature, be it the editor, marketing tools or scheduling—all in one platform. While the right side gives you designing options such as heading fonts, colours and typography, the left side has features for email campaigns, products and order management, invoicing and others.

Squarespace also impressed me with its plethora of selling tools. You can create custom merch products or sell products on Instagram and Facebook. Additionally, Squarespace connects to Google Merchant Center, allowing you to list free on Shopping Tab, Google Search, Google Images, and YouTube.

I’d also recommend Squarespace to the course builders who are willing to build, sell, and market their online courses. For instance, you can create online course content, video on demand, and a course library. Plus, the Scheduling feature allows you to schedule appointments and book courses.

Overall, Squarespace is an ideal choice if you want to sell online courses or build donation or portfolio sites.

Squarespace Features

• Create customised invoices, estimates, and proposals.
• Run automated email campaigns using pre-made templates.
• Track traffic, engagement, and sales in real-time.
• Use Square Payments to enable payments via Klarna, Apple Pay, and Clearpay.
• Create AI-powered websites using topic and context.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers plans with a starting price of $16/month. Here are all the plans it offers:

• Personal plan costs $16/month, billed yearly.
• Business plan costs $23/month, billed yearly.
• Commerce Basic plan costs $28/month, billed yearly.
• Commerce Advanced plan costs $52/month, billed yearly.

You also get a 14-day free trial with access to various features like a free website builder and marketing tools like a campaign builder, invoices, and more. Each plan includes free website templates, an invoice builder, and a free custom domain.

Try Squarespace

7. OpenCart

OpenCart is an open-source eCommerce platform best known for its customisation capabilities and wide range of eCommerce features, such as promotion/discount services, product category management, and point accumulation for loyal customers. 

I’d pick OpenCart since it offers two different software versions: on-premise and cloud. The cloud platform is hosted on ScalaHosting servers. However, the on-premise software can be downloaded through programming on the website’s server. 

During my testing, I found that uploading the programming on your server comes with a learning curve. Moreover, the installation took around 45 minutes to 1 hour.  

Apart from this, OpenCart offers an intuitive interface with all the menu items laid out on the left side of the dashboard. Its functionality is extended by a vast range of marketplace extensions. 

With over 13,000 extensions, OpenCart features various free and paid themes, payment gateways, reporting modules, languages, and more.

I also like that OpenCart offers an in-built, customisable SEO module to customise information like product name, meta tag title, or URL path.

OpenCart’s centralised dashboard gives various information under one interface, with access to widgets like total orders, sales, customers, people online, sales analytics and more.

Overall, OpenCart impressed me. Though the platform requires coding knowledge in areas such as theme customisation, it has a great feature-set. Choose OpenCart if you’re tech-savvy and require extra customisability.

OpenCart Features

• Robust integration with comments, reviews, and rating system.
• Manage multiple storefronts from one place.
• In-built affiliate system for promoting third-party products and services.
• Set up custom discounts and coupons.
• Automatic multi-currency conversions with pre-defined taxes.

OpenCart Pricing

Being open-source, OpenCart is free to download and install. Though it offers a cloud version, you’ll need to buy ScalaHosting plans. Premium themes and extensions will cost you more as well.

Try OpenCart

8. Square

Square has become one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for retailers who need an online store integrated with the POS (Point of Sale) machine. The platform offers a range of eCommerce features for item creation, order management, inventory management, and payments.

It allows multi-storefront capability and the flexibility to customise the elements of your online store. You can add new images, change header fonts, add new sections, or change existing themes. I also liked that you can preview your store on different devices.

Additionally, the website widget allows you to customise various aspects of the online store, including SEO, domains, and managing site preferences.

What stood out for me was that Square saves you from switching irrelevant tabs and lets you manage orders or add items within a single view. For example, I could add items or services, along with various information like modifier (list or text), order fulfilment, shipping type, and stock management.

Similarly, I could create a new order by entering information like payment details, product pricing, and item details.

I’m also impressed by Square’s email automation campaign builder. You can choose a pre-made template or design email campaigns using drag-and-drop elements like text, images, video, planners, and more. Additionally, you can create email campaigns using pre-made themes.

Overall, Square is an amazing eCommerce platform for small-sized online retail sellers, restaurants, event planners, and course sellers who wish to integrate the online store with their POS.

Square Features

• Set up communication via email or text, pop-ups, and messenger.
• Design and configure e-gift cards and plastic cards.
• Accept payments via Square terminal or POS.
• Built-in scheduling and time-tracking.
• Track sales summary, sales trends, payments, and purchase funnels.

Square Pricing

Square’s pricing plans start at £20/month. Here are its two paid plans:

• Plus plan costs £20/month with access to customisation features, personalised ordering and a one-year free domain.
• Premium plan costs £64/month with additional features like real-time delivery rates and lower processing fees.

There’s also a 14-day free trial with access to features like a website builder, social selling, and access to payment gateways.

Try Square

9. BigCommerce

BigCommerce partners with the UK government to digitalise medium-sized retail businesses. So, it’s a popular choice among UK businesses with its subsidised pricing plans.

The platform excels in my first testing parameter: ease of use. The interface looked similar to ShopWired and Ecwid, with all the menu elements on the left side of the dashboard. I’d also pick it for the vast range of customisation and website editing features.

For instance, I could use the drag-and-drop widget to add text, images, carousels, or a product section to the page. Similarly, BigCommerce allows you to add and customise layers of your home page.

You can also customise the checkout page, products page, and buttons with a range of colour selections.

BigCommerce offers 100 pre-made templates, 12 of which are free, and most cost between $100 and $400. During my live testing, some themes suited the industry specifics. For instance, the ‘Fashion & Jewelry’ theme had a zooming feature, while other categories didn’t.

I’ll suggest BigCommerce to businesses with global operations. It integrates with over 65 payment gateways with access to 140+ currencies. Moreover, I could set up multiple payment gateways with one click, including digital wallets, Fastlane by PayPal, Stripe, and Square.

BigCommerce Features

• View customer reviews and ratings using a single interface.
• Create custom scripts to use on the website.
• Access to 100+ pre-built storefront templates.
• Rule-based promotion and coupon builder.
• Create multiple storefronts and connect with Amazon, eBay, and other channels.

BigCommerce Pricing

BigCommerce’s pricing plans start at $29 per month. Check out its plans below:

• Standard plan costs $29 per month, billed yearly
• Plus plan costs $79 per month, billed yearly
• Pro plan costs $299 per month, billed yearly.

There’s also a 15-day free trial with access to various eCommerce features.

Try BigCommerce

Other Top eCommerce Platforms for UK Small Business

I’ve discussed the top 9 eCommerce platforms for UK small businesses in detail. But, if they don’t fit your requirements, you can check out these honourable mentions as well! 👇

Platform	Our Rating
10. Shift4Shop	4.2/5
11. Sellfy	4.2/5
12. LightSpeed	4.0/5
13. Volusion	3.9/5
14. BigCartel	3.5/5
15. Freewebstore	4.0/5
16. Adobe Commerce	4.2/5

6 Types of eCommerce Platforms

There are six types of eCommerce platforms, each differing based on their hosting servers, device types, and types of business they cater. I’ve shared each of these in detail with examples:

1. SaaS eCommerce Platforms

SaaS eCommerce platform is an eCommerce model that lets business sell their products through cloud-hosted software. SaaS companies own the software, host it on their cloud servers, and use a license-based subscription.

These no-code platforms are perfect for non-tech-savvy users. Also, the company is responsible for data safeguarding, automatic backups, and data restorations. Examples include Shopify, Square, and Wix.

2. Open-source eCommerce Platforms

Open-source eCommerce platforms provide users with full access to their source code for free. This allows them to customise and modify the platforms as needed. It gives a greater control over the software features and use.

However, open-source platforms are most suitable for users who are familiar with coding. A couple of examples of this type of platform are OpenCart and WooCommerce.

3. Headless eCommerce Platforms

Headless eCommerce platforms separate the front-end presentation layer from the back-end commerce functionality. So, changes on the front end won’t affect the back end. The platform offers vast flexibility using APIs. Examples include ContentStack and Directus.

4. B2B eCommerce Platforms

B2B eCommerce platforms enable businesses to buy and sell products or services online in bulk and facilitate the transactions between wholesalers, manufacturers, and retailers.

Their most significant features include bulk pricing, customised catalogues, and automated order processing. For instance, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce are renowned B2B eCommerce platforms.

5. Marketplace eCommerce Platforms

Marketplace eCommerce platforms act as an intermediary between the buyer and seller or vendors. Vendors can list their items for free or for a small fee.

While the marketplace owner is responsible for marketing the product, vendors are responsible for shipping and fulfilment. Examples are Fiverr and Gumroad.

6. Mobile Commerce (mCommerce) Platforms

Mobile commerce or mCommerce platform enables users to access their online shopping store through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

These platforms are standalone mobile apps with various features, such as a shopping catalogue with categories, shipping, and payment. Some examples of this type of platform are eBay and Facebook Marketplace.