E-commerce platforms

An e-commerce platform hosts an online store: product pages, a cart and checkout, payments, shipping and taxes, orders and customers, often with in-person selling and listings on Google, Meta or marketplaces from the same catalog. Small merchants, makers, retailers and restaurants use them to sell online without running their own servers. They differ in what the monthly plan includes, how card processing is priced and whether the platform takes a fee on top, which plan carries staff accounts and abandoned cart emails, and how easily you can take your data with you.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, payments, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need and the card rates have published prices, whether there is a month-to-month price and a stated fee for using another payment provider, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan that takes real orders, and whether it allows a custom domain and enough products; otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Monthly cost, $10K in sales: the monthly cost for a US store selling $10,000 a month online in 200 orders, with 300 products and 2 staff accounts, on the cheapest plan with a custom domain and abandoned cart emails, billed annually, including card processing, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it or no plan meets it.
• Selling features: real-time carrier rates, gift cards, subscriptions, multi-currency prices, in-person selling and marketplace or social channels, and on which plan each one sits.
• Compliance and security: PCI DSS Level 1, the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, a GDPR DPA, two-factor login for staff, an activity log and single sign-on.
• Data access and exit: CSV export of products, orders and customers, an API with webhooks, how long data is kept after you leave, and domain transfer or refunds.

How fast a store loads and how much it sells depend on the theme, the catalog and the merchant, not only the platform, so we do not score them. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.