The Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Businesses in Canada

Best for SEO and marketing

Shooting up from 4.3/5 to 4.7/5 in our most recent research, Wix came out on top. A solid all-rounder, it boasts first-rate website features including SEO analysis, slick marketing options and handy widget integration.

As mentioned in our Wix review, the provider scored second highest for sales-specific features in the research we conducted, beaten only by BigCommerce, which has superior reporting tools. It does what you’d expect it to: offers multiple sales types as well as check-out and order status. Yet it performs these basics to a super high standard – and includes nice extras such as abandoned cart recovery and diverse shipping options. Taking these into account, it’s no wonder Wix scored a perfect 5/5 in our feature vs price testing – matched only by Squarespace among all the platforms we reviewed.

Comprehensive creative tools let you craft your online shop exactly how you want to. Wix’s impressive customer support and user-friendly interface means we rate it as the gold standard in launching small businesses online. That said, some test users found the editor page cluttered at times.

No platform is perfect, and Wix is less capable of handling complex inventory than Shopify. It also scored 0/5 for storage space. But it will handle the sales volume you’d expect of most young companies.

Wix is our top choice for small businesses looking to get seen online.

Best for ease of use

What impressed us most in our second round of testing was Squarespace’s improvements on user experience, shooting up from a 3.4 to a 4.2/5 ease of use score. It’s now the easiest platform to build an online store with. Overall, it’s a great choice for tech beginners looking for a straightforward online store setup.

Stylish, ready-made templates mean you don’t need weeks to make a beautiful Squarespace store. This platform offers incredible value for money, supporting the sales of physical, digital, and service-based products. We’re impressed with its plentiful visual marketing plug-ins, too – something we praised in our Squarespace review.

Squarespace performed the weakest out of our top six in terms of multichannel sales – Instagram is your only external platform option. Stock monitoring capabilities were fairly limited as well, so don’t expect advanced visibility into your product levels.

Nevertheless, Squarespace supports a fair number of payment processors, and test users found the build experience intuitive. Customer support, however, was on the weaker side. Squarespace scored 3.5/5 here, which still isn’t too bad, but its competitors are quicker to assist their new users.

Squarespace is our pick for easily creating your first online store.

Best for value for money

Square Online is a solid option for setting up a free simple online store. For the money-conscious, it’s definitely the one to watch.

The ability to sell for free is a big draw. Instead, you pay 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on most plans, which seems a bit steep when you consider Squarespace, BigCommerce and Wix have no fees at all. Yet the high quality of features and relatively low average pricing plan make Square Online the best value for money platform we tested, scoring 4.6/5 in that category.

It’s obviously also a payments company, so your ecommerce account can give you access to Square Online POS products as well as business loans and credit cards – a boon for small businesses looking for cashflow solutions.

Surprisingly, there are no marketplace integration options, so you can’t cross-sell on eBay or Google like you can on most other platforms. Like with Squarespace, your only additional channel choice is Instagram.

Overall, Square Online is a no-frills approach to selling online. For that reason, it turned out to be pretty easy to use (third highest overall). It covers the basics very well, but doesn’t go much further than that.

Square Online is the best value for money platform for small businesses.

Best for range of sales features

Shopify is one of the most comprehensive ecommerce platforms on the market, offering more sales features than any other platform we tested. What’s more, you can easily sell across social media platforms – no one else enables sales through more channels.

In truth, Shopify may be better suited to larger online stores with more complex inventories – it’s a powerful solution that might be overkill or too expensive for small companies, with price plans starting from CAD$7 per month. It also enforces transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments – two things which may dent profits in your business’ early stages.

That said, Shopify’s backend is really easy to navigate. Test users scored Shopify a strong 5/5 in overall user experience. This puts it in a better position than platforms such as Woocommerce (as discussed in-depth in our comparison between the two), so you can’t go too far wrong with this one (even if it will cost you a fair bit).

Shopify has a plethora of mighty sales features for your online store.

Best for multichannel

For businesses with a diverse customer base, BigCommerce has you covered. You can pull in sales from all directions with its excellent multichannel integration: Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Walmart and more. While Shopify has more social media integrations, BigCommerce takes the crown on sales-specific platforms.

Its strengths lie in sales functions including shipping options, accounting integration and inventory management, scoring a perfect 5/5 in each of these areas. BigCommerce is perfect for online clothing stores as it offers the widest range of product filters as well as the option for headless commerce.

BigCommerce also provides useful SEO prompts when you add products, which is helpful for new stores without an established online presence. What’s more, there are zero transaction fees (unlike with Shopify) so revenue can stay strong.

What about the negatives? BigCommerce isn’t the best value for money; it has the highest base price of any of our platforms. For the extra price, there’s no opportunity to make Facebook ads or Instagram stories, unlike with Wix and Squarespace.

In addition, BigCommerce is still the least user-friendly platform we’ve tested (scoring 3.3/5 for ease of use). Nevertheless, BigCommerce is brilliant at helping you to manage your entire business processes, not just sell products.

BigCommerce can help a small store master its inventory in no time.

Best for speedy set up

Another fuss-free online store creator, GoDaddy is dependable but not awe-inspiring. It’s the only platform not to have improved on its overall score (3.9), achieving exactly the same rating as it did in our last round of research. It does, however, have a lower transaction fee (2.3% + 30¢) than Shopify or Square Online.

GoDaddy uses an ADI (artificial design intelligence) approach – first asking you a few questions, then generating a new website within minutes. Simply put, GoDaddy is the best ecommerce platform for small businesses extremely tight on time.

It offers some neat marketing tools such as email campaigns and social media integrations, so it will do more than the absolute minimum (but not a whole lot more). You can also sell through Google, eBay, Amazon, Etsy and Walmart – a wider selection of options than Squarespace or Square Online provide.

Still, it has to be said that the platform’s website features lack the quality found in competitor products, as we pointed out in our GoDaddy review.

GoDaddy can build an attractive ecommerce store for you within minutes.