Best sites to sell online: A brief overview

eCommerce marketplace business model

This is a place where multiple sellers can list their products for sale. That means that all virtual stores are hosted on a single website and you compete with other sellers who may sell similar items to yours.

Usually, this type of selling gives you less control over your store’s appearance, content, branding, and the information you can collect. However, it’s faster to set up and online marketplaces tend to have big amounts of free buyer traffic, as they’re well-known.

Difference between eCommerce platform and marketplace

Here is a thorough comparison between the platform and marketplace models, including all the main features from setup and customization to commissions and integrations.

1. Etsy

• Easy and straightforward setup
• No hosting fees
• Huge traffic to draw from 
• Beginner-friendly

Pros. Etsy is the ultimate place to sell products online, especially for beginners. Set up your store completely free of charge in only a couple of minutes by creating a profile, adding products and their information. 

Another Etsy plus is a large amount of traffic drawn simply by Etsy’s popularity. It’s an online marketplace where customers find your products, so you don’t have to promote your own brand that much. Join this beginner-friendly platform and chime in on free traffic with a very simple and easy approach.

Cons. Etsy has various transaction fees that can eventually leave an impact on your business. From $0.20 listing fees, a 5% transaction fee on items you sell through Etsy, to a standard 3% + $0.25 payment processing fee. Another con is the strict rules about what you can sell through the marketplace. Only handmade goods, craft supplies, and vintage items are allowed.

Start your own Etsy shop and take advantage of their popularity, power tools, services, support, and beginner-friendly costs. Manage, promote, and grow your business with a helpful hand and guidance along the way by being a part of a worldwide community. 

Starting a business on Etsy is the best way to enter the world of sales with a low-risk investment approach. No need to build a website or deal with domain and hosting fees. Set up a professional shop in just a couple of minutes and list your products online for a small symbolic fee. Etsy truly is the perfect place to start.

2. Shopify

• Subscription plans for businesses of various scales
• Great functionality
• Personalization
• Variety of useful integrations for dropshipping

Pros. Shopify is extremely scalable. It is built for all types of stores – big brands and small businesses. Another major pro from their end is the no-restrictions policy when it comes to selling products. Sell an unlimited amount of physical goods and services, as well as digital items. There are no rules for the product types you can sell on Shopify. 

Cons. Customers have to search for your online business specifically, so your traffic solely depends on you, the brand, and your marketing skills. Another con can be the add-ons. While there are various Shopify apps that you can use to customize and advance your store in a good way, adding apps can make the monthly costs too high for beginners and small-scale sellers.

3. eBay

• Allows to sell multiple categories of products (used, etc.)
• Generalized accessibility
• Huge pre-existing traffic especially in the US and UK
• Option to sell in bulk and reselling/flipping items
• Easy to set up

Pros. One of the biggest pros eBay has is the ability to sell anything, new and used. From books, crafts, clothing, electronics to car parts and more. The options are endless. Selling products online can be tricky, but with eBay, the process is simple and easy. Sell locally or worldwide with affordable prices for your products. eBay’s popularity will attract the traffic for you. No need to spend much on marketing tools and campaigns. 

Cons. Selling fees are one of the main reasons people opt out from selling on this online marketplace. If you have low profit margins, you might not benefit from selling things online, especially on items with lots of competition. However, to avoid confusion and highlight hidden fees, eBay even has a fee calculator and help site that will advise and guide you through the processes. The competition is fierce, as eBay has millions of active users. If you want to successfully sell products online, come up with better deals or prices to stand out amongst the others.

4. PrestaShop

• Open-sourced
• Needs technical know-how to set up
• Extensive integration across the board
• Active community for troubleshooting
• Slow to load and costly 
• Limited integrations with third-party marketing tools

Pros. This open-source software is quite easy to use for any merchant with minimal technical knowledge. A large amount of free plugins helps you set up a great basic shop for online selling. PrestaShop is very flexible when it comes to customization, making it easy to add, remove or personalize a page to your liking. Another great feature is localization. PrestaShop supports multiple currencies and languages, allowing you to easily sell items online around the world.

Cons. PrestaShop designs are most suitable for low-budget stores, as they lack a professional touch. The biggest and most important con is the lack of an official support team. There are no PrestaShop troubleshooting experts or support channels. However, the community comes together and helps out each other by listing problems and solutions on various support pages.

5. BigCommerce

• Small-to-medium size business
• Personalizable with seven free themes
• $145 to $243 per month for more themes
• $29.99 per month starter pack
• Fully hosted website

Pros. Receive your own built-in blog with many advanced features and free themes that other platforms only offer for premium plans. BigCommerce does not apply any transaction fees, compared to other eCommerce platforms, even if you use a third-party payment gateway. Another major pro is the real-time shipping costs and calculations, which are available on any plan, not just premium.

Cons. Annual online sales are limited. If you exceed them, you have to upgrade to a bigger and more expensive monthly plan. Also, compared to competitors, the abandoned shopping cart recovery feature is quite expensive. And while the free themes are a bonus, they tend to be quite similar, and the number of included typefaces is very limited.

6. Wix eCommerce

• Great for businesses of all sizes
• Great integration
• Built-in search engine optimization (SEO)
• On-page support
• Omnichannel Sales
• Upselling features 
• Marketing automations
• Fully customizable storefront

Pros: Great site speed and a massive template collection are only some of the pros Wix has. Templates provide a hassle-free approach for those who don’t know how to or don’t want to build their own online store from scratch, and Wix is very generous with them. Another great feature is the built-in SEO management. Tell Wix about your own store and main focuses by filling in keyword tags, and the platform will make sure your online store is found on Google. The easy setup, use, and great support team are what make this platform so popular. 

Cons: Nothing in life is completely free, there’s always a catch. If you choose to stay on the free Wix plan, your site is forced to display Wix branding. Furthermore, if you wish to track sales for each item sold, which item sells, which doesn’t and other measures, it will cost you. Tracking and analytics require a paid plan. And lastly, one of the biggest Wix cons is the fact that your site isn’t transferable. If you sign up for Wix, they have you for life.

7. WooCommerce

• WordPress is an open-source platform
• Free but merchant needs to cover hosting costs
• Great support
• Highly Customizable
• WordPress Knowledge Needed
• Not newbie-friendly, catered towards advanced sellers & coders

Pros. WooCommerce is one of the best online selling platforms for advanced sellers, without serving only a specific niche market. Business owners can sell all kinds of products, from physical and downloadable items to invites to training sessions or webinars. Another major pro is customization. WooCommerce helps merchants create a store specific to their type of products. It has a large number of free plugins, as well as themes that you can customize from the header to the smallest detail.

Cons. One of the biggest cons is the WordPress-specific build. WooCommerce cannot be used in sites that are not hosted by WordPress. This can be a problem for established businesses, as they would need to re-make their entire website in order to use WooCommerce. Another major con is the expenses. While WooCommerce is free to download and install, some extensions require a service fee.

8. Squarespace

• Unlimited number of products
• User-friendly
• 100+ templates
• All-in-one platform
• Excellent support

Pros. One of the biggest pros for Squarespace is their 100+ templates, optimized for tablets, desktops, and mobile devices. They allow users to build relevant, professional, and easy-to-customize pages, bringing their ideas to life.

Squarespace is a user-friendly all-in-one platform, leaving merchants worry-free of additional plugins, apps, or widgets. Website analytics reduce the number of troubleshooting issues and makes this platform easy to use even for beginners.

One of the most important pros for Squarespace is its amazing support team and system. The platform offers 24/7 customer support via email and chat, leaving no merchant in a bind when it comes to their business.

Cons. Since Squarespace is an all-in-one platform, it doesn’t play well with third-party plugins, apps, or extensions. Merchants have less control over their store, since any features used in the process must be owned by Squarespace.

Another major con is the overall lack of advanced SEO and marketing tools. SEO is limited to basic meta description and title, and all you have is a ‘share’ button. Keywords and separate segments are not an option, making it harder for people to find your website.

9. Printify API

• Needs coding experience
• Great choice if you have an existing community or custom platform
• Great for scaling & monetizing through an existing audience
• A great solution for individual merchants/large businesses with custom needs

For eCommerce platform owners:

Allows hundreds of thousands of merchants to sell on your custom platform

For individual merchants:

Allows you to connect Printify to your custom eCommerce store or application

Whether you use your own product creator or capture user-generated designs, with the Printify API, you can easily place those images on any products from our catalog, list them online, and fulfill. 

If you don’t use Shopify, Etsy, BigCommerce, or any other eCommerce platform and marketplace, the Printify API allows you to connect your own custom store with the same benefits of automation that our existing integrations do.

10. TikTok Shop

• Active user base providing a massive new audience
• Seamless shopping experience for users
• Free analytics tools for monitoring your store

Pros. You don’t need a fan base or a certain amount of following to set up a store on TikTok Shop. The platform provides a vast user base for you to chime into. And the seamless shopping experience allows users to easily find, check, and buy your products without leaving the app.

Cons. It might be a bit time-consuming to create content that promotes your products. TikTok only allows video-format promotions, so you’ll need to be extra creative to make your goods appeal to others.

11. Printify Pop-Up store

• Instant store page set up with a unique shareable link
• No website building or domain hosting necessary
• Great option for independent creators with an existing community
• Printify manages all customer support

Pros. This setup is by far the easiest gateway to bring your products to an audience for one-time events or as a quick merch line. Pop-up stores skip the entire eCommerce development process, offering you to effortlessly produce and sell Printify products without relying on third-party sales channels.

Printify automatically hosts a pop-up store domain under your unique URL. The store can be shared across your personal media accounts.

Cons. A pop-up store is not a replacement for eCommerce sales channels. Apart from the Google Analytics and Meta Pixel setup functionality, the page lacks integrated marketing or platform management plug-ins and will rely exclusively on your own ability to build an audience for sales.