By Lewis Smith - Dropship Unlocked

Choosing which e-commerce platform to build your dropshipping business on if you are operating in the UK market can be a very important decision.

There are many viable platforms in the marketplace and weighing up the pros and cons of each e-commerce system can be a daunting and confusing task. 

So here are our top 5 recommendations for where to build your e-commerce store as a UK business owner:

5th Place: Wix Stores

Wix is a very cheap fully hosted option and offers plans starting from £11 per month. Wix Stores makes it very easy to get a great looking store live in a short timeframe.

They have an extensive App store, meaning it’s easy to integrate with many essential e-commerce tools.

The low price tag does come with its drawbacks though and such as an unsightly advertising badge which appears during the free trial.

Additionally, the website templates can’t be easily changed once you have your store set up so if you decide to change the look of your store later, it will cause problems.

4th Place: Woocommerce

WooCommerce is a free plugin which can be added to a Wordpress site. It’s free initially, but if you want access to the more advanced features, you will need to pay (plans start at £37 per month).

With WooCommerce you’ll have a great amount of control over your SEO settings which is definitely a pro.

However, being just a Wordpress plugin means that you will be stuck with having to go the self-hosted route, which leaves your business vulnerable to security issues as well as Wordpress and Woocommerce bugs.

3rd Place: Magento

Magento is a very widely adopted e-commerce solution. It’s definitely suited to the more advanced e-commerce users.

It offers a great level of control over SEO optimisation as well as the flexibility to be highly customised. It also has a wide range of different theme options which are also competitively priced.

However, with such advanced features, it requires extensive developer skills to be able to achieve the most from this platform.

The less accessible interface can certainly make it overwhelming to beginners but it does have some very powerful features.

2nd Place: BigCommerce

In at number 2 is BigCommerce which offers a monthly pricing plan starting at $29.95 per month for the standard plan.

They have a huge range of website themes available to choose from and many of these are very highly optimised for mobile which is extremely important in today’s environment due to the ever-increasing number of mobile online shoppers.

However, BigCommerce places an annual limit on merchants sales, which if you exceed, will mean you are forced to upgrade to their next pricing plan.

First Place: Shopify

Without a doubt, for anyone looking to start a dropshipping business in the UK, the best e-commerce platform out there is Shopify.

Shopify is an all in one solution, so unlike WooCommerce, this means that the entire store and hosting are all managed by Shopify themselves, taking all the stress out of managing a store for the business owner.

There are now over 500,000 active Shopify stores live and the company is growing at a rapid pace.

Online stores built on the Shopify platform are fully customisable, highly optimised out of the box and they even have their own payment gateway built-in, called Shopify Payments, which is powered by Stripe.

The level of customer support which Shopify offer is second to none. They offer 24/7 phone, live chat and email support which gives first-time business owners the ultimate peace of mind.

Shopify offers a 14-day free trial to get started and their basic plan is very reasonable, starting at just $29 per month.