Which E-Commerce Platform Should You Pick Solo or in a Small Team, to Sell Physical Products?

1. Do you already have a site, or are you starting from zero? An existing WordPress site changes the answer.
2. How much time do you want to spend on the technical side? None, or you're willing to tinker a bit to pay less.
3. Will your catalog stay simple, or grow fast? Ten products don't carry the same constraints as two hundred.
4. What's your real monthly budget ceiling, not the one displayed in large type on the homepage: transaction fees and paid apps almost always add to the base subscription.

Shopify remains the most widely used platform for launching a store without managing the infrastructure of a commerce site yourself: built-in payments, inventory management, shipping, ready-made themes. The Basic plan is $29/month billed annually, with higher tiers (Grow at $79/month, Advanced at $299/month) that climb fast if the catalog or the team grows. The real hidden cost isn't the base subscription: it's the transaction fees and the paid apps from the ecosystem that add up as soon as a native feature is missing.

Choose Shopify if you're starting from zero, want an app ecosystem that covers nearly everything, and are fine paying a dedicated subscription on top of your existing site.

WooCommerce turns an existing WordPress site into a full store: product pages, cart, checkout, over 140 regional payment gateways, automatic tax calculation. The plugin itself is free and serves a small project as well as a high-volume store. The real cost sits elsewhere: separate WordPress hosting, a payment gateway, and most often one or more paid extensions from the Woo Marketplace for subscriptions or advanced shipping.

Choose WooCommerce if you already run a WordPress site and would rather own your store than rent it on a hosted platform, even if it means assembling the pieces yourself.

Wix covers e-commerce, booking, basic CRM, and email marketing in a single platform, drivable through drag-and-drop or an AI generator built from a prompt. The first paid plan (Light) starts at $17.77/month, with tiers climbing up to $159.77/month (Business Elite) depending on storage and the number of collaborators. The free plan keeps a Wix subdomain and doesn't allow a custom domain name.

Choose Wix if you're solo, don't want to assemble anything yourself, and the showcase site and the store need to live in the same place from day one.

Squarespace combines a visual editor, managed hosting, SEO, and product sales in a single subscription, starting at $19/month billed annually on the Basic plan, with a 14-day trial and no permanent free plan. The switch makes sense when the platform replaces several steps you currently manage separately (site, hosting, store); otherwise, a lighter solution is enough.

Atelier Atypique, a French brand of cigar accessories and upscale gift items, illustrates this default choice: a store built on Shopify, a catalog segmented into clear collections rather than a loose product list, and one differentiating argument pushed everywhere (free laser engraving on their leather case collection, which also opens a B2B offer for corporate gifts). None of this requires a technical team: the platform settled the infrastructure question in a single decision, which left time to polish the catalog and the differentiating argument instead of tinkering with a site.

The platform doesn't make the product. The four options above all answer the technical question correctly; what separates a store that works from one that stalls is catalog clarity and one differentiating argument pushed everywhere, not the number of features checked off in a comparison table.