探花精选

Maybe, like me, you want to start an online store in 2025. But maybe, unlike me, you don’t want to spend hours trying to figure out how to build an ecommerce website from scratch.

Lucky for you, going down the research rabbit hole is kind of my specialty. So, I decided to walk you through exactly how to build an ecommerce site by doing it myself.

For this article, I tried Shopify, Wix, and 探花精选 to see the strengths and weaknesses of each. Read on to see the results of my experiments. I’ll also share insights from my previous experience running an online store on WordPress and WooCommerce.

Table of Contents

• Building a High-Powered Ecommerce Website in 2025
• How to Build an Ecommerce Website from Scratch
• How to Build an Ecommerce Website from Scratch: FAQs
• My Closing Thoughts on How to Build an Ecommerce Website From Scratch

Building a High-Powered Ecommerce Website in 2025

No, you’re not too late to the game — ecommerce is still a booming industry. In 2025, global ecommerce sales are expected to reach a whopping , on the heels of a stellar previous year. Cyber Monday 2024 hit a record high with in online sales in one day.

So, in a saturated market, how can you stand out? I’ve noticed three rising tools that you can use to get ahead of the game.

AI website builders can help you build an ecommerce site faster than ever.

Take a look at the three side-by-side ecommerce websites I built for this article. Can you spot the one(s) made by AI?

If you guessed B and C, you’re right! B was made with the help of Shopify AI, and I added some of my own tweaks, including two stock images and three product listings under “Featured Products.”

C was made entirely by Wix AI. I didn’t tweak any of it. Wild, right?

Website A was made using a template from 探花精选. I changed some of the colors and added a logo made by .

In November 2024, I tested out Wix’s AI builder for an article about blog hosting sites and wasn’t happy with the results. But, GenAI is improving at a rapid rate, so I decided to take it for another spin in January 2025 to see how it’s changed.

探花精选's Free Website Builder

Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.

• Build a website without any coding skills.
• Pre-built themes and templates.
• Built-in marketing tools and features.
• And more!

Wix’s AI builder began by asking me a few questions, such as the name of my ecommerce site and its target audience. For demonstration purposes, I came up with a hypothetical business: a sustainable wood furniture ecommerce website by the name of “The Furn Collective.”

Then, I clicked “Generate Site” and waited for its AI to create a custom site for me.

It took about 40 seconds, which was faster than the last time I used Wix’s AI builder. I was also much happier with the results. The website it generated contained text and images very relevant to my hypothetical sustainable wood furniture business.

Look at the hyper-specific product images it created for me!

While I was impressed by the automated product listings, this is a classic case of how AI is a great tool but a poor substitute.

Even when Wix’s AI generated entire product listings with images of wood furniture and descriptions, there’s no way for the AI to know what my products look like.

So while these were great placeholders and provided a good feel of what my completed site might look like, I still need to go in and upload actual product photos and write accurate descriptions.

Additionally, the Wix AI builder asked me a lot about my business, but it didn’t ask me about my design preferences. So there was no way for it to know if I like full-screen hero images or parallax scrolling.

For design preferences, I’d rather scroll through ready-made website templates and choose based on my liking.

But if you’re looking to launch an ecommerce website fast, pretty much nothing can beat an AI builder.

The takeaway: AI website builders aren’t perfect – but they’re blazingly fast. For website owners pressed for time, they can build a usable site in seconds. Then, you can tweak and customize it to your liking.

Try .

SMS marketing is the new email marketing.

When SMS marketing started cropping up a few years ago, I treated it like I would a random guy at the bar asking for my number: hesitantly handing over a number from my burner Google Voice account in the hopes I’d be left alone.

Now, I find that I’m looking forward to these marketing texts. Because of incentivized opt-ins, I expect the opportunity to give my number when I’m shopping online.

For instance, when I was shopping for high-visibility running gear on the website, I jumped at the opportunity to provide my email address and phone number to gain some discounts.

Noxgear uses a format that I’ve found is extremely popular among ecommerce websites lately. It consists of three parts:

When you first enter the website, a popup offers a discount and asks for your email address in return.

After you enter your email address, a second form asks for your phone number and promises future discounts/news/promos. This is the brand’s way of ensuring you opt into its SMS marketing.

After SMS marketing opt-in, the brand then sends you text messages based on your shopping preferences.

The takeaway: It’s no longer enough to send promotions to your customers’ inboxes. Ecommerce businesses that want to skyrocket their revenue will need to enhance their email marketing efforts with personalized text messages.

AI chat agents will increasingly replace the search box.

This 2025 ecommerce prediction comes from , host of podcast. He told , “We could soon see the end of traditional search boxes on retail platforms. Instead, we'll be interacting with conversational AI agents.”

This rings true for me. changed how I research Amazon products. Before, I would pore over the listing’s details and then use the search bar to find answers in the customer reviews. Now, it’s as easy as asking Rufus to find that information for me.

When I was looking for a walking pad for my standing desk, finding specific details such as belt width in the product descriptions became tedious. Then I discovered that Rufus could do it much faster.

From then on, all I had to do was ask Rufus to find that information for me in each listing, masking for a quick way to compare belt width across products.

The takeaway: AI chatbots have come a long way since they were first introduced. They’re smarter, and easier than ever to build. In 2025, winning ecommerce businesses will take advantage of AI agents to provide fast customer support. Try .

Creating a website to sell products is a major goal for many aspiring entrepreneurs, but getting started is often the hardest part. To help you conquer that hurdle, I’ll show you an eight-step process for building an ecommerce website from scratch.

Let’s define what I mean by “from scratch.” I’m using that term to mean that you’re starting with no knowledge of building an ecommerce website and no coding skills.

探花精选's Free Website Builder

Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.

• Build a website without any coding skills.
• Pre-built themes and templates.
• Built-in marketing tools and features.
• And more!

I do not mean that you will be writing the code yourself. After all, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Why code from scratch when there are already so many templates out there built by experts?

Let me walk you through the process now, with screenshots from my own experience.

1. Pick an ecommerce platform.

An ecommerce platform differs from a regular website or blogging platform in that it has features to enable visitors to complete purchases directly on your site. These ecommerce features include:

• Product listings
• Different product variations
• Shopping carts
• Payment methods
• Shipping options
• Order tracking
• Inventory management

An ecommerce website builder can save you tons of time and money by cutting out the need to hire a developer.

Here are some popular choices, along with my recommendations and guidance:

Self-hosted with WooCommerce

Best for: Businesses already on WordPress

Choosing self-hosted WordPress for ecommerce will be the most challenging because it requires the most steps, and then you have to connect those separate parts.

With this option, you’ve got the following pieces:

• WordPress, the CMS
• Web host, the place where your website is stored (which you need to connect to the WordPress CMS)
• WooCommerce, the plugin that enables ecommerce features on the WordPress CMS
• Domain registrar, where you buy a domain name (which you need to connect to the WordPress CMS)

And then, you’ve got to connect all those parts. I’ve done it many, many times as a non-developer.

In fact, my first ecommerce venture was a self-hosted WordPress site, and I made a few sales that way. But just know that if you’re completely new to it, it will take more effort.

Best for: Beginners who want to use WordPress but don’t want the complexity of self-hosting

If you really want to stick with WordPress as your CMS but don’t want as much complexity as a self-hosted solution, try WordPress.com. It’s an all-in-one website builder/host/CMS/domain registrar. You still need to use WooCommerce to make it ecommerce-ready.

Best for: Optimizing business growth with unified customer data

While and a leading customer platform, it’s not an ecommerce platform.

However, many successful ecommerce businesses have 探花精选-hosted marketing websites that integrate with Shopify to create an online store with ecommerce features like carts and order tracking. Plus, they get unified customer data that they can use to personalize experiences through 探花精选. Just to power its online presence.

Best for: Robust ecommerce capabilities

When it comes to online store creation, Shopify lets you do it all: your web host, e-commerce features, and domain registrar are all in a centralized dashboard. It’s the

However, you might find Shopify limiting when it comes to marketing. Thankfully, you can use the marketing efforts.

Best for: Building an ecommerce site fast with AI

Wix is the Its AI website builder is getting better and better and is extremely fast. For those pressed for time, Wix is a great place to start.

Because it’s so popular, I chose Shopify to walk you through the steps of how to build an ecommerce website from scratch. So, let’s continue to step two.

2. Choose a website template.

This step alone will save you weeks of ecommerce website development. A website theme (or template) is a prebuilt website layout that controls how the website looks and functions. It’s basically a website straight “out of the box.”

Shopify offers a free three-day trial. The onboarding process began by asking me a few questions about my goals, such as where and what I’d like to sell.

Shopify’s signup process does ask you to choose a plan, but I just clicked “Skip, I’ll decide later,” and it let me continue to the dashboard.

This is where things got interesting. This wasn’t advertised anywhere when I signed up, but once I entered my dashboard, it appears that Shopify has an AI builder right in the dashboard.

It asked me to describe my business, and it let me click “Generate custom themes.”

So, I typed, “Sustainable wooden furniture.”

The resulting generated themes did not appear to be publicly available templates. (I Googled their names, and I couldn’t find them anywhere.)

On top of that, these themes were automatically populated with personalized text and images that were directly related to my business (sustainable wood furniture).

For example, the hero image was prepopulated with a photo of a wood dining table, and the site had copy such as “Eco-conscious designs” and “Where sustainability meets style.”

Based on all of this, I think these themes were generated by AI.

Now, here’s why I say that’s interesting. When I signed up for another Shopify account with a completely different email address, the “Design your store in seconds” option was not available! It was replaced with “Customize your online store,” and when I clicked “Customize theme,” it merely let me select from premade themes.

So, it seems that Shopify is still experimenting with its AI website builder and is perhaps rolling it out to some accounts, but not all at the moment.

I decided to stick with one of the AI-generated themes (it looked great!). My only problem? I didn’t have any business branding yet because I just made up this furniture store concept for this post.

That brings us to step three: creating a brand identity.

探花精选's Free Website Builder

Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.

• Build a website without any coding skills.
• Pre-built themes and templates.
• Built-in marketing tools and features.
• And more!

3. Create a basic brand identity.

Website templates are great — I use them all the time! But you can’t just stop there. You need to customize your template to match your business branding.

But what if you don’t have any branding? Just use .I was able to whip up a brand identity in about two minutes.

First, you need to provide some basic information about your business.

Then, the brand kit generator will provide you with some icons to choose from. Pick your favorite.

From there, it’ll prompt you to choose a font that best represents your brand.

You also get to choose your brand’s primary color.

In step five, choose the logo that you like best.

And finally, make any last tweaks to your custom brand kit, including icon, color, and font.

You can then download your finalized brand kit. To find it in your Downloads folder, look for “探花精选 Brand Kit.”

Hold onto these files. You’ll need them in the next step.

4. Customize your template settings.

Now that you’ve got your brand kit, it’s time to apply it to your ecommerce website template.

In Shopify, I clicked “Customize” to change the settings of the template it generated for me.

The first place I always start is the logo — it’s the face of your brand!

All I had to do was navigate to Logo on the left menu and select Add images.

From there, I navigated to the 探花精选 Brand Kit folder > PNG. Because my theme has a dark background where the logo goes, I made sure to select the “main-logo-white-transparent.png” file.

Here’s what my logo looks like on my Shopify theme.

Next, I customized some colors based on my generated color palette. To find the hex color codes for your brand colors, go to the folder “探花精选 Brand Kit,” then open the color.txt file.

You can then copy-paste the codes into your ecommerce platform.

Here’s what my ecommerce homepage looks like so far:

Pro tip: Don’t forget to make your ecommerce website accessible. This includes having an accessibility policy linked to on your site and adding alt text to images.

5. Create product pages.

Now, I want to create my product pages so I can start selling. To do this, I went to Products and clicked Add product.

When I added my product, I saw another opportunity to use Shopify AI to generate my product descriptions, so I decided to give it a try. All I had to do was type in some features and keywords.

It also let me select the tone.

From there, I clicked “Generate” and almost instantly received a product description. I thought what it generated was pretty good!

However, I wanted to see what else the AI could do, so I asked Shopify AI to generate a “playful” description. Here’s what it made:

How fun! From there, Shopify let me configure all sorts of settings, including product image, pricing, inventory, shipping, and variants like size or color. Here’s my first product listing:

6. Set up payments.

Once you’ve got your product listings, it’s time to set up payment methods so visitors can actually buy. This is a key component of an ecommerce site, so it’s crucial to do it right. You want to ensure you set up secure payments and offer multiple payment methods.

For me, the payment setup step is where things got complicated.

In Shopify:

Shopify will prompt you to use Shopify Payments, but in reality, you have the option to use third-party providers, too. To do this, you need to click the “See all other providers” link.

There are benefits to using Shopify Payments, including faster payout, but there are more hoops to jump through. To activate Shopify Payments, you must:

• Verify your email address.
• Verify details about your business (which might require you to provide documents). Shopify will ask you questions such as whether you're running your store as an individual, registered business, or non-profit.

• Turn on two-step authentication.

If you want a simpler process, you can accept payments through PayPal. To do this, however, you need to make sure that the email address linked to your Shopify account is the same as the one linked to your PayPal account.

Otherwise, Shopify will automatically create a link inside your dashboard for you to create a new PayPal account with the email you used to sign up for Shopify. It will ask you for your personal information, what your business sells, and your monthly sales.

Pro tip: If you’re on a Shopify trial, you cannot test transactions without first selecting a paid plan. Also, you can’t “launch” your store. As long as you’re on a trial and haven’t selected a paid plan, your store is password-protected and not able to sell anything.

In 探花精选:

offers two native payment processor options: 探花精选 or Stripe.

Similar to Shopify Payments, 探花精选 has a native payments platform where you must verify your business information to get approved.

The other option is Stripe, where you simply connect your Stripe account.

Pro tip: If you use Stripe, be sure your ecommerce website contains .

Be sure to run a test transaction to ensure payments work before you launch your site.

探花精选's Free Website Builder

Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.

• Build a website without any coding skills.
• Pre-built themes and templates.
• Built-in marketing tools and features.
• And more!

7. Register your custom domain name.

Now that you’ve built your ecommerce site and set up payments, it’s time to register a domain name.

A lot of “how to build an ecommerce website” posts recommend registering a domain name first, but here’s why I put it toward the end: Unless you’re going the self-hosted WordPress route, you actually don’t need to have a custom domain to start building the site.

Also, I know from having built over a dozen sites in my lifetime that the domain name is often the biggest time suck. You’ll brainstorm 20 potential names and spend weeks agonizing over the “perfect” one.

My goal with this post is to get the ball rolling on actually building the ecommerce site so you have that big win before you have to choose a domain name.

If you use Shopify or 探花精选, they’ll both assign temporary branded domain names (e.g., abcd-123.myshopify.com). I highly recommend registering a custom domain name (e.g., thefurncollective.com). It’s much more professional, and easier for your customers to remember.

In Shopify, you can change your free branded domain name one time (e.g., thefurncollective.myshopify.com), but again, I still would rather own a custom domain name.

Shopify is also a domain registrar, which means you can register a custom domain and connect it immediately to your store, all on the Shopify dashboard. Super convenient!

Simply go to Domains and click Buy new domain to get started.

I wanted to buy “thefurncollective.com,” and as you can see, it is available for $16/year.

The downside? Registering your domain on Shopify is slightly more expensive than using a separate domain registrar and then linking it to Shopify.

Here’s what I mean: I typically buy domain names on Namecheap. I like it because it’s relatively cheap, and it includes domain privacy at no extra cost (free forever, in fact). If I purchase “thefurncollective.com” on Namecheap, it’s only $11.28 for the first year (and $14.98/year after).

Sure, it’s a small difference, but I just wanted to give you that heads-up.

Also, some experts do recommend keeping your domain registrar separate from your CMS for an added layer of security. For instance, if someone hacked your domain registrar account, they wouldn’t automatically also be able to access your CMS, and vice versa.

All you’d need to do is update your domain registrar’s DNS records to point your domain to Shopify (I promise it’s not as scary as it sounds):

8. Set up your customer service and marketing.

Telling you how to build an ecommerce website from scratch without emphasizing the importance of growing your ecommerce business seems silly.

Once your site is live, you need to keep the business alive through solid customer support and personalized marketing efforts.

Back when I helped manage a Shopify account for a photography gear client in 2016, Shopify didn’t have a suite of marketing tools like . We were separately managing our email marketing through MailChimp, so it was very disjointed.

In 2019, Shopify launched , bringing email marketing right into the Shopify platform. That’s a great first step!

However, it still doesn’t unify all of your customer data, as Shopify is not a CRM. That means it can be tougher to track customer interactions and use that to determine how you’ll send personalized marketing messages.

Pro tip: To get the best of both worlds, . 探花精选 is a leading CRM with a Shopify integration that syncs data between the two platforms and lets you deliver more personalized marketing.

It was incredibly easy for me to connect the two. I’ll show you how.

Step 1: Log into your 探花精选 account, type “Shopify” in the search bar, and click the first result.

Step 2: From there, click “Install app.”

Step 3: Click “Next.”

Step 4: Type your Shopify domain in the box and click “Connect to Shopify Data sync.”

Step 5: Click “Install.”

Step 6: Voila! Now you can sync data between your 探花精选 and Shopify accounts.

How to Build an Ecommerce Website from Scratch: FAQs

Is it hard to build an ecommerce website?

Thanks to like Shopify and 探花精选, the answer is no. I will say that building an ecommerce website is more complex than building a simple five-page portfolio site or a blog.

That’s because ecommerce websites need features that portfolio sites and blogs don’t — namely, the ability to accept payments and track orders. That gets pretty complicated.

All of the ecommerce websites I built for this article took me less than five hours to complete. The Wix one took me less than a minute. But, again, I didn’t complete signing up for payment processors, fully flesh out my product listings, or configure all of the settings.

My point? You can build a passable website in one day. Tweaking it and optimizing it for your business’s long-term sustainability will take more time, though.

Can I build an ecommerce website on my own?

Yes! I’ve built ecommerce websites on my own, and I’m not a developer. Again, website builders like BigCommerce, Shopify, and 探花精选 make it possible for beginners to build an ecommerce website.

How much does it cost to build an ecommerce website from scratch?

If you use website builders like Shopify, Wix, or 探花精选 to build your ecommerce website from a template, it’ll cost about $30/month. Many have free trials.

If you hire a web development agency to build it from scratch for you, it’ll be the most expensive. surveyed over 100 web development agencies and found that an ecommerce website costs $5,000 to $50,000+ and takes four to 16 weeks to build.

My Closing Thoughts on How to Build an Ecommerce Website From Scratch

Thanks to website builders and AI, building an ecommerce website is easier than ever. You don’t need to be highly technical or even know how to code.

If you’re still feeling stuck, check out these ecommerce website design examples for inspiration.

Or, do what I did: Just and learn by doing. Sometimes, action is the best way to create inspiration.

探花精选's Free Website Builder

Create and customize your own business website with an easy drag-and-drop website builder.

• Build a website without any coding skills.
• Pre-built themes and templates.
• Built-in marketing tools and features.
• And more!