To get an e-commerce store ready, you’ll need to take several crucial decisions that cover both creative and technical aspects. It should be fast loading, beautifully designed, and have user-friendly navigation with advanced functionality like filters, different search parameters, etc. It should also be mobile-optimized, include high-resolution product images, a clear logo and branding, an easily accessible customer care desk, and easy account sign-ins and guest checkouts. Your e-commerce website should have customer reviews as well because they have been shown to improve conversion rates. However, the biggest impact is typically triggered by the first five reviews.
In this article, we present the fifteen best eCommerce websites and analyze the reasons that make them the leading names. You can take inspiration from them to design your own online store and make it one of the best eCommerce sites out there.
A key criterion of the leading e-commerce websites is their user-friendly and fast shopping experience. If you too want your e-commerce website to have the world’s fastest checkout experience (under 3 seconds) that doesn’t involve form filling, waiting, or resetting and lets shoppers buy with a single click right from the product page, you can trust Xpresslane to do it for you.
Table of Contents
What Is an E-commerce Website?
It’s a website that lets you buy and sell digital products, physical goods, or services over the internet, unlike traditional brick-and-mortar stores. The process also involves the transfer of funds and data between two or more parties involved in the electronic transaction. Thus, an e-commerce website facilitates what’s commonly known as online shopping.
What Are the Top 15 E-commerce Websites?
The best eCommerce websites that feature on our top-15 list are:
1. Amazon
You can buy anything and everything from A to Z as the Amazon logo displays. From fashion and cosmetics, mobiles, and electronics to furniture, books, pantry items, and a lot more, you can shop for a wide variety on this e-commerce website. It sits at the apex of the list of top ecommerce sites in the world. Amazon is available in different countries and has a simple interface, user-friendly website and app, fast site loading speed, and top-notch customer service.
It also allows shoppers a versatile array of products, different payment methods to choose from, a hassle-free and easy checkout, affordable product rates, added benefits with Amazon Prime membership, a wide variety of offers and great discounts, the ability to track your order, and fast delivery. All these features have made it the one-stop shop to meet all your consumer needs.
2. eBay
eBay, which is available in 190 countries, is popular for its auctions and consumer-to-consumer sales. You can search products on this site locally, nationally, or globally. Sellers can set up their eBay Store if they want to run their e-commerce business via eBay. From electronics, health and beauty items, and fashion products to sports, collectables and art stuff, home and garden equipment, auto parts and accessories, and industrial equipment, you can buy them all on eBay.
Thanks to a high level of competition, this eCommerce site offers items at reasonable prices and gives buyers multiple choices of sellers. Speedy site loading, user-friendly navigation, and daily deals have made eBay endearing to buyers. The ability to search for anything and shop by category (and even use the advanced search with more parameters like keywords, price, buying formats, etc.) is another factor that contributes to eBay’s popularity.
3. Rakuten
Japan’s Rakuten is amongst the world’s best B2B eCommerce websites. Rakuten connects shoppers with cashback, coupon codes, and discounts for famous brands and smaller e-commerce stores. For buyers, it offers superior search functionality (with the options to filter by a category, brand, price, and more) and intuitive navigation with the choice to refine the selection, change locations to toggle between pickup and delivery, etc. It also offers highlighted deals, ease of reordering, cash back for shopping at their favorite stores listed on Rakuten, superb customer support tools, real-time inventory readings to remove out-of-stock products until they’re restocked, and a secure payment gateway, among others.
4. Alibaba
It’s China’s largest e-commerce B2B marketplace that serves both buyers and suppliers. It’s also one of the largest global marketplaces online that can help wholesalers, manufacturers, and traders reach more than 26 million active buyers from over 200 countries. Ease of use, SEO-friendliness, centralized management for omnichannel ecommerce, availability of several plugins and integration tools for accounting, marketing, and dropshipping, live stream shopping, order tracking, secure transactions, and prompt 24/7 customer service are some of the key features that help Alibaba’s inclusion in this list of the best ecommerce websites.
5. Walmart
According to a Jungle Scout report, Walmart’s growth online is over five times faster than Amazon in the domain of e-commerce. If those rates continue, Walmart’s e-commerce will overtake Amazon’s retail sales in four years. This explains why Walmart features on this list of the top eCommerce sites in the world. In the United States, Walmart is the largest grocer. Globally, it operates in 24 countries. Thus, from its e-commerce website, you can buy everything from groceries to cleaning supplies, over-the-counter medicine, and a lot more.
Together with its value-based merchandising strategy, Walmart offers some of the lowest product and shipping prices. With a user-friendly website and app, faster delivery, and omnichannel retailing with multiple fulfillment options, including collection from store and delivery to home, Walmart has attracted buyers by the droves.
The added benefits you get with Walmart+ membership, such as free delivery from the store, free shipping without any minimum order, select prescription medicines for less, and lower fuel prices at Walmart and Murphy stations, among others, is another reason for buying from Walmart.
6. Aliexpress
AliExpress meets the needs of global consumers who want to buy products “as is” without being coerced to place a minimum order quantity. It’s a retail division of the Alibaba Group and functions similar to other popular B2C platforms. Buyers prefer AliExpress to shop for a wide range of quality items at attractively low and competitive prices, along with secure buyer protection and support for 38 local payment channels and 18 languages. Owing to its wide array of goods and competitive prices, AliExpress has also emerged as an ideal choice for dropshipping.
7. Target
Target’s website clearly shows shopping categories (Christmas, gift ideas, grocery, household essentials, etc.), deals (top deals, weekly ad, clearance, etc.), what’s new (women’s new arrivals, men’s new arrivals, beauty new arrivals, and more), and pickup and delivery options (same-day delivery, order pickup, and drive up) in a drop-down format on the home page itself. This helps buyers quickly move onto the product pages they want to shop from. Buyers may even scroll down to shop from featured categories like home, kids’, baby, kitchen and dining, electronics, beauty, pets, grocery, and sports and outdoors, among others.
With a user-friendly app to help buyers shop on the go, free 2-day shipping (subject to certain conditions), order tracking, multiple payment options, and added benefits with the use of Target RedCard, this website has become one of the best ecommerce sites that are around.
8. Etsy
Etsy is an online marketplace where sellers can list their products against a listing fee and start selling. Thanks to its popularity, Etsy attracts 81.9 million buyers and connects them to 4.36 million sellers (as per April 2021 data).
With a website design that’s easy to navigate and use even for non-technical people, Etsy makes it easy to set up a seller’s account, upload product information and images, and start selling. This e-commerce site is designed only for craft supplies, handmade goods, and vintage items that are 20+ years old.
On the flip side, Etsy doesn’t let you exercise creative control on your store by branding your product page or choosing the layout though you can use your own logo. The transaction fee and payment processing fee could also hurt, especially when sales increase and you start raking in larger amounts. But the positive side is that with the Standard plan, you can sell with no additional charge over your monthly subscription unless you decide to upgrade.
9. Paytm Mall
From mobiles and electronics to fashion, daily consumer needs, footwear, stationery, car and bike accessories, and used gadgets, Paytm Mall offers everything. An attractive feature of this ecommerce site is its cashback feature, along with facilitating good savings via offers, attractive discounts, and best deals.
With an easy-to-use website and app, user-friendly searching and shopping options, multiple payment modes, easy return and cancellation policies, real-time tracking of orders, and 24/7 help, Paytm Mall’s website stands testimony to how to get it right when wooing customers to your online store. This ecommerce website also has a program called ‘Paytm Bug Bounty’ to reward people who find and report bugs to help the company address the problem at its earliest.
10. Flipkart
Though it began its journey as an online bookstore, Flipkart later evolved into an online marketplace where a wide array of products are on offer – from apparels, books, and electronics to fashion, digital music, home care, grocery, beauty products, and more. By using modern ecommerce website design, Flipkart ensures its website is easy to browse.
It also has a user-friendly app where app-only discounts are made available. Other features of this ecommerce website are the ability to create your wishlist, easy returns, fast shipping and tracking of your orders, hassle-free delivery, and multiple payment options. By becoming a Flipkart Plus member, buyers can get additional benefits like free shipping, early access to sales, superior customer support, and even earn and exchange their super coins for rewards.
11. Myntra
This eCommerce website is the leading player in the domain of fashion and lifestyle merchandise in India. Buyers can choose and buy from a wide range of products – right from clothing and footwear to fashion accessories and home décor, among others. Myntra focuses on bringing the most fashionable brands at discounted rates (via deals, discount vouchers, and special offers) for its customers.
Myntra’s homepage neatly organizes the products in different categories to make it easier for buyers to choose and shop. From categories like ‘deals of the day’ and ‘biggest deals on top brands’ to ‘categories to bag,’ ‘explore top brands,’ ‘Myntra luxe,’ ‘trending in western wear,’ ‘trending in Indian wear,’ and a lot more, shopping is made hassle-free and easy. With the ease of ordering, search functionality with filters, multiple secure payment methods, a simple order tracking system, gift cards, and different ways to reach its customer service department quickly, Myntra has made its place among the best eCommerce websites.
12. IndiaMART
This is primarily a B2B marketplace that connects suppliers, manufacturers, and exporters, thus letting them showcase and promote their offerings to the interested parties on the platform. Though it started its journey as a B2B marketplace, it slowly embraced the B2C model as well. IndiaMART offers products under a wide range of categories, including hospital and diagnostics, drugs and pharma, food and agriculture, and industrial supplies, to name just a few.
The home page clearly shows the categories with the option to click and view the rest, including the ones that are already visible. There’s also a prominent search bar to find products and verified sellers – either in your city or throughout India.
IndiaMart has a whopping 68 million product listings spread across 100,000 categories. But despite the sheer size, the website is designed in such a way that finding what you’re looking for is easy with a few clicks. Perhaps that’s why Dinesh Agarwal, IndiaMART’s founder and CEO once told that if you can’t find something on this platform, you won’t come across it on the internet. With almost unlimited categories and products, featured products to showcase some of the popular buys, reasonable pricing, and secure payment gateway, IndiaMART easily makes its way into this list of the best ecommerce websites.
13. AJIO
This ecommerce website is the digital commerce initiative of Reliance Retail. It’s the ultimate fashion hub for handpicked and branded collection of fashion and beauty products sourced from different corners of India and around the world. AJIO Own, which is AJIO’s in-house label, offers buyers a wide array of apparel and accessories, including a special line of activewear, maternity wear, and an exhaustive tween collection.
With user-friendly navigation and search functionality, real-time order tracking, multiple payment options, free shipping (for orders costing ₹1199 or above), a clear cancellation, return, and refund policy, and Loyalty Rewards, this ecommerce website is sure to inspire you to include these features in your online store.
14. Zivame
It’s India’s largest online lingerie shopping site and features all leading brands with an array of nightwear, panties, bras, sportswear, and shapewear, among others. You can also shop for beauty products and jewelry as well as other categories like socks and stockings, swimwear, beachwear, etc.
Zivame brings fabulous offers for its buyers on its varied range that includes almost everything from daily styles to high-fashion products in every size. With discreet packaging, 15-day easy return and exchanges, dispatch within 24 hours, multiple payment options, and 100% secure transactions (PCI DSS compliant), seeing it featured amongst the best ecommerce websites is a given.
15. Tata CLiQ
This is one of the fastest-growing ecommerce brands in India that lets you browse the best national and global brands in fashion, electronics, home furnishing, and beauty. This website has several user-friendly features like search functionality, the ability to add products to the wishlist, pre-ordering products before their official launch, different payment options (including EMI), three delivery modes (Standard, Express, and QUiQ PiQ), tracking of order status, and easy cancellations (including cancellation of a part of your order), returns, and refunds (in the form of CLiQ Cash). Tata CLiQ has the potential to become one of the best B2C ecommerce websites.
Best B2B E-commerce Websites
Some typical features that the best B2B ecommerce websites should have are:
1. Simple navigation
2. Eye-catching call-to-action buttons on every product page of the site
3. User-friendly site search with images, autocomplete features, and listings of similar products
4. Attractive and high-resolution product visualizations
5. Easily accessible tools, such as filters and comparison features
6. Personalized offers and promotions
7. Personalized functionality
8. Bulk, repeat, and scheduled ordering for regular customers
9. The option of self-service for process flexibility
Integrations to facilitate seamless user experience
As expected, most B2B e-commerce websites focus on lead generation. But while doing so, they often forget to strike the right balance between great design and superb functionality. Yet, when you put the spotlight on the best of the lot, you’ll notice that they do it the right way by embracing the fundamentals of great design, namely appealing layout, rational navigation, and user-friendly search.
We found that the top three names ticking almost all the parameters the best B2B ecommerce websites should have are:
1. Rakuten
2. Alibaba
3. IndiaMART
Best B2C E-commerce Websites
To become one of the best B2C ecommerce websites, it’s not just enough to implement modern ecommerce website design. Some other features like the following too should be present in the website:
1. Intuitive and advanced search capability that goes well beyond linear matching
2. Product filter and comparison options
3. Geolocation to offer visitors a personalized shopping experience
4. Marketing tools like coupons, discounts, gift cards, rewards/loyalty points system, etc., to woo customers
5. Wishlist feature to let customers browse and add products they can buy at a later date
6. 2 to 3-step shopping carts to minimize cart abandonment
7. Bundling and grouping of similar products
8. Multiple payment options
9. Swift means to reach and interact with customer service representatives
10. Cost-effective shipping
11. Flexible delivery options
12. A Knowledge Center or FAQ section to help website visitors who need additional information while browsing
13. Analytics and reports to fine-tune your website
We found that the top three names ticking most of the parameters the best B2C ecommerce websites should have are:
1. Amazon
2. Walmart
3. Flipkart
Final Words
Both B2B and B2C e-commerce are poised for tremendous growth globally in the forthcoming years. Due to the fillip provided by COVID-19, the Indian e-commerce industry too is expected to grow by 84% to touch the $111 billion mark by 2024. All these make it the right time to join the bandwagon and start selling from your online store. Now that you know what makes some of the best ecommerce websites tick, you can try to implement some of those functionalities and features in your own ecommerce site to benefit from them.
Whether you want to target customers via the B2C business model or manufacturers, wholesalers, and traders through the B2B model, it’s important to assess the key criteria to focus upon when building your ecommerce store. And if you already have an online store that’s not getting you the desired results, you can try tweaking its features by getting some inspiration from the leading players in the ecommerce domain that we have talked about above.
FAQs
Which is the best site for e-commerce?
Amazon is the best site for e-commerce. It has a simple and organized user interface, responsive and mobile-friendly website, lightning-fast page loading speed (3 seconds or less), multiple browser compatibility, ease of product discoverability, and a secure, fast, and hassle-free checkout.
What are the 5 best e-commerce websites?
Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, Alibaba, and Walmart are the 5 best e-commerce websites.
What is the most popular eCommerce platform?
Shopify is the most popular eCommerce platform, primarily because it lets users easily manage their online store’s layout and functionality.
What are the three types of e-commerce?
Three key types of e-commerce are B2C (Business-to-Consumer), B2B (Business-to-Business), and C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer).
What was the first eCommerce website?
In 1982, Boston Computer Exchange was launched, which was the first ecommerce company in the world. Its primary role was to act as an online market for people who wanted to sell their used computers.
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