With Wix, don't they own the site and just rent it to you basically?

Get your own set up. You can get good hosting cheap and a domain for less than $10 and own 100% of it.
Wordpress is pretty easy to build a site for free.

it will be harder to rank your wix site but it can be done. But free websites have a lot of problems over paid ones. Security is one of the problems. Free subdomains also get a lot of people skeptical, so they`re less likely to buy anything from you. You also have annoying ads on free websites usually.

Thanks for the responses. Also what the best way to start building back links besides purchasing or renting domains?

Wrong place for this post, try the SEO Forum

You can rank it, but why post on someone else's platform. Build your own website then everything belongs to you.