Ecwid Review 2021 - Is it any good?

what's up guys i'm paul and welcome to my channel now in this video we're going to be reviewing one of the world's most unique and versatile e-commerce platforms slash tools ecwid and this is because ecwid not only allows you to build a standalone e-commerce website but it can also be used to integrate with other platforms such as wordpress and wix to bring e-commerce functionality to these website builders so it certainly is a unique proposition and it's going to be interesting to see if it's any good or not now to test if it is any good we're going to be looking at seven different things in this video we're going to be looking at the pricing a quick summary of the features a quick overview of how easy the platform is to use what the theme selection and customization options are like what the store management is like the support options are available for you as the user and finally a quick look at the hosting environment that the ecwid platform is based on before giving my final thoughts at the end of the video so make sure you stick around because i'm going to be covering lots of different things in this video to see whether or not ecwid is a good and viable ecommerce platform so with the introduction out of the way let's get this review started by jumping into my computer not literally obviously just on screen as i said the first thing we're going to be looking at is the pricing of the ecwid platform and ecwid actually offers four packages for each users the first one is a completely free package and this actually replaces the conventional free trial that lots of other platforms offer now understandably as it's a free package it is a little bit limited because it allows you to sell up to 10 products and it's limited to features that are available on the platform which is completely understandable but it's a great way of actually getting started with ecwid and being able to use it in the real world to see if it's any good and it's going to work for you and your business now if you want to go and try ecwid out for yourself you can do by going to paul's channel dot com forward slash ecwid and i'll also leave a link in the description so you can go and try ecwid out for yourself but outside of the free package they also offer three paid packages and these are the venture package which is 15 a month the business package which is 35 a month and the unlimited package which is 99 a month now these prices are only if you're paying monthly if you pay annually you actually get the equivalent of two months free a year which is quite a big saving especially on the business and unlimited packages that's a lot of money to be saving every year but what is the difference between the actual packages and what you get for your money well the main thing that differentiates the packages with ecwid is the amount of products you get to list and the amount of features that are available unlike other platforms they don't have transaction fees on top of like payment gateway fees and they also don't have turnover limits either it's just the amount of products you can sell and the amount of features that are available to you on your package so the second thing we're going to be looking at is the features that ecwid has to offer now as i said i'm just going to be doing a summary of the features in this video because if not i'd be here forever in a day talking about all the different features that ecwid has to offer now in my written review which is what you can see on screen i have gone into the features into a lot more detail and that's available on my website paul's channel dot com and i will leave a link in the description below so you can go and check out the full written review which i say does cover the features in much more detail and i'm just going to do a quick summary in this video now on all the packages you do get all of these features which is a good selection of features to have on every single package there's a lot of these that maybe aren't available with some other platforms out there but one of the ones that does stand out to me is the facebook messenger live chat this is in many cases a paid option on other platforms so to be able to have live chat on your ecommerce website for 15 a month is really really good and it can be a great way of turning visitors into customers as they may have a question about your product and you can answer them instantly using the live chat function so that is a really really good tool but when you move up onto the business and unlimited packages you also get these features as well which is another set of really really good features that can help you get even more sales now outside of ecwid standard features they also have their own app store now this isn't cram packed with apps like it is on say shopify or big commerce it doesn't have that level of apps within it but it does have a really good selection but unlike most app stores unfortunately not all these are free to use a lot of them are paid options that you're going to have to pay on top of your ecwid basically monthly fee so this is something you do want to be aware of when you're installing these apps how much is going to cost you on a monthly basis because it could make ecwid a little bit expensive a little bit quickly if you're using too many of these apps but there are some really useful ones and there's some really good not only features available but also integrations with third party platforms available through the app store so if you're going to be checking out ecwid i'll definitely go and look through the app store see if there's any features that could be useful to you and your business so there are obviously lots of other features on ecwid there's a good selection of payment gateways there's actually over 40 to choose from which is a really good number they don't charge any additional transaction fees so you just pay the transaction fee for your payment gateway you don't actually pay any transaction fees to ecwid which is nice there's lots of shipping options now one of the things that is really good about ecwid shipping options is you can set local delivery rates so if you're just a local business and you only deliver to your local area you can set specific rates for that you can also set in-store pickup as well and this can be actually if you want people to come into your store so maybe you're selling food or things like that they can place an order and come and pick it up they can do curbside pickup and they can also do drives through pickup as well these are all great options especially with what happened with the world in 2020 these options are very good for businesses especially when they're serving a local community some really good options there and then obviously you just have your standard kind of like shipping options integrations with national carriers and things like that some really good options when it does come to shipping but one thing i do just want to cover about the features of ecwid is their seo features because in terms of marketing equity is actually pretty good because you can have things like a facebook shop you can have an instagram store ecwid integrates with lots of platforms and lots of sales channels and it does make it a very good hub for managing your online business but in terms of straight up seo tools there's something that does really get to me with ecwid now they do say they have advanced seo tools but they're actually pretty basic in a lot of ways this is because you have very limited control over your meta information so you can set a page and product title but when it comes to url you can't create a real custom url because it takes it from your product title and one of the things that it does is it adds a random number to your product page and i don't know why it does this but for me as somebody who is very much into seo and likes to create nice clean urls having this random number at the end of it just oh i just don't like it personally it's one of the little things with ecwid that i just don't like is this random number it puts at the end i could understand if it was kind of the product code that you entered i could understand it adding that but these are randomly generated numbers and i don't know why it does it but so it's just one of the things i just don't like with ecwid's seo now other things when it comes to seo with ecwid is on the content creation side it is very limited on their website builder so there's no access to a blog function so you can't add a blog to your site and also you're limited to the amount of pages you can actually add to your site as well there's no kind of custom page option so you can add an about us about me page but you couldn't add something like a team page or things like that you're very limited in terms of content creation options on the ecwid platform so seo is one of the areas where it's not really that strong even though it does have some other great marketing tools seo it's really not that great but overall the features on ecwid are pretty good especially considering the price of the platform so the third thing we're going to be looking at is how easy is the ecwid platform to use because to me this is a hugely important component of running an ecommerce website you need it to be easy to use you can have the best features in the world but if it's difficult to use on a day-to-day basis it's completely pointless so how does ecwid stack up in this sense well for me ecwid is one of the easiest platforms to get started with and use on a day-to-day basis i felt very comfortable using this platform from the day i signed up to it and the reason is and this is going to be especially important if you're integrating this with other platforms especially wix and wordpress is the dashboard is going to feel very familiar because it's very similar to both wordpress and wix in terms of the dashboard and the layout and there's one little thing that ecwid has done that makes it so much easier to use and this is to do with the main navigation menu which is a sidebar navigation which is very similar to a lot of other platforms out there but one of the little things i do like is they've separated all the sections into headings and this makes it just so easy to navigate around your dashboard so you've got all your store management here so you've got your sales your catalog marketing things like that then you can manage your sales channels here then you've got all your settings and configuration at the bottom i just like this little separation that they do it just makes it so easy to move around the equity dashboard one simple little thing but it makes life so much easier to use but what's ecwid like for new users so you're just signed up to the platform what they do to actually help you get set up well they've actually got a short to-do list which is basically a short setup guide to help you get up and running with the ecwid platform now the first one is create an account that one seems like a pointless option to put there but it gives you a nice green tick to get started with the second one shows the primary focus of the ecwid platform which is its integrations with other platforms and this is because the first one is to add your store to an existing website or social network and let's say this is where ecwid's primary focus is it's more of an e-commerce tool rather than an e-commerce platform and honestly the integrations with some of the other platforms are out there are absolutely fantastic but then you've got other options on the list which is like add your product or service so get your first product set up set your regional settings up this is really important as well because you want to know you're selling in the right currency the right time zone you've got your address all set up really good problem there to actually get your like settings configured properly then select a shipping method and then select a payment method which are basically the main things you need in order to get an e-commerce store up and running there's only one thing i would like to see added to this list and this is a prompt to set up your website pages primarily your terms and conditions and privacy policy because for many countries around the world these are now legal requirements so it would be nice to see this prompt added but overall ecwid is a very easy to use platform and there's definitely no complaints from me when it comes to ease of use so the fourth thing we're going to be looking at is the theme selection and customization now as ecwid isn't really primarily an e-commerce website builder its primary focus is more integrated with other platforms the instant builder that they offer isn't the best one in the world i'm going to show you exactly what i mean by that so if you go onto website click on edit site it will bring up the live theme customizer now one thing i do just want to say when it comes to the theme selection of equities they're not complete themes not like you get with some other platforms i'll show you what i mean by that so if we click on arrange sections we get a nice overview of what our home page looks like and you can see the layout you can see exactly what it looks like so we'll come out of that go into themes and we'll select another theme as you can see there's quite a few different options available i'm going to go for this one play room at the top so we click use this theme and it looks like it's changed the complete look and feel of the website but if we go back onto the arrange sections you'll see the rest of the actual home page looks exactly the same as it did before and this is because ecwid's themes aren't complete themes they're basically just different styled headers for you to use on your website and this does make it a little bit difficult to really be able to build a custom looking website on the ecwid platform but you do get a few options when it comes to the layout of your home page because you can drag all of these options up and down so if we dragged about to the top it will appear at the top so you do have some control over what your home page looks like and you can disable sections if you want so if you want to disable about we just do the slide toggle and it would remove that section now one thing that is missing is the option to add additional sections to your home page you're just limited to these options here and it would be nice to have a selection of additional sections that you can add so you could create a really custom home page on your site and to apply these changes you just click apply at the bottom and then it will make those changes on your site and if you want to save it you just click save at the top so for me the theme selection and customization options are okay they're not great but they're not very bad either they're just kind of somewhere in the middle it's okay now there are a few more things you can have access to when it comes to the look and feel of your site so we've come out of the theme customizer go back into the ecwid dashboard and we actually go to design at the bottom now as you can see you can change the look of your store and this is a selection of options for basically your categories and also your product pages as well it does give you a really good selection of options so you can change the image size how you want them to appear you can change the aspect ratio if you want so if you're doing something like fashion and you need a portrait image rather than a square one you can change that you can change how your product card is displayed on your category pages so you can choose how you want them to be aligned what things you want to show and what things you want to hide but the one that really does appeal to me and the one i think is the best is the product page layout because it gives you some selections as to how you display the product page so you can decide where you want your columns to be you do that and it just gives you a live preview here so if we change it to that one you can see the column moves over to the left left-hand side and while this is really really good what i do like is as you go down to the bottom you can choose what options you actually want available in your sidebar now this is something that isn't available on a lot of e-commerce platforms so it's a very useful feature to have with ecwid and being able to choose what you want to display and what you don't want to display can make customizing the look and feel of your product page is very good so overall the ecwid theme selection and customization is okay the main theme selection and customization options aren't that great to be honest but when it comes to your product pages you do get lots of options so it kind of does balance out a little bit so overall it's okay it's not the best in the world but it's also not the worst in the world either so the fifth thing we're going to be looking at in this review is the store management in ecwid and for this we're going to be looking at what it's like to manage your inventory and what it's like to manage your orders so to manage your inventory we need to go into the catalog under the store management so i love this little thing where it's just labeled in on your navigation menu so we go into catalog let's see what it's like to add a new product now the new add new product page actually offers a tabbed layout and this means there's quite a few different options that you can go through when you're adding your new product now i do just want to make you aware if you're using the free package or the venture package you're not going to have all the options available that i have on my screen this is because i'm actually on the business package and this gives me access to all of the features when it comes to adding new products that ecwid has to offer but let's go through a few of these tabs so the first one is the general tab and this way you add your images your name your sku code your price things like that so we need to add a test name so let's call this product one i know that's really original isn't it then you can add attributes to the product you can add options now if you're on the venture package you won't have access to variations you have access to options but not variations what's the difference between the two options is things like if you were selling in small medium and large and you didn't need to show an additional picture for it variations are if you're selling a t-shirt for example and you want to show a blue one a red one and a green one with separate pictures when people click on the different options you would need the variations and this is only available on the business and unlimited packages it's not available on the venture package unfortunately other thing you can have is files so if you're sending the digital product this is where you'd upload your files to you set your taxes and shipping you can set your seo now this is what i did briefly cover in the features section is this is the advanced seo options but all you can say is your product title and your meta description you don't actually get to change the url which is one thing that does just annoy me a little bit but then you can set related products and if you want to integrate this with another platform so you wanted to list this on something like squarespace you will go to embed this product on your site and you'd create a buy button for it if you're using wix or wordpress you don't need to worry about this because the integration is completely different but that's what it's like to add a new product it's a very simple page to use it's very well laid out and there's not too many options on each tab this does make it really quick and really easy to use so the next thing is organizing your products and for this we go into categories leave this page i don't want to save that now ecwid uses the traditional category setup which means you create parent and child categories very quick very easy to add a new category so you just add a root category if you want to add a parent category if you want to add a subcategory to it you just click on the parent category then click add subcategory very easy to set a good product hierarchy for your ecwid store but what about when it comes to managing your inventory so you've set all your products up you need to go in and you need to manage your inventory unfortunately ecwid isn't that good on this feature because it doesn't have many bulk editing tools now if you wanted to go in and change your pricing your inventory whatever it is you're going to have to do this on a product by product basis this is because ecwid lacks any real bulk editing features so if we select some of these products the bulk update option is you can just basically enable it or disable it there's no inventory management options or anything like that it all has to be done on a product by product basis which is a bit of a let down for me because if you've got a large product inventory this could take you a lot of time going through changing prices updating stock quantity it's just something i'd like to see added to the ecwid platform is a poor credit feature you can install an app to do this but you do have to pay for it i'd just like to see it as a native feature on the actual ecwid platform so that's the inventory side of things but what about when it comes to managing your orders because this is hopefully somewhere where you're going to be spending a lot of time in your ecwid store because you're going to be getting lots of sales so if you're going to my sales you'll see i've created a demo order and there are lots of options when it comes to being able to manage your orders they actually have a really good bulk editor why they can't do this on the products i don't know but on the orders it's really good so if we actually select the product you'll see that we can have bulk update what we can do is we can print it we can export it we can change the payment status for it and you can do this for multiple orders in one go or you can come over and you can actually update the order individually and you can print the order directly from the order management page this is really good i really like the order management system within ecwid it's one of the better ones out there in a lot of ways because it just makes it so easy to manage your orders i just wish they'd apply this to the products as well because it's the only thing that's really lacking from the store management is a bulk editor for the products otherwise everything else is pretty good so the sixth thing we're going to be looking at is the support options available for you as the user and it's one of the reasons why people go with fully hosted e-commerce platforms is knowing that there's a support team they can contact should they run into any difficulties with the platform and ecwid do offer a variety of different options it just depends on the package you're on as to what support options are available for you if you're on the free package you get email support it's understandable you're on the free package you get the basic level of support if you're on the venture package you do also get live chat on top of the email support as well and this is available directly from the ecwid dashboard if you're on the business and unlimited packages you do get access to phone support as well but this is only available between 2 p.m and 10 p.m pacific standard time also if you're on the unlimited package you do get priority support which is just another level on top of the standard support you get with the business package so there are some good options available the phone support might not be ideal depending on where you live in the world with the time that it's available but generally the support options available with ecwid are very good and the support team in my experience has always been very good in getting back to me and answering my queries so the final thing we're going to be looking at is the host environment that ecwid is run up now unfortunately i can't do my usual performance testing on ecwid this is because most ecwid users are actually using ecwid in conjunction with other platforms such as wordpress wix or squarespace rather than actually using ecwid's instant website builder and this means that my testing results just wouldn't be accurate so i can't do my usual performance testing but i have taken a look at the actual basically hosting environment ecwid offers and it's very very impressive it's run on amazon's web services which is the largest hosting provider in the world they also have pci level one compliant servers they also offer a global cdn that is powered by cloudfront which is the largest and well-known cdn providers in the world obviously it's a secure checkout and you also get unlimited bandwidth with every single package as well so the host environment is very good and from a little bit of kind of investigation work i've done with sites that are using ecwid as their checkout provider it hasn't had any detrimental effects to wordpress wix or squarespace in terms of performance so when you're integrating it with other platforms it's not going to cause any negative effects when it comes to load time or performance from what i've checked out and i've also checked that out on my demo sites as well and i didn't see any negative effects of having ecwid installed and that was on wordpress so a bonus thing i wanted to cover was ecwid's integrations with other platforms because it is their primary focus as i may have already mentioned in this video rather than being a ecommerce website builder like a lot of other e-commerce platforms so we just wanted to go through and say what the integrations are like and the ones that i've tested out for me the two best ones are wordpress and wix and this is because it actually brings the full ecwid dashboard into these platforms so this dashboard here is actually available within your wordpress site or your wix website so you get access to all of these features directly from these dashboards so you you only have to log into your wix site or your wordpress site to be able to use ecwid you don't have to manage two separate dashboards two different logins you can do it all from one place squarespace has more limited integrations it's more of a kind of buy button integration with squarespace and other platforms like joomla and drupal it's basically just the buy button it doesn't offer the full integration the wordpress and wix offer but if you are using wordpress on wix i would definitely consider checking ecuador as an alternative to woocommerce for wordpress and the wix stores app for wix because it is definitely a very good alternative now before i give my final thoughts on ecwid i do just have one quick request for you if you found this video helpful i'd really appreciate if you drop a like on the video also if you'd like to support my channel you can do by buying me a coffee using the link in the description and that is very much appreciated because it does help with doing all this work when it comes to doing the reviews so ecwid is it any good it's actually a two-part answer from me on this one the first one is if you're looking to build an e-commerce website from scratch i wouldn't have ecwid as my primary option i think there's better options out there especially when it comes to the website builder side of things because the instant site builder really is quite limited in terms of features and customization but the second part of my answer is if you've got an existing website with something like wordpress wix or squarespace it's definitely a good option for adding e-commerce to your existing website this is because it offers a lot of features and in many cases is a very good or if not better alternative to likes of woocommerce for wordpress or the wix stores app for wix or even squarespace's e-commerce features that's built into the platform in many cases it can be a better option because it does offer a lot of features out of the gate and the integrations with these platforms is really really good so say if you've got an existing website it's definitely something you do want to consider and you can also try it out for free which is also a good thing so that is my conclusion of the platform let's say it's a two-part answer in one way it's not the best option out there in another way it's a very good option that should be considered so that brings me to the end of the video i hope you enjoyed it if you have say if you could smash that like button i'd really appreciate it make sure you stay awesome and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 14,100

Keywords: ecwid review, ecwid review 2021, ecwid online store, shopify alternative, ecwid pricing, what is ecwid, woocommerce alternative, ecwid features, best shopify alternatives, wix alternatives, ecommerce website, ecommerce shopping cart, ecwid online store review

Id: oZOLLogqXQk

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021