Ecwid Review - A Good Alternative to Wix and WooCommerce?

what's up guys Paul here from e-commercegold.co.uk now for this review video I am going to be looking at one of the world's most unique and versatile ecommerce platforms ecwid now ecwid has been around since 2009 and it's gone on to power over a million ecommerce platforms in the world which makes it one of the world's most popular choices when it comes to e-commerce but the guy behind ecwid has actually been involved with e-commerce for many many years in fact ecwid isn't the first platform he's ever developed he's the guy behind X cart which is one of the world's most popular open-source ecommerce platforms but when he was working on it developing it and promoting it he realized there was a need for something slightly different than a traditional e-commerce platform and that is why he developed ecwid and it's gone on to be so popular and I'm gonna discuss that a little bit more as I get into the video when I start looking at that ecwid dashboard and the features and explaining it why it works so well so the first thing I'm going to do when I jump into my computer which I'm going to do now is I'm going to look at the pricing of the ecwid platform now for this I have out to go onto the support section of the US website because whenever you go onto ecwid com it will always show how much it costs in your local currency so for me that is the Great British Pound and they do charge in a variety of different currencies depending on where you are in the world so the most popular is going to be the US dollar but you also get charged in the British Pound the Euro rupee the peso and the Russian ruble obviously depending on where you are in the world so this shows how much of a global platform ecwid is now ecwid are really really generous and you do get an option of a free package for life now this is limited in terms of products and the Amalfi as you get which is understandable they're not going to give everything away for free but it's a great way of getting started with the platform and being able to learn how to use it before you upgrade to a paid package to get access to all of the features of the ecwid platform they're talking about pay packages let's take a quick look at the ones they offer because they offer three main packages the entry one is the venture package which is $15 a month which is a very good entry-level price and it's cheaper than majority of other packages out there but if you buy that annually you do actually get a discount and it works out $12 50 a month meaning you pay a hundred and fifty dollars a year which is a saving of two months which is actually a pretty decent saving this next package is the business package which is $35 a month or twenty nine dollars and seventeen cents a month if you pay for an annual package which works out three hundred and fifty dollars and the biggest package they do is the unlimited package which is $99 a month or it works out to eighty two dollars fifty annually so there is an overview of the pricing of the equity plan form but what do you get for this money well for that I'm going to jump into the main ecwid site and as you can see it's gone on to my local currency which is the British Pound but what is the difference between the packages well the main difference is the amount of products you can have on that package with the free package you are limited to ten products which is a great way to actually test the platform Oh once again it's not ideal if you need to go beyond this if you need a fully functioning ecommerce at all or platform is just really to test the platform out but when you get into the POE packages the venture package comes with 100 products the business package allows you up to two and a half thousand products and the unlimited one is as it says you get unlimited products and obviously you do get more features as you move up through the package there's certain extra things that are included that aren't included with say the venture package that are included with the business package but talking about features I'm going to jump into my website ecommerce gold where I've gone through these features and these are the ones that really really stand out to me now one of the ones that I do like is one type check out this is a very important thing when it comes to e-commerce conversion rates this is very much come down from Amazon who've got one clear checker and it's becoming more of a norm within the e-commerce world because people want it to be as easy and convenient as possible to buy that product they just want to click a button and it's pause you can do that with ecwid but it's only when people are paying with Apple pay it hasn't been introduced with other payment methods just yet another thing is you can have facebook Messenger Live Chat don't vet Lee on your site this is a great conversion tool because people want to have answers pretty much instantly to their questions having a concept phone number address and contact form isn't really enough anymore you need some form of life chart and ecwid enables this through the Facebook messenger system which is really really good another thing is if you have a physical bricks and mortar store you can actually schedule it so people can come in and pick that ones up directly from you so if you're a florist or a baker or any kind of small local business where people can place an order and then pop in on the way to work or the way to the park or things like that and Pete the order of it just makes life really really simple and this is a feature that's not offered on that many platforms actually so to have it as a core feature of the ecwid platform is really good and it's definitely aimed at these kind of smaller bricks and mortar businesses to help you increase the amount get that's a really really good thing another thing you can do on the conversion tools is you can create discount codes so if you want an email marketing promotion or sign up to our newsletter promotion you can create discount goes that people can then put in at the checkout to save some money on that order nice and simple feature another thing you can do to help retain those customers you sell gift cards so if you was a forest for example you can sell gift cards directly onto your site and then people can give these to their friends family and then they can come and buy from you so nice little tool though but what really makes ecwid stand out from pretty much every other e-commerce platform out there is the versatility of the tool and the Americas you can actually use ecwid to start selling because you can start sending directly to your Facebook page and your Instagram account so if you've got a large following on these social medias you can actually start sending to them directly through the platform you don't need to encourage them to come onto your website you can just use the platform to get them to buy from you and another thing is you can use ecwid on a variety of different web sites now for some platforms like Squarespace and Weebly what you can do is use the ecwid buy button so using the equity plan form for your e-commerce transaction but you're actually hosting the rest of your website on their platform this is a really good integration but we're really stands out is it's WordPress and Wix integration because it actually integrates really really well and it brings in ecwid dashboard directly into those platforms so you can basically manage your ecwid dashboard directly from your wordpress dashboard or directly from the Wix dashboard there's no needing to jump between say the ecwid dashboard and your WordPress dashboard you can do these all in one and I'm going to show you that in a little bit I'm gonna first show you what it's like to actually use the ecwid dashboard now again start with ecwid is really really easy simply click that get started for free button at the top if I can't click that because it'll automatically log me but it'll just bring up a quick screen where you need your email address a password and I think your store name and you're good to go and when you've done all that you'll be brought into your ecwid dashboard which looks exactly like this and they've got a really good guide to get started which takes you through pretty much everything you need to do to get your ecwid site set up and working now as you can see it's a very simply laid out dashboard and it really does not take a long time to get used to using this dashboard in fact I felt really comfortable with it straightaway I know I test a lot of platforms out but this doesn't always happen whereas with ecwid I clicked with it pretty much instantly everything is where you need it to be so you've got your store management section here which takes care of your sales your inventory then you can manage your sales channels then you've got all your configuration at the bottom really simply laid out everything is where it needs to be now I was talking about the integration with WordPress on Wix and I'm going to show you how good this is so this is the ecwid dashboard through the ecwid website this is what it looks like in WordPress as you can see it is pretty much identical in fact I think it is identical so that's in the WordPress dashboard this way looks like in Wix once again it's brought everything Kin so there's no needing to get used to another kind of configured dashboard because it just brings everything natively into these platforms and this makes it really really good I say you can manage everything so if you're using WordPress you can manage everything from one place there's no need to log into WordPress then log into ecwid it all does it automatically this I really really like it's one of the few ways you can bring a fully hosted ecommerce checkout directly into the WordPress dashboard so as we talking about fully hosted let's see what I'm talking about with that so let's scroll down on here so this is the ecwid hosting um performance now I can't do my usual tests right over and speed tests on it because a lot of the examples are integrated with other sites and a WIC site it's going to load differently to a wordpress site so I can't do that kind of performance but this is the kind of security you get and performance you get with the ecwid system it's hosted on Amazon's web services this is one of the best hosting services in the world in fact their likes of Adobe I think Pinterest Iran there was a lot of big big names use Amazon Web Services because it's so robust and it's so reliable and ecwid choose this for theirs and it was it's pretty quick when you go into the equity dashboard it loads quick it's easy to jump from one page to another and you don't really notice any lag when you're using it in WordPress or using it in Wix eat loads pretty much as quick you also get PCI level 1 compliance with the ecwid dashboard so there's no need to worry about is your hosting good enough if you're using WordPress you don't need to worry about that all you need is pretty much basic WordPress hosting because all of the important transactional information is taken care of using the ecwid servers not your server so even though you do want to still have your SSL certificate and make sure it's secure as possible you haven't got to take that extra level and make sure it's super secure for e-commerce because ecwid takes care of all of that for you they also use a CDN from cloud fronts this means that all the information all the images everything is populated really really quickly wherever you are in the world this makes it a great global option for WordPress weeks any kind of site like that or even if you want to use the native ecwid store builder it's really good it's really quick you also get such a secure checker it's all SSL encrypted so you don't have to worry about that and you get unlimited bandwidth so you know you're not going to incur any extra oh geez for having too many people on your site which I'm sure is a problem a lot of you would like to have so that is what I mean by you get this fully hosted solution fully hosted ecommerce solution directly into your WordPress dashboard this is one of the best integrations I think's out there when it comes to WordPress e-commerce it definitely better options and some of the ones out there but I'm going to be reviewing the likes of WooCommerce in a few weeks so let's go into what equities are actually like to use and it's the same to using any platform so I could do this directly in ecwid in the WordPress dashboard or in the Wix dashboard it won't matter it all works exactly the same so the first thing we look at is products so to add your product is really easy you simply click on products add new products the layout for this is really simple and it's really easy to use so you just add your name your ask you your price all the information is there and you can walk through all these tabs at the top so it's just create a test name for that so you can work through all these tabs at the top configuring all the information you need for your products if you - our digital products this is where you upload your digital file yes you can sell digital products by a ecwid system but this doesn't need to be a paid one you can't sell any digital products on the free one unfortunately so you set up your taxes in shipping and then you go to SEO now there's only one thing I don't really like about this SEO configuration on ecwid and that is the fact that you can't edit your URL now for a lot of people this isn't going to be a big issue but it could actually do a really really good job of producing SEO friendly URLs because they'll take all the information out of your product title and actually put it in your URL but what they do is as I'll show you on my test site is they will add a random number at the end as somebody who likes to do as much to help their SEO as possible and don't like this random number because it just makes things look a little bit untidy to me but it's only a minor thing generally the SEO is really really good on the platform and say generates really really good URLs a standard it just adds that number to the end which one little thing I don't like and I would like to be able to create my own URLs so not let the system do all for me you can then set up related products so if there's if you it's part of a range or part of a collection you can add your related products there and then you can create a by no button and this is where the integration comes in with other platforms outside of WordPress and Wix this is what you deem poor if you was using Squarespace or Weebly or any other pretty much any of that website builder in the world Joomla Drupal any of these this is the code you would copy and paste into your website and it will produce a button onion on the page where customers can then checkout directly on your website but it will be using the ecwid system so this is where the integration isn't quite as good with other platforms but it still works really really well now this is where the only negative comes in when you're using the the Buy Now button is if you are using Squarespace or Weebly or any of these other platforms you won't have to come into your ecwid dashboard to manage your orders this can't be done directly in Squarespace so you are gonna have to log in and manage the two different dashboards that's the only negative really but and the product is really really easy the flow is really good everything simply laid out you can do everything you need to and pretty much I don't want to say if our product and pretty much exactly the same goes for creating a character great now you can create parent and subcategories on this and this makes making a cut a great high rock really really easy to do on the equity platform so you're not limited to just parent categories like you have on some platforms now this is something you may find if you're using the weeks platform that you can only create parent categories and this is quite limited especially if you have a large inventory with ecwid you don't have to worry about this you can create as many parent and subcategories as you want you're not limited on that so you can create a really good product hierarchy now when it comes to managing your inventory it's not quite as easy as I think it could be because there's not a lot you can do directly from the overview screen the product overview screen let you come with some other platforms because even though it's got bulk update you can't actually change that much for that you can only disable the product enable it or delete it you can't actually do any edits into the products you can't edit the product title or you can't edit the quantity directly from that or the dashboard instead you have to actually go into the product and edit them one by one this could be a bit frustrating if you have a large inventory because it would be nice if you could just do it all from the product overview there is an app on the ecwid app market that allows you to do bulk product ordering but this is an additional cost it cost an extra five pound a month and it's actually made by a third-party developer it's not made natively by the equity team so that is one thing if you did have a large inventory you may want to consider doing that it is something I'd like to see added to the equity system in the future but other than that the products and inventory management is really good uh neck word it's easy to add it's easy to organize yes it's a bit annoying that you have to do it one by one on the products when it comes to managing your inventory but it's still not difficult to do nice big Eddy button there so when it comes to managing your orders there's actually a lot you can do when it comes to managing your orders I really like the amount of things you can do directly from the overview page now you can do things in bulk so you can select them and you can do mass update you can print them off you can change the state subject or you can update them individually don't leap from the order overview this is something not a lot of platforms do a lot of platforms if you want to update things individually you have to actually click on the order and go into it this isn't the case with ecwid you can do all from the order management page this just makes it super easy to manage your orders I really like this this is the kind of area where you're going to be spending most of your time hopefully could you'll be getting lots of orders so you want this to be as easy as possible and it really really is with ecwid it's one of the easiest ones I've actually used and this was all done in the main ecwid dashboard but you can do it all exactly the same in the WordPress dashboard as you can see you can update everything go into Wix go into my sales you can do everything from that the dashboard because it brings in the whole dashboard and as you can see there's not really much lag between using it directly in the ecwid native panel and using the ecwid plug-in or the equity app in WordPress and Wix it just works it works really really well I think fantastic solutions adding ecommerce functionality into existing websites which was something that was definitely missing I wish I had discovered this a few years ago when I had my wordpress site because it would have been the ideal solution for me at the time so my conclusion of the eccrine platform is it any good yes but it does come with a but unfortunately as a standalone website builder ecommerce website builder I don't think it's all that good because it's missing a lot of the functionality general web site functionality they kind of required to have a really successful e-commerce store so if you are looking for a standalone ecommerce went builder I wouldn't generally recommend ecwid I think there are better options out there but if you have a wordpress site a Wix site Squarespace anything like that and you want to bring ecommerce functionality into your website so maybe you want to start selling products or just monetizing it in some way it's a quick there's one of imagine that weeks ecommerce set up I tried that and I didn't really like it I'm gonna be doing a review on that in a couple of weeks so if you want to check that out hit that subscribe button in the notification bar I sell cheap like that but yeah I think it is better than the standard like Wix ecommerce set up just because it's got much more control over it you can do more when it comes to managing your categories and just generally the checkout process just works better on ecwid than it does with Wix but what it really really stands out for me is the WordPress integration because WordPress has always had a bit of a weak spot when it comes to e-commerce yes there are plugins like WooCommerce and things like that but it puts more onus on you as the website owner because there's more you need to kind of figure because you're responsible for every aspect whereas with the ecwid system you don't have to worry about making sure that your checkout secure making sure that you're storing transactions properly you don't have to worry about that that's all taken care of natively by because that's what they are they're an e-commerce tool you just have to worry about hosting your website and making sure that your website performs well all the e-commerce functionality is taken care of for you you just need to add your products at a payment gateway delivery method and you're good to go that is why I really really like it I think it's a fantastic option for WordPress because it brings together the one of the world's best website builders which is WordPress with fully hosted ecommerce functionality into one fantastic package that you can use to really start growing your WordPress website home so that is my full review of the accurate platform if you want to read more on ecwid I'll leave a link in the description below to my for written review that I may have covered some things that haven't covered in this video because it's quite difficult to cover everything in one video so that brings me to the end of the review I hope you've enjoyed this video and you've learned something if you have and really appreciate it if you could hit that like button because it really does help the channel oh so once again guys thanks so much for watching stay awesome and I'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 6,445

Keywords: Ecwid Review, Ecwid Tutorial, Ecwid Online Store, Wix Alternative, WooCommerce Alternative, shopify alternative

Id: L7zLyuN_4Ho

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020