Ecwid vs Shopify (2021) - Which one is better for Building an Ecommerce Website?

what's up guys i'm paul and welcome to my channel so is ecwid or shopify the better option for building an e-commerce website well that's a question i'm going to be looking to answer in this video by doing an in-depth comparison between these two platforms now i am going to be covering quite a few sections and if you want to check these out individually i will leave all the timestamps in the description below i would honestly recommend sticking around and watching the video all the way through because it's going to give you lots of information and help you make an informed decision about which platform could be the better option for you and your business so with the introduction out of the way let's get on with the comparison ecwid is a fully hosted e-commerce platform and while it can be used to build standalone e-commerce websites the actual primary focus of the platform and what it was originally designed for was to be more of an e-commerce tool for other content-driven platforms such as wordpress wix and squarespace rather than being used as a standalone e-commerce website builder whereas shopify was designed from the ground up to be an all-in-one e-commerce platform to help you build a feature-rich e-commerce website for your business now when it comes to pricing both platforms offer a range of packages ecwid offer a total of four which is the free package which is free 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 and if you pay for these plans annually you actually get the equivalent of two months free every single year which on the business and unlimited packages is actually quite a saving now the difference between these packages with ecwid is the amount of products that you can sell and also the features you get access to with the platform now shopify actually offer a total of five packages but the smallest package which is the shopify light package doesn't include a website builder so i haven't included it in this comparison but the three fixed price packages that they offer are the shopify basic at 29 a month the standard one at 79 a month and the advanced package at 299 a month and the biggest difference between these packages is the additional transaction fee that's charged on payments that received i'm going to cover that more in the payment section later on in this video they also offer a custom package which is called shopify plus but this is only really for like enterprise level ecommerce businesses that need a completely custom solution and i'd imagine for most people watching this video they're just going to be looking at the standard packages and if you want to try either of these platforms out for yourself you can do by taking our ecwid's free plan or taking our free trial with shopify and i will leave my links to both platforms in the description below now these are affiliate links which means if you do purchase a paid service through these links i earn a small commission but it comes at no additional cost to you but does help me out a lot but when it comes to these platforms it's a win for ecwid on this one just because it's cheaper overall when it comes to marketing tools ecwid has a really good selection of tools to not only help get people to your site but also help convert these visitors into paying customers and one of the main things with ecwid is the ability to sell across multiple sites so you could build a site save with ecwid's instant website builder but you can also list your products on wordpress sites or wix sites that you may own you can also sell via social media platforms such as facebook and instagram with the ecwid system but when they actually get onto your site there's features like facebook messenger live chat so you can converse directly with your customers you can also offer discount coupons and gift cards to help encourage people to buy on the business and unlimited packages you also get abandoned cart emails which you can actually add discounts in if you want to to try and encourage people who have abandoned their cart to come back and complete the transaction and you also get to offer your car in multiple languages as well so if you sell to a global audience this is going to increase the chances of getting sales on your site shopify also offer a really good selection of marketing tools and these are very similar in a lot of ways to the ones that are available from ecwid so you can sell via your facebook page you can also sell via instagram through shopify as well you can have social shares so you can share your products to your social media pages you can also offer discount codes you can offer gift cards but on all packages you also get abandoned car recovery and you can sell in multiple languages so if you're on the shopify standard package you can offer your site in two languages and if you're on the advanced you can offer in up to five languages but one thing that shopify does offer is the ability to create ad campaigns directly within your shopify dashboard and these campaigns can be run through facebook through snapchat and you can also create email marketing campaigns as well and this can be done directly within your shopify dashboard so when it comes to the marketing tools that both of these platforms offer there's really not a lot to choose between the two platforms so i'm going to have to call this one a draw when it comes to seo tools ecwid isn't that great to be honest even though they say they have advanced seo tools they're actually pretty basic so if you go onto your product page and go under the seo tab all the tools you get are the ability to create a page title and change the meta description you don't get the ability to customize the url and one strange quirk with the ecwid system is it adds a random number to the end of your url i don't know why it does this and this is just a random generated number and while this won't have a massive impact on your site's seo for people who like to create really clean urls for your site this is one of those things that's just going to be a little bit of annoyance more than anything else but ecwid doesn't offer much more in terms of seo tools because you're limited to the amount of pages you can create on your site and they don't have any blog functionality either so seo tools really are quite limited on ecwid shopify offers much more when it comes to seo because on every single one of your pages so whether it's a product page it's your collections page or a custom page you've built for your site you get access to shopify's seo tools which look like this and this allows you to change the page title add a meta description and also control parts of your url now certain things aren't customizable in the url so if it's a product page you're going to have this product section if it's a page it's going to say page but you can edit the end bit of the url which means you do have more control over the url than you do with ecwid also on shopify you can create unlimited pages for your site so you can create custom about me pages teams whatever it is pages you want to create for your site shopify also offers a blog functionality as well so you can add a blog to your site which can be very beneficial to seo so when it comes to the seo tools between the two platforms it's really not close it's a clear win for shopify on this one ecwid offers a really good selection of payment gateways in fact there's over 40 to choose from including some of the biggest names in the industry such as paypal stripe clarner square and apple pay and if you do sell apple pay on your site you can actually enable one tap checkout so for any of your customers who are checking out using apple devices you can really streamline the checkout process for these customers there's also a range of offline payment methods such as cash on delivery or bank transfer and one good thing with ecwid is they don't charge any additional transaction fees on top of those that are charged by the payment gateways now shopify actually offers a larger selection of payment gateways with over 100 to choose from including their own payment gateway which is called shopify payments which is powered by stripe but also other big names in the industry such as paypal amazon pay and clarner but one thing that you do need to be aware of when you're using these third-party payment gateways is you do get charged an additional transaction fee by the shopify platform and it does depend on the package you're on as to what you actually get charged so if you're on the basic package you're going to get charged two percent if you're on the standard package you're going to get charged one percent and if you're on the advanced package you're going to get charged 0.5 percent but this is only on third-party payment gateways if you're using shopify payments you aren't charged this additional transaction fee so when it comes to payment gateways even though both offer a great selection i'm going to have to give this one to ecwid just because they don't charge additional transaction fees now when it comes to shipping ecwid has some really good options including integrations with providers such as the united states postal service raw mail canada post and australia post as well as big independent shipping providers such as fedex and some of these integrations will actually allow you to have auto calculated shipping rates in your checkout but if you want to say your own rates you can do by setting custom pricing this can be a flat rate if you want it to be you can set your shipping price based on the subtotal of the car you can also set your shipping prices based on the weight of the goods in the car as well also you can offer free delivery but they also offer some additional options so if you're a local business you can set up local delivery so if you just want to deliver in your local area you can also offer pickup options as well you can offer in-store pickup curbside pickup and also drive through pickup as well and when it comes to shopify is pretty much the same story because they offer the ability to create custom shipping rates based on different rules or you can offer free shipping if you want to you can also offer local delivery options as well as in-store pickup but one additional thing that you can do with shopify is you can actually link your store up to the fulfillment centers that you may be partnered with so if you use a third-party fulfillment center to deal with your orders you can actually link your store up directly to this and it just makes the process a bit more seamless now when it comes to the shipping options that the two platforms provide there really isn't much between the two so i'm going to have to call this one a draw now even though ecwid has a really good selection of features as standard they do have their own app marketplace and this boasts a selection of over 150 apps and these are made by the ecwid team and also third-party developers as well to offer additional functionality but also integrations with third-party platforms now not all of these are free some of them do have free plans or are free to use but a majority of them are paid options and they range from a couple of dollars a month to over a hundred dollars a month now when it comes to apps it's really difficult to beat shopify because of all the fully hosted e-commerce platforms no one has a selection as big as shopify because their app store boasts a selection of over 3000 apps and these cover a wide variety of different features functionality and integrations that you can have with your shopify store but as with ecwid these aren't all free to use because a lot of them are made by third-party developers but the pricing of these apps can range a lot more than they do on ecwid there are some free ones available or ones that offer free plans but the paid options range from a few dollars a month into the hundreds of dollars a month and in some extreme cases into thousands of dollars a month now when it comes to apps that are available for these two platforms it's really hard to go against shopify just because of the sheer amount of apps they've got so it's a win for shopify on this one so the next thing is how easy are these platforms to use and ecwid is one of the easiest platforms to use and that's not just my opinion but the people i know have used the platform and also a lot of the reviews on ecwid say how easy the platform is to use and it really is this is because they've gone for simple designs and layouts for their pages and they've made the navigation of their site super easy now one of the things that does make ecwid so easy to navigate is because they've broke their navigation menu down into three sections so you've got your store management options which are all here your sales channels and then your settings and configuration and this just makes it really easy to move from one section to another now for users who are new to ecwid you do get a short to-do list to help you get started with the platform and the second option on this list really does show where the main focus of ecwid is because it's a prompt to add your store to a website or social network rather than a prompt to build your website using ecwid's instant website builder but the rest of the to-do list is pretty much what you'd expect from an e-commerce platform so it's add products or services set up your regional settings so your currency on your language how you can deliver your goods to your customers and how you're going to get paid the only thing missing from this list is a prompt to set up your terms and conditions and your privacy policy which is something i would like to see added as this is a legal requirement for many countries around the world shopify is also a really easy to use platform and for many of the reasons why equity is easy to use because the pages are well laid out and they're easy to use and also the main navigation menu is easy to navigate because it is effectively broken down into the same three sections you've got all your store management options at the top you've got your sales channels there and then your settings down the bottom of the navigation menu now if you're new to shopify you're going to be a little bit let down by the setup guide the reason is it's a little bit on the light side for me it doesn't include all the options i'd like to see in a setup guide but shopify have gone somewhere to remedy this by creating a video tutorial guide to help you get set up with shopify and this is available in the shopify compass and it's actually a complete getting started with shopify course it takes about an hour and a half to go through but it is definitely worth going through if you're brand new to the platform because it will take you through all the steps you need to go through in order to get your shopify store set up properly now when it comes to ease of use there's not really much to choose between these two platforms once again so it's another draw now when it comes to theme selection ecwid say there's over 70 themes to choose from but they're not actually 70 complete themes and i'm going to show you what i mean by this so we're in the ecwid theme customizer and if we click on arrange sections it'll bring up a preview of our website's home page and as you can see we've got this header here and the design of the website if we click on themes and we change it to something else so we change it to this theme all you'll see is it's the actual header that changes but the rest of the website doesn't it stays the same so these actual 70 themes are more like 70 different styled headers that you can have for the ecwid instant website builder which is a bit of a letdown but when it comes to customization within ecwid there are a few options available so what you can do on your home page is you can drag and rearrange sections on your site so it moves them up and down on your home page you can also choose to hide these sections if you want to as well by just clicking on the toggle and that is basically the limit of what you can do when it comes to theme customization for the ecwid website but there are some additional options that are available within the ecwid dashboard so if we come back in and we click on design there's some options for the look and feel of your product pages and also your product categories as well and you can change the size of the pictures the aspect ratio what you want to appear on the cards but my favorite one is the one down the bottom which is your product page layout so you can choose how you want your product page to look so if you want it to move from the column from the right hand side to the left you can just click the button and it changes it for you and also you can choose what options you want available in the sidebar that appears on your product page which gives you a lot of control over the look and feel of your product pages and also your category pages as well when it comes to theme selection shopify has a selection of nine themes you can choose from that are free to use they also have their own shopify theme store that has a selection of around about 70 themes that range from 140 to 180 but outside of the shopify ecosystem there is also a massive selection of themes if you go on themeforest and you search shopify themes it will actually produce a result of over 1200 different options which is incredible and also there's lots of independent developers and also independent developers who will make you a custom theme as well so this gives you lots of options when it comes to the selection of themes that you're going to use for your shopify store now one of the tools that really does help shopify stand out from the crowd is their theme customizer because it gives you so much control over the look and feel of your site so you can edit the header you can edit the footer of your page you also get some good options when it comes to the theme settings so you can change colors and typography but the main thing is the ability to rearrange the look and feel of your home page because you can rearrange these sections or you can choose to remove them there's also the option to add additional sections because there is a good selection of sections that are available within shopify another good thing with shopify is there is a stock image library that you have access to as a shopify customer now the only real letdown with the shopify theme customizer is the fact that you can't use this page builder on custom pages on your site so if you have an about me page unfortunately you're limited to a pretty basic text editor and this goes for your blog pages as well it'd be absolutely amazing if shopify expanded this page builder functionality into any custom pages that you create and also your blog posts as well because it would just take theme customization on shopify to a whole other level but when it comes to theme selection and customization it's a clear win for shopify because it just offers so much more as to what you can do to your site than what ecwid offers now equity is very good when it comes to inventory management and this is because they've managed to combine keeping it simple and easy to use with all the tools and functionality you need to create a good product selection on your store and the product page is very much evidence of this this is because it's very simple and easy to use and the tab layout makes it really easy to navigate between all the options that you need in order to create a really good product listing but once you've created your products how do you organize them well ecwid has gone with the traditional category structure and this means you can create parent and child categories even though ecwid calls them root and subcategories but it's really easy to go through and create categories and subcategories to create a really good hierarchy for your products and then there's inventory management so you've added all your products how do you manage the inventory once it's live on your store well this is a new update to the ecwid platform and it's very much a welcome one because they've added a bulk editor so if you select the products and go into the editor you can now edit your products in bulk which was something you couldn't do previously on ecwid and you've got a filter system so you can choose what options you want and it's quick and easy to go through and change any of these things within the bulk editor click save and it's updated it on your store shopify are also very good in this area because it's easy to use it's simple but it also gives you all the tools you need and the add new product page is slightly simpler to use this is because it's a single page layout rather than the tab structure that's with ecwid and this just make it a little bit easier to use than working through all the tabs but when it comes to organizing your products shopify is a little bit more complicated because they've created their own collection system and there's two different ways that these can be used the first one is a manual collection this works very much the same way as a traditional category then you create it and then you add the products but then there's automated collections and these are a little bit more complicated but when you know how to use them they can be very effective because these are based off rules that you create so if it contains a product tag or there's words in the product title or even down to price you can have these go into certain collections so you can create things like give some men under 30 dollars you can do this using the shopify automated collections and when you set these rules it will automatically find the products for you this makes it really easy to organize your collections but it does take a little bit of time to get used to how to do this but when it comes to managing your inventory once you've added all your products shopify have definitely got you covered because there's two options first off you have the inventory page and this allows you to go through and quickly update the start quantity of your listings but they also have a really good bulk editor so if you go into all products select the products that you want to edit click on edit products it'll bring up the shopify bulk editor and once again this is customizable you can add different fields to this book editor and it's basically anything that's available in the create new product page or the edit product page and you can go through and edit products in bulk it's super easy to do once again the two platforms are incredibly close on this and it's another draw between the two platforms ecwid has a very sleek order management system and it allows orders to be managed in bulk or you can manage them individually so if you want to manage them in bore you just select the option click the drop down menu and you can print them off you can export them or you can change the status of the orders and you can also do this for an individual order as well it's super simple to manage orders within ecwid it'd just be nice there's a bit more customization options over the document that you can actually print to send to your customers shopify's order management used to be a little bit of a letdown because there was no way you could print orders directly from the shopify dashboard but they have remedied this with a recent update and now you can actually print packing slips directly from the shopify order management you can also fulfill orders and you can change the payment states of your orders and this can be done in bulk or by individual orders but really to get the most out of shopify's order management system it is worth installing an additional app that gives you much more control but for the standard order management system it's a draw between the two because they basically do the same thing but if you install something like the order printer pro app then shopify's order management becomes considerably better than the equivalent in ecwid ecwid does offer a variety of different support options but it does depend on the package you're on as to what is available to you if you're on the free package you get basic email support if you go onto the venture package then you get the addition of live chat support and then if you go into the business package you get additional phone support and if you go and see unlimited package you do get priority support but when it comes to the phone support this is only available between 2 p.m and 10 p.m pacific standard time monday to friday it's not available 24 7 but it is really easy to actually contact ecwid support team because in your dashboard you just click get up at the top and it brings up this sidebar menu and then you have all the support options that are available to you in the sidebar then you choose whichever one you want to use now the support i've had from ecwid has been very good it'd just be nice if it was available for a longer period of time shopify offers a variety of support options available to all of its users including live chat via email and over the phone and what's even better about the shopify support is it's 24 7 and that's 24 7 for all users of the platform it doesn't matter whether you're on the basic package or the advanced package you get access to 24 7 support they also have a really good community support form which can be a great place to ask non-urgent questions so when it comes to support shopify is the clear winner because it offers a variety of different methods and also 24 7 support to all of its users now the final comparison of this video is going to be looking at the hosting environment and the performance of these two platforms now when it comes to the hosting environment both offer really good environments because they have unlimited bandwidth unlimited data storage pci compliance servers you also get a free ssl certificate as well they both offer global cdns which is a content delivery network and 99 uptime but even though that all sounds great what does it actually mean in the real world well i don't like to take these companies at their word i like to put them to the test and usually what i'll do is i'll take five customer example sites and run through pingdom speedtest store and google's pagespeed insight once a day for three days to get a nice spread of data to really compare the two platforms unfortunately i wasn't able to do this on this test and the reason for that was i could only find one store on the customer example sites with ecwid that was built using their instant website builder all the other customer example sites were either run on wix wordpress or squarespace and that wouldn't be a fair comparison so what i did to try and make some kind of comparison was i took the one example store and my demo store and ran through the same tests and i'll show you the results on screen now they are very close in terms of performance the only major difference is the google desktop scores where shopify was considerably better but they were pretty close but as this wasn't a completely fair test it was basically two websites against five i can't really call this one at draw because i haven't been able to test ecwid properly so almost a win by default on hosting and performance is shopify now before i give my final thoughts on these two platforms i do have a couple of quick requests for you the first one is if you found this video helpful i'd really appreciate if you could drop a like on the video because it really does help the channel out with the youtube algorithm also consider leaving a comment because i'm always interested in hearing other people's thoughts and finally if you'd like to support the channel you can do by buying me a coffee using the link in the description below and that is very much appreciated so when it comes to ecwid versus shopify which one is better for building an ecommerce website it's a clear win for shopify and it's not surprising shopify is designed from the ground up to be an all-in-one e-commerce platform whereas ecwid's focus is definitely more on being an e-commerce tool rather than being a stand-alone e-commerce website so that is why shopify is the clear winner on this one but as i mentioned earlier in the video if you'd like to try either of these platforms out for yourself you can do by using my links that are in the description below and as i said there are affiliate links which means i do earn a small commission if you purchase a pay plan through those links but no additional cost to you but it does make a big difference to me so thank you if you do go through my links so that brings me to the end of the video i hope you enjoyed it i hope you found it helpful and say if you have please drop a like on the video so make sure you stay awesome guys and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 14,021

Keywords: ecwid vs shopify 2021, ecwid vs shopify, ecwid review, shopify review, shopify vs ecwid, shopify alternative, ecwid alternatives, ecwid or shopify

Id: 2v_DBUYR1R0

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021