Ecwid vs Shopify - Which is the Better Ecommerce Platform?

Hi guys Paul here from e-commerce gold and in this video I will be comparing two of the world's largest and most popular e-commerce platforms ecwid and shopify and for this comparison I'm going to be looking at the price, the performance, what they like to use and also the quality of their support so make sure you stick around to the end of this video because there is a lot of information that I'm going to cover but for anything that I haven't covered in this video I will have covered that in my full written review which you can check out on e-commerce gold and I'll leave a link in the description below to that and the reason why I have missed some stuff out is because I don't want this video to be way too long because I do have a habit of talking quite a bit so with the introduction out of the way I'm going to jump into my computer to get this comparison started. Now as I said the first thing I'm going to be looking at is the pricing of these two platforms and for this comparison I've decided to go for two packages that are similar in terms of pricing and also the features and functionality that you get and this is the ecwid business package which is $35 a month and the Shopify basic package which is $29 a month now both platforms do have smaller and large packages but these two are the best in terms of straight head-to-head comparison which is why I've gone for them but what do you get with these two packages, well you get quite a lot with ecwid, you get up to 2,500 products that you can list on your website you also get unlimited bandwidth no turnover limit no transaction fees unlimited data storage and a free SSL certificate on your site now Shopify isn't too different in fact the only real difference is the fact that they have unlimited products but you do get charged a transaction fee now this transaction fee only applies for any payment that you receive where you're not using Shopify his own payment gateway Shopify payments so this would be on top of any payments received by I say PayPal or worldpay, klarna anything like that anything that's outside of the Shopify payments gateway you will be charged this additional 2% fee now this does decrease as you move up through the packages but on the basic package you will be charged this 2% so it's something you do want to bear in mind when you're figuring out how much your Shopify store is going to cost say for the year for example but the pricing is pretty similar ecwid is a little bit more expensive but this kind of counters out when you factor in the Shopify transaction fee so that is the raising of the two platforms now when I said I wasn't going to be covering features in this video but I actually do want to talk about the two main features of both of these platforms now with ecwid this is the ability to sell on multiple channels so you can sell by Facebook by Instagram you can also manage your Amazon and eBay stores directly within the ecwid dashboard this is a really good feature of the equity platform because it gives you kind of a central point to manage many many different channels whereas with Shopify one of their main features is the Shopify app store which is a combination of apps made by the Shopify team but also third-party developers and there's over 3,000 apps to choose from in the store which offer a variety of different functionality so if there's something that's missing from the Shopify platform there's a good chance there's an app out there that will fill that void whatever it is now with the Shopify app store unfortunately not all of these apps are free to use some of them do have free packages but if you want access to all the features you're probably going to have to go onto a paid plan once again it's something you want to consider when you're factoring in the cost of your Shopify store so I just wanted to briefly cover the two main features of these two platforms so that you get an idea of what these platforms have to offer if you want to see more about the features and not just listen to me reel them off the screen go and check out my written review at the end of this video don't skip it yeah but yeah go and check out my recent review cuz I do go into the features in a little bit more detail so bad the way I want to move on to the next thing which is the hosting and performance now it was a little bit difficult to actually do a direct comparison side-by-side with this in my usual testing method because what I usually do is take three customer example sites run them through Pingdoms speed test tool and to get a nice average spread of data that was a little bit difficult with ecwid and I'll explain why in a minute but what are these platforms offer in terms of hosting well they both have a really robust hosting system because they both offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited data storage so you never going to run out of storage with your product images or any kind of content that you want upon your site they also have PCI compliant servers so if you're using more traditional payment gateways that do require PCI compliance such as WorldPay or sagepay and this just makes becoming PCI compliance so much more easier because your servers are already PCI compliant it just reduces the amount of things you need to do as a website owner to become PCI compliant so just a bit of peace of mind and they both offer a global CDN which is great news because it means it doesn't matter where you're based or where your customers are base your website is going to be served up to them as quick as possible so not too much time with your customer sitting there waiting for your site's a load they also both have ninety-nine percent guaranteed uptime which is once again a very good thing because you want to know that your site's going to be reliable and working where people click on it now as I said I usually test these platforms out but it was a bit difficult with ecwid because as ecwid is a platform that integrates with other platforms a lot of the actual demo sites on the ecwid site are integrations with the lights of WordPress, WIx or Squarespace and actually I only found one site that was built on their own web building platform and this made doing a test quite difficult so they can only test one website but they still didn't start me testing it so what I did was I took that website I ran it through Pingdom speed test tool once a day for three days and you come up with an average load time of 1.05 seconds which is really really good but once again pays only for one site putting that up against Shopify and then should get three of their customer example website and I run you through exactly the same testing so I got a total of nine tests and that came out with an average load type of one point six zero seconds with as you can see on the screen the websites were all very good in terms of performance and one thing I do want to quickly note about ecwid was. I did test them with integrations with WordPress and Wix and they definitely didn't bog down those platforms either it was a very quick and very consistent low time but both these platforms done really really well and coming well under that golden two second window that you want an e-commerce sites are loading so really no issues when it comes to the hosting or performance of either platform so with that out of the way let's jump in and see what these two platforms that actually like to use cuz I'd imagine that's probably what you want to know isn't it so first off let's see what it's like to get started with both of these platforms now with both platforms is super easy to get started there's no credit card information required you just sign up with an email address and a password and you are good to go we've ecwid as well you do get a free package for life so you sign up to a free package and then you can upgrade to either the venture package which is their introductory package or the business package I've talked about in this post so you do get this free package and you get that for life we Shopify on the other hand you do get a free trial you get a 14-day free trial and if you want to check out either of these platforms for yourself I'll leave my partner links in the description below so you can go through and try them out for yourself because that's the best way to see if these platforms again it work for you and your business so once you've gone through the signup process you'll be taken into your dashboard and I'm going to show you what ecwid looks like first because it looks pretty much exactly like this and the equity dashboard is a really nice place to be it's really well laid out it's not overly complicated all of the sidebar navigation menus are clearly labeled and the sub menus pop out and they're also really well labeled it doesn't take long to get used to the ecwid dashboard and start navigating your way around the site really really quickly but also when you log into ecwid for the first time you'll be greeted by this startup guide and it's a pretty comprehensive guide because it takes you through pretty much everything you need to do in order to get your website set up properly now the only thing I think is missing from here is setting up your legal pages which are your terms and conditions and your privacy policy but that seems to be something that every single platform seems to overlook but this is a really good set of guide and it takes through as I say everything you really need to do to get your site set up properly and it'll also take you to the pages so you can actually see what it's like to use those pages it's not like some platforms but it kind of does it for you it actually shows you what these pages are like and allows you to work through it but what about Shopify well once again chef why it's really easy to get started and once you come into your Shopify dashboard for the first time you'll be greeted by this and I really like the Shopify dashboard because it's got a very almost minimalistic feel to it it really doesn't feel cluttered there's lots of nice space around so you don't feel like there's too much going on which can be up with some ecommerce platforms also it's got a really simple sidebar navigation and once again everything is clearly labeled as it is with ecwid this means it's really quick and really easy to get started with the Shopify dashboard now on your first signing you won't be greeted by this very short start up guide and I think this is really lacking in comparison to startup guides on the majority of other e-commerce platforms because it really doesn't give you the things you need to do to get started it doesn't get you to set up your payment gateways your delivery methods or anything like that in fact it's very very limited but it's a counter that shop if I have done something really really good they've actually created a video series which can access if you didn't see that by clicking on that learn more about getting started and this video series is a series of 27 videos which takes around one and a half hours to watch and it goes through everything you need to do in order to get your Shopify store set up properly and I've watched a few of these videos and there's lots of useful information in there just like my videos obviously and there's also a few great hints and tips in there as well because the person who's actually doing it which is this lady here has actually built a Shopify store and a shop for business herself as well as working for Shopify so she really doesn't know what she's talking about so those are the two dashboards they're really simple to use it really doesn't take a long time with either one to get up to speed and get up and running quickly with them but what's it like to actually use it in terms of e-commerce well the first thing I want to look at is adding our new products and actually managing your inventory in general now with ecwid they don't call them products instead they call them cut alike and you just go to and click on products and to add a new product you just click on the big blue button here add new products and it will bring up this page now they've gone for a hub structure along here so you work your way through the tabs and when you get to the end and once you're happy with it you just click add new products and you've added a new product to your imagery it's really simple and it's really easy to use and I do like the tab layout because it allows you to move from one section to the other really really simply but there are quite a few options here so you do have to go through a couple to really learn how to sell your products properly now once you've added a few products you want to organize your products because this is just going to make it so much easier for people to use your website it's also going to make it easier for search engines to index your websites they're going to understand what the hierarchy of your site is with ecwid this is really really easy to do yes I want to leave this page because you can add parent categories and subcategories they call them route categories but they work in the same way as parent categories so these are your top-level categories and you can add these really really simply and if you want to add a subcategory just click on a category that you've created and then add subcategory and then you can add a subcategory to this so I could add say test category then click Save and then you see underneath the main category is a new sub category and this makes it really easy to go through and organize your products and with equity it's really easy to add your products to the category because you can actually do it from the main category menu because you just click on the category product stubs and then assign products to their category this is really good because with the love platforms what you have to do is create the categories then go back in and edit your products so you can assign them to the categories and this just adds tines your workflow so being able to do this and being able to edit where your products are in the categories directly from the category menu is a really really good system and they do really like this but what I when it comes to actually managing your inventory so managing your stock levels because you wanna have to do this quickly and easily with your products unfortunately with ecwid there's no way in the correc we program to do this from the overview menu you have to go in and edit the products individually and if you have a large product inventory this can end up taking quite a lot of time especially if you have products that sell regularly and you need to update your products on a regular basis it's one thing I wish was improved with equity because it just kind of let the platform down a little bit not being able to do any kind of product editing in bulk because it does just save so much time when you're managing your store well what's it like to do this on Shopify our Shopify call their products products which is really simple just click on products then add new products now Shopify I've gone with a much simpler layer on their ad product page because it's just a single one page layout with a few sections within it this makes it really good for people who are brand new to ecommerce because it's not a daunting page you can just go through and work your way through the sections really quickly and really simply one thing I did just forget to mention with ecwid is that you can create physical digital or service based products all within the core platform which means there's lots of options when it comes to creating different products Shopify on the other hand allows you to create physical products and also service based products because what you can do is you can scroll down and you can actually turn off shipping for the product but to turn this into a digital products you will need to install an additional app and there is one from Shopify that allows you to do that and I'm sure there's probably third-party ones that allow you to do it as well but as with ecwid this gives you lots of flexibility in terms of the types of products you can't sell but what about when it comes to organizing your products workshop I have developed their own system which they call collections and this isn't as straightforward as some other category based systems out there let me explain why so you click the Creator collection button and it will bring up this page which has a very similar look to that add new product page but then you need to select what type of collection you want this to be and manual mode operates in a very similar way to a typical category system in the fact that you just add a product to that collection most really simply it's really easy to do but the automated one takes a little bit of getting used to because it actually works off product tags that you add when you're creating or editing your product and then you can set up rules around these product tags and say this takes a little bit of time getting used to and if you do want to use this method it's worth reading through the documentation and watching a few videos on it so you really understand how to do it because if you just come in and try and do it yourself there's a good chance you'll probably get it wrong I know I did when I first tried to do it so there's the collection system with Shopify the manual one is very simple and very easy to use that automated does take a little bit of time getting used to but another quirk we shall fight is that creating subcollections is then completely straightforward and this is because there's no way to do it with in the create collection page or even going in and editing their collection and to create sub collection you actually have to go in and edit your navigation bar which is a little bit unusual so you go into your online store click navigation and then click on main menu and then to create a sub collection what you need to do is actually add the collection under an existing heading so as I've done here I've added a test collection and I've added it under catalog this is the way you create sub collections within Shopify it's not straightforward as it is with ecwid where you've got a complete tab within the category creation menu you have to do it this way and it just is a little bit of a strange workflow in some ways and it's not immediately evident how you do this without somebody actually telling you how to do it so you go I just told you how to do it so that is the quartz with the Shopify collection system it can work really really well you just need to learn exactly how to do it but what about when it comes to managing your imagery well a shop might have created a separate tab called inventory and what you can do is you can quickly and easily add and remove stock quantity and this is really really good because it allows you to manage your inventory in bulk unfortunately this is the only thing you can do within the imagery management page there's nothing else you can do so you can't update the pricing or product ID or SKU code or anything like that all you can do is come in and edit the quantity but it's still better than nothing and it's still better than what you get with ecwid so that is how you manage your inventory on both the platforms now the next thing i want to talk about is managing your orders because it's probably going to be where you spend most of your time when you're not either adding imagery or marketing your shop now ecwid has one of the best order management systems of any e-commerce platform in my opinion so to manage your orders in Ecuador we do is go to my sales and then you'll bring up this order overview page this is a really good system and I'll show you why because you can do so much in bulk you can mass update you can print them off you can export them you can change payment status you can change fulfillment status and you can also delete them this is one of the best systems out there as I've already said if there's not many that allow you to do this many things from the main menu and allow you to do so much in bulk but you can also go through and do this on an individual order basis it just makes managing your orders so easy to do by having all these options especially if you're going to be having a large number of orders you want to be able to manage them quickly and easily but what's this like with Shopify well this is something that is a bit of a letdown in Shopify for me because even though there is some things you can do in bulk the main thing that for me I always wanted to do when I was when an e-commerce thought was to print orders off directly from the order overview menu and directly in bulk and you can't do this with Shopify you actually need to install an additional app to do this there's no way to do it in the core Shopify and it's a bit of a letdown for me but there are some things you can do directly within the order management menu what you can do is you can catch a payment or you can fulfill the orders which is changing the order status and you can also export the orders if you're using a third-party management system and this is really good but he's just missing that one crucial thing for me which he's been able to print your orders off in bulk because to me that's just basic ecommerce functionality and I'm surprised Shopify doesn't have that so that's what it's like to manage that basically the e-commerce aspect of the two platforms so it's like to manage your products and what it's like to manage your orders but what he liked to actually customize the look and feel of your site because it's really important when it comes to creating a good quality ecommerce site he's been able to make it look and feel unique to your brand well ecwid is a little bit lacking in this regard for me because it's not the main focus of the ecwid platform is the theme customization and to customize the look and feel of your website you go into the sales channels website then click on edit site and it'll bring up this like live preview of what your site looks like now initially when you go into this editor and you click on themes it looks like there's lots of different themes you can choose from for your ecwid site but these are actually only changing the headers it's not changing the full theme and full look of your website because this just changes the top section which is this bit here when you actually scroll down it doesn't change any of the Paige and I'll actually show you what I mean by these so this is the theme that I've selected so you can see that my navigation menus here I've got an image going on here and a bit of information there so if I wanted to change say to this theme here click on use this theme all it's done is change this top bit as you scroll down the rest of the page is exactly the same it doesn't change the look of the whole website just changes this header section but you can control the sections that are on your site so you can see I've got featured products here there's also a bit of content and about us and you go into this section here click arrange sections and you can remove these as you want if you wanted to remove the custom and the testimonial you could and you could add it back in now you've only got these sections that you can choose from for your site there's no additional ones that you can actually bring in which is a little bit disappointed to me I would like to see a few more sections so you could really customize the feel of the front page of your website because it'd be nice to add some custom touches and not have it look like every other ecwid site that's out there but there are a few more like little tweaks you can do to the ecwid site so if you come off these and actually go into the design section you can actually start editing some of the layout elements so you can change your image size you can change your aspect ratio you can change how you want your cars to be displayed so if you want your lines on the left or you want it aligned in the center all these little tweaks that you can make you can also choose what you want to show and what you don't want to show you can also change your product page of appearance as well so you can change all these different ways so you can have it customize how you want it to this is really good and it's something that not a lot of other platforms actually allow you to do is create all these different layouts of your site so while the front page is a little bit lacking in terms of theme customization throughout the rest of the site there's actually quite a lot of things you can do which is a nice little feature but what's this like to do with Shopify my Shopify has always been renowned for being really good when it comes to design and it really doesn't let you down so if you go on to online store click on themes then click on customize it'll take you to the Shopify customizer which is in my opinion one of the best all out there because it allows you to do so much with the home page of your site you can add and remove sections as you want there's also access to a stock image library which is great if you're just starting out let me show you what this is actually like so if you go on this you can select an image and you can go on free images and you have access to all of these free stock images which is really really good so if you wanted to add this image for example I've got a free high-quality image that's padding out the content of my site then I can add custom text then custom content to the front page so we'll confirm that one and it is there's just so much you can do with the front page of your website because you can add and remove these sections as you want as I've already said and it just gives you so much control over the front page of your site the only thing with the Shopify customizer for me is this functionality isn't extended through the rest of your site so if you wanted to create a custom about me page for example you are quite limited because it doesn't give you access to these sections see there's just not a lot I can do and if you actually go into the create page section of the Shopify dashboard all it allows you to do is add a couple of images because it's a very basic text editor so it would be nice if Shopify would expand this they're great customizer to the rest of their sites it would just give you so much control of the look and feel of your website but still saying that the homepage editor is really really good and he is one of the best halls out there now when it comes to the amount of things available Shopify is really really good because not only within the Shopify ecosystem but also outside of it there are a lot of themes to choose from and it really is a great selection so if we come out of the theme editor and go back into the dashboard so if you scroll down you can choose from the free themes which there is nine to choose from or you can actually visit the shop about themes thought which has got a really good selection or you can go to place like theme forest that has ones made by third-party developers there's just so many different themes available now a lot of these are paid for within the shop by theme store they range from 140 to 180 dollars which is really actually quite cheap for a good quality premium theme and under lights of theme virus the range of prices is far greater on the Shopify theme store now the next thing I want to talk about is support because it's one of the reasons why people choose fully hosted ecommerce platforms is because they've got access to a support team it's not like going with lots of WordPress WooCommerce Open Cart any of these where you're on your own with a fully hosted e-commerce platform you do have access to their support teams which is really good now ecwid do have a really good selection when it comes to support so goes back into the equity dashboard click on the get help icon in the corner and it'll bring up a list of all the help articles which can easily access a video on the specific topic you're looking at so the page you're looking at they've created lots of videos to help you out and then you can contact the support directly underneath so you can contact them via email via live chat or via the phone now the phone is not 24/7 unfortunately it's only available 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Pacific time so if you live anywhere else in the world it can mean the times are very almost inconvenient for you but live chat and email support is available 24/7 which is really really good and the response you get is always really good from the team I've contacted them and I've had really good helpful responses Shopify on the other hand offer 24/7 support to all of their users which is really really good the only thing is actually accessing their support it's not as simple as that grid where you've got that sidebar that appears in your dashboard you actually have to go and almost hunt for it within Shopify so to contact Shopify support what you need to do is click on the icon in the corner of your dashboard click on Shopify help center it'll bring up this page you then want to scroll all the way down to the bottom click contact Shopify support type in a search term so it's type contact Search that scroll down and contact retail support and then it will display all the options that you can use to actually contact them now I kind of understand why they do this because they've got lots of users but it's still a bit of a faff to actually get through to find out how to actually contact someone and if you needed to contact someone really really quickly who's having a really frustrating time just these extra steps can make it really quite infuriating to actually contact their support now with Shopify they do also have a community support forum as well which is a great source of not only information but also there's lots of very knowledgeable people actually frequency including Shopify support team members and also just general members of the community or either developers or specialists in the Shopify system so this makes the community support form a very useful resource when it comes to finding information and also asking non-urgent questions so my conclusion of the two platforms which one is the better option now as this comparison is just the echo platform against Shopify I do have to give the edge to Shopify on this one because to me is just a more complete website builder so if you're looking to build an e-commerce site completely from scratch Shopify just has more tools to an able you to do this but as a caveat to that if you throw ecwid in with the lights of WordPress it becomes a completely different story because WordPress really does fill the areas where ecwid is lacking as a standalone website builder but that is a completely different conversation as I say but the to just straight-up heads a head he does just go to Shopify know as I said at the start I have covered this in more detail in my written review which you can check out on e-commerce GOG - I'll leave a link in the description below - and also you can check out these two platforms by

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 14,630

Keywords: Ecwid vs Shopify, Shopify vs Ecwid, Shopify Alternative, Shopify Alternative Free, Ecommerce Comparison, shopify review, ecwid review

Id: 1vi1RMFHNKg

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020