Ecwid vs WooCommerce - Which is the best Ecommerce Plugin for WordPress?

what's up guys Paul here from e-commerce gold and in this video I'm gonna be talking about whether Ecwid or WooCommerce is the better ecommerce plugin for a WordPress website now these are two of the most popular e-commerce plugins for the WordPress platform but they achieve bringing ecommerce functionality to WordPress in different ways because with ecwid all of your ecommerce elements is your product pages your category pages and your checkout are all hosted on ecwid servers they're not hosted directly on your website but then what they do is they integrate into the WordPress system which is a pretty seamless integration which I'll show you later on in this video whereas WooCommerce on the other hand actually adapts the WordPress coding to allow you to create product pages category pages and a checkout directly on your WordPress site and it's this difference that leads me perfectly on to the first part of the comparison which is pricing so I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into my computer and carry on with this comparison so as I said the first thing is pricing now as a ecwid is a fully hosted ecommerce platform to get access to all the e-commerce features you do need to be on one their pay plans they do have a free plan but it is limited to 10 products and you don't get access to every e-commerce feature so that's why for this comparison video I'm actually gonna be looking at one of their pay plans which is their entry-level plan which is called the venture package and this cost $15 a month if you pay monthly or $12.50 a month if you pay annually now if this isn't enough for you they do have two larger packages they have the business package which is $35 a month and the unlimited packet which is $99 a month and you do get so means on them if you buy those annually as well but why do you get with the venture package you get to add up to 100 products into your store you also get no turnover limits and no transaction fees outside of your payment gateway fees which I think's really good you also get unlimited data storage now this might not seem a lot but as all of your ecommerce elements at your product pages and category pages are hosted on ecwid servers all of your product images your category images are also going to be hosted on ecwid servers so having this unlimited data storage is really useful because you know you're not going to have to worry about run out of storage just because you've got too many pictures for your products you also get a free SSL certificate with their equity echo so all of your checkout pages are secured by an SSL certificate if you run it on the rest of your site you're going to have to install an SSL certificate on your main wordpress site now comparing that to WooCommerce were commerce is free to use as far as I know it always has been and there's no plans to charge for it in the future and that's because it's owned by the guys who own WordPress it was actually brought by them a few years ago and he's basically become the official ecommerce plug-in for the WordPress platform and with the WooCommerce plug-in you get unlimited products there's no turnover limit and there's no transaction fees but your bandwidth your data storage and whether or not you have an SSL certificate it's all down to your web host because as I said before WooCommerce is actually directly in your WordPress site so it all depends on your WordPress House's - how much of an allowance you get with these things and whether or not you get a free SSL certificate so with the pricing out of the way why I'm gonna talk about next is the features and I'm wrong in dudes I'm gonna scroll down the page I'm on by the way if you want to check out this this is my full comparison my fault written comparison I'll leave a link in the description below or you can go to ecommerce gold code at UK and search for it on there this is my full written comparison and I've gone into quite a bit of detail in this so he's worth check you know because there may be one or two things I might miss it in this video but with ecwid you do get a lot of e-commerce features and I say this is all on the basic package as you move up through the bigger packages you do get more features but for this video I'm just sticking with the venture package and what you get in terms of e-commerce tools is you get one type check out but this is only using Apple pay and fourthly it doesn't apply to other payment gateways as of yet this may change in the future depending on how things develop you also get to shed your order pickup this is great if you are a local business so if you're a traditional kind of bricks and mortar store this may be absolutely brilliant for you if you're something like a florist or even something like a butcher's anything where people can come order direct from your website and then come in and pick it up from your store it's a great feature in its cement that's not available on that many e-commerce platforms he can also sell physical products and digital products you can also offer discount code so if you want to send these out over email marketing or have special promotions you can do that you can also buy gift cards from you as well so you can encourage repeat business and as I said before you get a secure checkout the next thing talks about marketing and this is one of the great features of the area platform is because it's such a versatile platform it allows you to sell on multiple different channels so you can sell by your website you can also expand this to sell by Facebook via Instagram so if you have large audiences on there you can sell directly through these platforms you don't have to try and encourage them to come through your website to make the perch as they can just buy directly through their social media you can also sell directly with Amazon there's quite a few integrations with ecwid it's worth checking them out because it's a kind of Swiss Army knife of e-commerce when it comes to how many platforms you can actually sell on using the central point that is ecwid it really is a good platform in that way you can also create custom metadata so you can create custom titles and custom meta descriptions as well any auto generates SEO friendly URLs which is really useful and it's great for SEO and it really does complement what you get a standard from the WordPress platform in terms of SEO it also has a good number of reporting features you can see how many visitors you've had while the revenue each conversion rate number of orders things like that pretty typical kind of e-commerce analytics now one of the things that does make ecwid stand out from WooCommerce is the amount of payment gateways you go because ecwid is really a global platform there are so many different payment gateways that are integrated with the ecwid platform some of the main ones include PayPal stripe WorldPay Square Apple pay through stripe authorized.net these are big name payment gateways and there are lots more than that and if you want to check it out I'll leave a link to ecwid in the description below so you can go check it out and see all the payment gateways they offer because they really do offer a lot of payment gateways and these are all integrated into the ecwid platform so you can start using these straightaway also with ecwid you do get access to that marketplace now this is full of a few apps that's made by third-party developers that adds different functionality to the ecwid platform I'm not going to go too much into detail in this video but if you want to know more about that then check out my ecwid review because I do a full review that's Percy on the equity platform if you want to check that out I'll leave a link in the card up here or up here one of them so that's ecwid so what do you get with WooCommerce well as you can see we're commerce is a little bit like when it comes to e-commerce features when it comes to e-commerce tools you can sell physical and digital product you can also sell multi variation products as well and you can create discount code which you can send out via email newsletters or social media promotion when it comes to the marketing and SEO if very much piggy backs off the WordPress platform because you get access to the blog which you do with ecwid as well and it creates SEO friendly URLs as long as you set your permalinks up properly within WordPress other than that it's pretty limited now they have added a new analytics feature into the WordPress plugin which is a massive improvement over the old analytics which were not that great to be honest but with the new analytics you can see sales by date by products by category you can also see your ratio of registered customers versus guest customers which is always useful now another thing that is lacking with the WooCommerce plug-in is the number of payment gateways as standard you just get paypal standard that's the only actual payment gateway that's integrated with the court WooCommerce plugin if you want any additional payment gateways you have to install additional plugins so if you want to stripe you're gonna have to install an additional plug-in even if you want PayPal Express Checkout you're gonna have to install an additional plugin and this is something that if you're not careful can actually start slowing your site down by the amount of plugins that some websites will need in order to get WooCommerce to work really effectively because every plug-in you installed on the site is more drain on your website servers so you do need to be careful the amount of plugins you do actually install with WordPress now you may notice that there's a few big names missing from here such as WorldPay and sage Bay and the reason why I left them off this list is because if you want to have them on your WooCommerce sorry you do need to buy the plug-in from WooCommerce and these plugins aren't particularly cheap they run at $79 each and that is one of the things that can cause we commerce to become quite expensive is sometimes you will need to use premium plugins not everything it will be available via a free plug-in and you're not careful using too many paid premium plugins cameras on your WooCommerce like becoming quite expensive quite quickly but talking about plugins let's look at one of the main features of WooCommerce and WordPress in general and that's the plug-in library now I don't a quick search in the WordPress plug-in library now these are all the free plugins that are available directly within your WordPress dashboard I don't a quick search and you can see that it generates over 7,000 results that contain the word will comment somewhere in there as a keyword that's a lot of plugins and this shows how popular and also versatile the WooCommerce plug-in is because there's a lot you can do with WooCommerce and you can create so much more than a basic ecommerce website you can create booking websites you can create membership sites subscription sites even multi-vendor marketplaces can be created using the WooCommerce plug-in as a base but as I mentioned earlier you do need to be careful with the amount of plug-in to you actually install because they can't put a serious drain on your site's resources and what this can do is this can really affect your site's performance to your low types can be affected and it becomes more and more difficult to actually optimize your WooCommerce site effectively so that is something you do want to bear in mind so that's the features and the pricing of the two plugins and now I'm going to move on to which I'm guessing you probably wished I would've moved on to already is what these two plugins are actually like to use on WordPress now I'm going to start with ecwid because it's ecwid versus will commerce so what you need to do is go to equity um or I'll leave a link in the description below which you can click on that and it'll take you straight there what you need to do is you actually need to sign up with ecwid first so you need to click on and get started and it will come up with a sign up box where all you need to do is enter your email address and a password and you'll set you up a free account so once you've been through the signup process you'll be taken into your equity dashboard which looks pretty much exactly like this and why you'd be greeted with is something that will feel quite familiar if you're used to using WordPress because the layer is pretty similar to the WordPress dashboard you'll also be greeted by this quite comprehensive set of guide which will take you through how to integrate ecwid with your website in this case WordPress also take you through how to set up your products how to set up your settings at set up your delivery methods and your payment options a really good introductory guide and you get used to hide the equius system works how the equity dashboard works but once you've done that once you've got yourself signed up and you've got yourself kind of accustomed to using ecwid what you want to do is go into your WordPress website so go into your WordPress dashboard go into plugins click on add new and then type in equity and you want to look for this one here which is by ecwid ecommerce as you can see I've already installed it what you want to do is click install then click activate what it will do is it will activate the ecwid plug-in on your website so once you've installed the plug-in and activate it what you want to do is you want to click connect your store it will then ask you if you want to connect your ecwid account to your WordPress account so you just click accept and what it'll do is it will import all the information from the ecwid dashboard directly into the wordpress dashboard once it loads now as you can see it's literally brought the whole ecwid dashboard in it looks exactly the same and this is one of the things that's really good with ecwid the integration between ecwid and WordPress is absolutely fantastic and as you can see you've got everything here that you've got in your ecwid dashboard and it makes the setup process really easy and really quick to actually get started with ecwid on WordPress but how do you get started with WooCommerce why it's very much the same with anybody who's used to using WordPress will know that you need to go to the plug-in library and install the plug-in so you install it click activate and then when it loads it will have installed the plug-in for you as you can see it's a pivot here and then you get these new options in the WordPress sidebar now when you've installed your work on most plugin it will ask you if you want to go through the set or guide and it's worth going through because it sets up your kind of business information you can set your PayPal standard or set up a basic delivery method things like that it's good but it doesn't actually show you how to do this in WooCommerce he just kind of does it for you whereas with equity choice like to actually sell products set up all your settings what it's like when you actually go in and do that for yourself so you do learn more from the ecwid setup guide than you do from the WooCommerce setup guide if that makes sense so once you've been through the setup process with WooCommerce you can then go and start adding products and that's the next thing I want to talk about is managing your treating these two plugins now with WooCommerce it's really simple to add a new product just go on products add new and it'll bring got this menu now anybody who's used WordPress for a while will recognize this lags because it's based on the classic editor not the new Guttenberg block editor he's very simple and very well laid out so you just add your product name your main description your products information and then your short description so why is that two descriptions while the main description sits below your products images whereas the short description sits next to your product images if you're looking on a website and I'll show you what this looks like in the front-end a little bit later in the video so that's how simple it is to add a new product into WooCommerce and organizing your products is equally as simple you just click on categories you can then create or edit categories as you feel like you and within WooCommerce you can create parent categories and child categories this is really great for organizing your inventory especially if you have a large selection of products because sometimes you need category within a category it just makes it so much easier not only for you as a store owner to be able to navigate around your products but also easier for your customers to navigate around your site to find the ideal product that they're looking for so that's how easy is to set up your product categories and organize your products so what about what it's like to actually manage your inventory well where commerce has got one of the best product management setups I've actually come across and it's actually based off the quick editor which anybody who's used WordPress before will know about it when it comes to editing posts or editing pages the quick editor is a really useful tool within WooCommerce it allows you to change the title the URL you can also change the SKU of it if you've got it so you manage your inventory it'll also come up with an inventory option here as well so you can add or remove products you can also change the price as well or from this main overview menu and you can also change the product category as well this makes it really easy to manage your inventory without having to go in and edit each product on an individual basis just makes life so much easier especially if you've got a large inventory because there's nothing worse than having to go in and edit products individually or you've got lots of products so that's one of the things that is really good with WooCommerce is this quick edit system just makes so much easier so that's how easy it is to manage your inventory within WooCommerce but what's it like to do this within ecwid well err quit has a really good system as well if you just go into your equity dashboard which is under the equity tab navigate to catalog and then product it will bring up a list of all your products now to add a new product you just click on the big blue add new product button now it has got a different layer to that of WooCommerce and in some ways visually to me it does look a bit better because it's a bit more easier on the eyes than the classic editor in WordPress which does look a bit dated these days but other new products in ecwid is really really easy you just add the name SKU add your description assign the products of a category add your price and then you work your way through the different tabs to get it all set up and then when you're ready to go you just click add new products then he adds that product to your inventory it's a really simple process and the layers really good and it has got a good workflow to it so what's it like to organize your products on ecwid well it's very similar into the way you do it on WooCommerce because they use the same kind of category system so if you just click on categories leave this page because I don't to save that product and you'll see an overview of your categories and as you can see you can add main categories but they call them root categories and you can also add subcategories and this makes it really easy to organize your products exactly the way you would on with commerce into parent and child categories if you have got a large inventory it just makes it so much easier to organize your product but where equity is not quite as good as we converse is when it comes to managing your inventory because there's no way to edit the products from the product overview page if you want to edit the product you have to click the Edit product button and it will take you back into the product where you can make all the changes this is not as good as we Commerce and if you do have a large inventory this could mean a lot of time spent updating your products it's one thing I do which a group will change and it's one thing that would make a massive difference to the equity platform so that's how you manage your inventory so what about when it comes to your orders because that's the section where the majority of ecommerce businesses will spend their time if they're not adding products they'll be spending time managing their orders and ecwid has one of the best order management systems I have come across well they're not very good at managing the products in the overview menu managing your orders is really really easy to do so you just navigate to my sales then click on orders and what it will do is it'll bring up a summary of all the orders you've taken and there's so many things you can do in this main order overview page what you can do is select the product mass update you can print it you can export it you can change the payment status you can change the fulfillment status or you can delete the order there's just so much you can do directly from this menu there's no reason to actually go into the order information screen you just don't need to do because pretty much everything is doable in the order overview screen and say this is one of the best order management systems I have come across when all the platforms are reviewed but what's it like to manage your orders on WooCommerce well unfortunately this is something that my commerce doesn't do very well at all especially in its standard form because if you can't to manage your order so you don't work on mass and then click on orders there's not much you can do from this order overview menu in fact there's not much you can do with your orders for stop now all you can do in the standard WooCommerce is update the status you can't print the orders off you can't export them to add that functionality you need to install additional plugins this just adds more bulk to your website even though you do need this functionality I really don't get why we're commerce hasn't integrated these kind of features into the core plugin because every ecommerce site needs this functionality so I just don't get why they don't do this so it's a really big letdown on the WooCommerce side but fortunately there are a lot of great free plugins that do add this functionality and one that I always recommend to anybody who's installing WooCommerce he's working as PDF invoices and packing slips and he just transforms the order management within WooCommerce it just makes it from pretty much unusable to actually being able to run an effective e-commerce store with all so if you want to export it as well there are additional plugins that you can get for that as well and there are good free ones out there that you can use so that's all the back end things of these two plugins always like to get them started White's like to use them whites like to manage your inventory always like to manage your orders with them but what do they look like on the front end because this is a really important thing because you want to know that your products are going to display well now this is one of the things with WooCommerce so those just go into the front end of my demo site with WooCommerce you do need to get a theme that supports will ecommerce because it doesn't work with everything out there some things have no integration some have limited integrations some are created specifically for WooCommerce so this doesn't narrow your theme selection so if you've got a theme that doesn't support WooCommerce you are gonna have to change your theme to one that does but where commerce generally looks really good in the front end so this is your shop category page and this is your product page now it depends on the theme you've got you may be able to edit this page and you may be able to remove the sidebars and change the layer of these slightly but say it all does depend on the theme you're using but what does ecwid look like but let's go into my heck restore go into the front end click on the store and it does look pretty similar to what commerce now the beauty of ecwid is it works with any theme you don't need a specific theme in order to work in fact they claim it will work with every single WordPress theme out there because unlike WooCommerce that actually uses core WordPress code ecwid doesn't all of equites coding is done externally then it's integrated into your site and as you can see the integration is pretty seamless well the product pages look really good now you can edit the layer of your pages within ecwid and this can all be done directly in your dashboard so if you just go back into your dashboard click on storefront and click on edit your appearance it'll bring up the pages that equities aren't and you can edit the layout of your product pages your category pages and your main store page so if you've got a storefront page similar to this one which is display all your products you can go and edit this and say it doesn't matter which theme you're using you'll be able to use ecwid and it will display exactly how you want it to which is another advantage of it over will commerce because we're commerce is themed specific so my conclusion which one is the better ecommerce plugin for WordPress well if you're just going to be running a basic business to customer ecommerce store light majority of e-commerce stores are for me ecwid does get the nod over WooCommerce just because you get all the functionality and advantages of having a fully hosted shopping car directly in your WordPress site along with not having to worry about theme conflicts and also having to worry about plugging conflicts either because all the updates of the ecwid system are taken care of by ecwid and then you just have to update one plugin rather than to update lots of plugins when it comes to WooCommerce updates and for me it's just a little bit easier to use as well because all the e-commerce features and functionalities there yes it is missing the ability to manage your inventory from the product overview page but that's the only real thing that's missing in my opinion from ecwid everything else is there and for me it's that perfect marriage of a fully hosted e-commerce platform with a self hosted WordPress site and it all comes together and it just works seamlessly I've tested it out on a few different sites of mine and it does it just works I do really like it plus you get the advantage that you can sell across multiple channels using one core system so you can sell by your WordPress site you can sell by Facebook Instagram Amazon Google and manage it all just from your ecwid site and you can actually manage that directly in your WordPress dashboard because it brings the equi dashboard into your WordPress site he just works and it works really really well but if you're building anything other than a basic kind of business to customer ecommerce site then we're commerce his definitely worth consideration because it is so versatile and there's so many different options you can create when it comes to WooCommerce and say you can create booking sites membership sites subscription sites multi vendor sites it has lots of possibilities when it comes to the amounts of things you can do with it but it does require a lot of plugins and almost a lot of moving parts to get it working perfectly and it can become a bit difficult to optimize WooCommerce properly especially if you've got lots of plugins going on you also need to make sure that your theme is WooCommerce compatible so that is my conclusion that ecwid if you're just running a normal ecommerce store is the better option when it comes to adding ecommerce functionality to WordPress so I hope you enjoyed this video sorry if it's a bit long but I did want to cover this in as much depth as I could if there's more stuff you want to read about this then you can check out my full written review which I'll leave a link to in the description below I'll also leave my links to accrete and WooCommerce that you can go and check those guys out as well so thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed it if you have please hit that like button because it really does help the channel out also if you're interested in content like this please consider hitting that subscribe button so once again guys thank you for watching stay awesome and I'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 4,516

Keywords: Ecwid vs WooCommerce, WooCommerce vs Ecwid, Ecwid WordPress, WooCommerce WordPress, WordPress Ecommerce, WordPress Ecommerce Website, ecwid review, online store

Id: vOSRvcd5RDc

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020