EKM Review 2021 - A Good UK Alternative to Shopify?

what's up guys i'm paul and welcome to my channel so it's been a while since i did a review of ekm in fact it's been over a year and as there's been some changes to the econ platform in that time i thought it was about time i sat down and did an updated review now for anybody who doesn't know who ekm are or are just unsure of who they are they are the uk's largest fully hosted e-commerce platform and they've currently helped over 80 000 individuals and small businesses start selling online here in the uk and they are a uk focused and dedicated company so if you're looking for an alternative to something like shopify for your uk based business then ekm is a company that you should consider but are they any good well that's why i'm here doing a review i'm going to give my opinion on the ekm platform i'm going to look at things like the pricing an overview of what you get for your money and then i'm actually going to delve in and see what the ecam platform is like to use before giving my opinions at the end of the video as to whether you should consider it or not so with the instruction out of the way let's jump in and start looking at the ekm platform so the first i'm going to talk about is the pricing of the ekm platform and in september 2021 ekm updated their prices and now the prices for their basic package cost 34.99 a month the standard package is 69.99 a month the advanced package is 209.99 a month and the pro package which is their top package is 599 pound and 99 a month that's a lot of nines but this new updated pricing does mean that ekm is now one of the more expensive options when it comes to launching an e-commerce website especially at the entry level with the basic package being more expensive a month than their competition and with all the ekm packages you do also get turnover-based pricing which means you have an allocation of turnover every single year and when you go over this you are automatically moved up to the next package and with the basic package this starts at 50 000 pounds a year when you go into the standard this goes up to 150 000 pound a year on the advanced package this is up to one million pound year in annual sales and then the pro package is a million pound plus there's no kind of upper limit on that but what do you actually get for your money well ekm offer a lot of features and there's a combination of features that are built into the platform and also features that you can customize and install yourself so you can kind of pick and choose if you want to now i'm not going to go through all of the econ features because there's loads as you can see this is my full written review of ekm and there's a lot of features i'm not going to go over these individually because it basically just be me reading off the screen which would be really really boring and this review is probably going to be long enough anyway but if you want to go and check out my detailed breakdown of these features i will leave a link to my full written review in the description below so you can go and check those out for yourself but one thing i do want to talk about when it comes to the econ features is their evolution mode which is a rather innovative thing that ekm actually come up with a few years ago and it is a really cool feature because the evolution mode is where you actually get the use of ecom's evolution team which is a team of specialists across many different departments things like design sales and marketing conversion rates there's lots of experts within that team and what you do is you actually go into your dashboard and you request a review from the evolution team and what they do is they go through and have a look at your website and come up with some recommendations for your site that maybe could improve your website potentially start getting you more sales or just make your website more profitable and they'll give you a list of these recommendations and then you go through and see which ones you want to implement and ones you don't and then once you give them the green light they will go through and do it for you now this is only if you're on the standard advanced or the pro package if you're on the basic package you'll get this review but it's up to you to go through and implement those changes for yourself and it does also depend on the package you're on as well as to how regularly you get to request this review from the evolution team if you're on the basic or the standard package you get this once a year but if you're on the advanced package you get this once a month which is like having your own team of e-commerce experts that you can go and send your site to and say what can i be doing better and when you go onto the pro package you get unlimited requests so if you wanted to you could probably do this on a weekly basis well that's what you're paying for but this is a really good feature in my opinion because sometimes just having a third party look at your website go through it and give a proper critical analysis of it can uncover some things that you might not see yourself i've had this with my own websites in the past where i thought that was amazing somebody else has gone on and using why doesn't this work or what's wrong with this so having a third party actually look at your site and then be able to actually produce recommendations that they can then implement for you is a really good feature in my opinion now following on from evolution mode it leads me quite nicely into sport because when you're using a fully hosted ecommerce platform you want to know that there's a support team behind you should you run into any issues that you could contact so hopefully they can resolve the issue for you and ecamm certainly isn't short of options when it comes to support and their support is also really highly rated if you can read any of their customer reviews with things like trustpilot it's one of the kind of messages that always comes through is how good the quality of their support is and i've contacted ekm support a few times with my own demo site when i've had questions about how to do certain things and i've had quick and good responses from whoever i've spoke to at ekm and i've never struggled to get in contact with them either and when it comes to contacting them there are quite a few options available because in your ekm dashboard there's a live chat icon in the bottom right hand corner if you go into the help section you can also contact support and they do allow support via phone and also email as well and support is available between 8 am and 6 pm monday to friday and 9 a.m and 5 30 p.m on saturday and sunday so you do get seven day support between regular business hours here in the uk which is really good now if you're on the advanced or the pro package you do also get 24 7 emergency support as well so should anything go wrong with your site at one o'clock in the morning you can contact ekm and they will do their best to try and resolve the issue for you another thing with ecam as well is whenever you sign up to ekm you will get a 30 minute introductory call from one of the ekm team to help you through getting your site set up which i think is really good and you also get to ask any questions that you have about the econ platform in this introductory phone call and then if you move up onto the standard package you also get your own dedicated account manager for six months and if you go onto the advanced or pro package you get your own dedicated account manager permanently as well and talking about signing up to ekm is something i should have covered in the pricing section is the free trial you get when you sign up to ekm now ecam have been really generous and given me a unique referral link which gives you a 28 day free trial over the standard 14 day free trial so you get to try the platform out for four weeks to really test it to see if it's going to work for you and your business now when it comes to actually signing up for the trial you do need to give your payment details before you actually can sign up to this free trial and if you decide that you want to cancel the free trial ecamm isn't for you you do need to let ekm know and you can do this by either contacting the support team and just letting them know that you want to cancel the trial or you can actually do it from the dashboard i'm not 100 sure where it is because i did try this but it was a while ago and i've forgotten so if i think it's if you go into settings and then you go down to your plan i think there's an option in here to cancel your trial but it should be in the settings section somewhere that's where i found it and it will just ask for your reasons as to why you want to cancel the free trial now before i get into what the ekm platform is actually like to use i do just want to quickly look at the performance of the ek and platform because i have tested it out like i do with every single ecommerce platform i test so if we go onto my written review scroll down it's somewhere down here somewhere yes here we go ekm or web hosting and performance and when it comes to the hosting environment that ekm offers you get unlimited bandwidth unlimited storage pci compliant servers 99.9 uptime and also 24 7 server monitoring which all sounds great but what's this actually mean in reality well i put them to the test by taking five of their customer example sites running them through pingdom's speed test tool using their london server and also google's page speed insight to check their mobile and also desktop performances so how did ekm do well they did really really well because their average load time was 1.12 seconds which put them towards the top of the charts of all the platforms i tested and honestly anything around about a second is absolutely great when it comes to load time mobile score was also good at 55 out of 100 obviously i'd like this to be a little bit higher because of mobile is becoming more and more important when it comes to e-commerce lots of people are using their mobile devices and the desktop score was really good at 83 out of 100 and overall as i say these scores put them towards the top of the tables when it comes to e-commerce performance testing for uk platforms so with the performance out the way let's actually look at what ecam is like to use because i'd imagine that's what you want to know so let's go into the ecm dashboard and when you first sign into ecam you'll be greeted by this home page now this is a short setup guide that's available and there is more options available when you first sign up there's actually six you can choose from and you can see these options here but i've already been through and done some because obviously i've been testing the platform out and this is a really good basic guide to help you get started there's only one thing missing from this and this is something that pretty much all ecommerce platforms seem to miss from their setup guides and that is to set up your terms and conditions and your privacy policy i think this is a prompt that should be there because it's a legal part of setting up an e-commerce website you need these two documents in place before you actually go live with your website so prompts to these would be nice to see but overall the ecam dashboard is quite a nice place to be and it's quite different from a lot of other e-commerce platforms that just go for the kind of standard sidebar navigation menu instead they've gone for a top navigation menu which let's say it's quite different and it's makes it a bit more visually appealing to actually go in and use ekm now when it comes to the navigation menu there are seven options available you've got your main dashboard which is basically your dashboard home page you've got your shop section which i'll cover a little bit more in a second you've got your order management your analytics your design the features features are these are the ones that you can pick and choose that are available on your store and these basically work like apps basically their single one-click installations and you can also remove them in a couple of clicks as well so this is where all the features are that you can pick and choose for your website let's say they're just one-click installations and then you've got settings which is where you set up things like your payment gateway shipping options and things like that so let's go back and look at the shop section because this was always one of my biggest bug bears with ekm so if we go into the shop section what my main issue was with ekm was there was almost too much going on with this section because there was elements for managing your inventory so you could add new products you could add new categories but also there was options for design elements as well so if you clicked on edit design you'd see that you could edit images and there was just things you could do design wise to your store i just didn't like the fact that this was all kind of mashed into one with the way it works before but this has changed somewhat with ekm because they've released a new theme and it's changed things up because if you used to go into the design section before and you used to click on the edit option for your theme and you go on to edit layout there wasn't many options available there were some pre-defined sections available for your theme and there was nothing you could add it was quite restrictive in what you could actually do in terms of design and i didn't really like this i always felt this was a bit of a kind of achilles heel of econ but they've released a new theme and with this theme have come some awesome changes so if we go back into design we leave that one [Music] we go back into design we go into edit and then we go on to change theme it will bring up all the themes that are available for ekm as you can see there's quite a good selection but these are the old themes that are available and once it updates it will actually show your current theme but also this new theme that's available which is aerial so if we go into this and apply it to the shop it will add a few changes to ecam and the first thing you'll notice is it's changed from shop to products and i'm going to cover this a little bit more in a second but the first thing is i want to go into the theme customizer which is a new addition to ecam and a very very welcome one and what you can do now with this new theme is you have a lot more control over it because all the design elements are in one section in fact it's almost like they watch my last video and top notes of what i said personally i would preferred it if all the design elements were under the design section because it just made customizing your theme which i'm going to go over in a little bit a little bit easier to do but this is a very welcome change because what you can do is you can remove these sections there's also a load of sections that you can add so you can really customize the look and feel of your page i do really like this it's definitely a welcome addition then in theme settings there's things you can change like fonts there's options for your navigation menu your info bar now one thing i would like to see change with ecam will be the option to build your own custom navigation menu because from everything i've tried this isn't available at the moment it also add things to your menu so i'd like to be able to build my own custom navigation menu because it's just a bit of control i like over my website because there's certain things i might want to remove there's certain things i might want to add and i want the control over that so that's one improvement i would like to see made to ecam is the ability to add a custom navigation menu but overall the settings are really good it's definitely an improvement over what was available before and say it's almost like they listen to me so that's what it's like with the new theme customization definitely a welcome improvement and when you go on you can edit all of these sections you can choose a text it's just lots of options available it's definitely worth going through and having a play around with the new theme customizer because it is definitely a good improvement but let's talk about products so if we go back into the product section which was the shop section what it's done now is it's removed all of the design elements and so it's just about managing your inventory in here now so what you can do is you can go through and you can edit your product and it brings up some options whether you want to edit it delete it move it whatever but let's look at what it's like to actually manage your inventory so let's click on the add new product button and this brings up this popup menu and this is quite a nice page to actually use i do wish it filled the page a little bit more so i had more room to work when i'm actually working through all these sections and as you can see all these options are grayed out to start with and to make those available you actually need to put in a title for your product so let's call this test product one super original i know and then you can add your description you can add your price and you can go through and add things like variations you can add images you can add attributes you can add options for things like gift wrapping and things like that set your delivery charges for it then choose which category you want it to go into there's also more options available here and if you add some of the features that are available from the features section you will also get more options in the more options section as well if that makes sense so that's how you add a new product or click on save with that one and it will close that and to add a category is equally as simple so you just click on add category and it brings up another pop-up menu you just need to enter the name for it and then you get some options as well and you can also choose whether this is a child or parent category to other categories you've created which allows you to create a good kind of product hierarchy for your ekm store but what about when it comes to actually managing your inventory this is the one thing i still don't really like about this new product section is as standard if you want to go through and find your products you actually have to go through and navigate through your website so i'd have to come down to the our product section click on edit product click edit and it'll bring this screen back up now i don't think this is the most optimal workflow because i don't want to be navigating through my site trying to find my products but they do have a feature in the feature section that's really good so if we go into features you'll see i've already installed it and this is the advanced inventory manager if we click on this it brings up a much cleaner interface for managing your products and you can add a product and you can add a category from this feature and what you can do is you can click on the product and you can edit lots of things there's lots of options available you can edit the price you can edit the product code you can also filter out your products as well which is pretty awesome and to me this is what should be the product section because it's a really good tool it's actually a really powerful tool and it just makes your inventory management so much easier you can go through and find products by category you can search for your products it's just a much better tool in my opinion that what they've got set up in the product section at the moment and say for me this is what should be in there and if i had an ekm store and i was actually running one live i wouldn't even bother going into the product section i would just go straight into the advanced inventory manager and that's where i would manage all of my inventory now this is a completely free tool to use you don't have to pay any extra for it same with a lot of other features when it comes to ekm i'll cover that briefly now there's only a couple that are either linked to advanced plans which is like the api or the trade discounts and there's a couple of premium ones which include the web statistics and also the postcode lookup which are paid options as well but for me the advanced inventory manager is the one that i would install straight away because it just makes managing your inventory so much easier because it's such a powerful tool so that's inventory management i still think there's an improvement that could be made which i've just discussed but what about managing your orders because after managing your inventory this is hopefully where you're going to spend most of your time now order management with ecam is really good so if we go into orders you'll see all the orders that's available huh paul's awesome wonder who created that one but there are quite a few things you can do so if you select that product you can change the order status you can also choose to print it as well and you can actually choose to print packing slips and you can buy these directly from ecm and these have got sticky labels and if you've got lots of orders you're processing lots of orders this can save you so much time just having a peelable label with the customer's address on it it saves so much time it's one of the best investments i ever made in my e-commerce business was having sticky labels just saves so much time but there are some options when it comes to layout how you want to print your packing slips off now if you want to export your order say you're using third-party order management software accounting software things like that what you need to do is you need to install the import export feature so if you go back into features it's around here somewhere import export what you can do with this one is if you install this you can then export all of your order information via csv format but you do have to go into features then go into import export to actually do that but you can also export things like product information as well if you want to export all of your products and upload them to somewhere else so that's a quick overview of what ekm is like to use now i don't want to go into too much detail in this video because this video just go on forever and a day but i do think there's been some real welcome changes to ekm mainly with the theme customization the fact that they moved it all into one section with the new theme is amazing and hopefully all the new themes they're going to be releasing in the future will have the same setup because it's definitely a welcome improvement to ekm i still would like to see the advanced inventory manager go into the product section if they did that i think the dashboard would work really well and it would be more optimized in terms of workflow but do i think ecamm is a good option yes i think ecom is really good they're definitely moving in the right direction with the changes they're making the platform is easy to use the sites also perform really well as well and that gives like a good base for building a successful website plus you've also got things like the support that's available and the things like evolution mode as well now is it a good alternative to shopify once again yes i definitely think so and the fact that they're a uk focused company they do understand the uk market and they've helped a lot of businesses start in the uk and they've helped a lot of businesses become very successful in the uk it's really a good indication that ecm do understand the market and what they're doing so i definitely recommend giving them a try and as i say there's an exclusive 28 day free trial if you go through my referral link in the description below so that brings me to the end of review i hope you found this helpful if you have please drop a like on the video because it does help me with the almighty youtube algorithm to help grow my channel out so thank you so much for watching guys i really really do appreciate it also if you'd like to support the channel you can do by buying me a coffee using the link in the description below so thanks so much for watching guys i do really appreciate it stay awesome and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 133

Keywords: ekm review, ekm, shopping cart software, online shop, sell online, ecommerce platform, ecommerce platform reviews, shopify alternative

Id: 5AMbh169Nzs

Length: 22min 9sec (1329 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021