EKM vs Shopify - Which is the better Ecommerce Platform?

well guys Paul here from e-commerce gold and in this video I'm going to comparing two very popular options when it comes to creating an e-commerce store here in the UK and they are ekm and Shopify now in this video only comparing the pricing the performance what they like to use and also the support options are available for you as the user now I'm not going to be covering features in this video because it's basically just me reading off the screen but if you do want to check out the features that these two platforms offer I'll leave a link in the description to my for written comparison which covers all of this in more detail and also a few other things I'm not going to be covering in this video because if I covered everything I'd just be talking forever and ever and I don't want to do that cuz I don't want to bore you so with the introduction of the Waya let's jump into my computer and get this comparison started now the first thing what are we talking about is the pricing of these two platforms and they're quite similar when it comes to their monthly cost because ECAM comes in at 32 pound and 49 pounds a month plus vit if you're not very interested here in the UK whereas Shopify comes in at 29 dollars a month and with a conversion rate this does make Shopify quite a bit cheaper on a monthly basis but your Shopify payment will fluctuate slightly every single month due to that aforementioned conversion rate now while they are quite similar in their monthly price they do operate a different pricing structure between the two platforms ekm operates on a tiered pricing structure what this means is when you hit certain annual turnover limits which is 50 thousand pound a year on the basic package you're automatically moved up to the next package and this has been designed so that as your business grows you get more support and resources from the ekm platform to help your business grow and continue to grow and some people don't like this but you can actually work really well for your business because as I say you get more resources and you get more support and you get better features from the ECAM platform that is designed to help your business grow even further Shopify on the other hand operate on a fixed pricing structure and this means it doesn't matter how much you sell a year if you want to start on the basic package you are more than free to do so but there is a caveat to that and that is the transaction fee which is this right here and what this means is any payment that you receive that's not accepted through the Shopify payments gateway so if you using paypal or well pay anything like that you will be charged this additional transaction fee and this is almost a roundabout incentive to get you to move on to the larger packages because as you move up through the packages these transaction fee does decrease you drops to one percent on the next package and on the advance package it drops to not point five percent so even though you can sell as much as you want on the basic package there is incentives to move up because you will be paying less to Shopify in terms of percentage of your sales which as business owners obviously we all want to be reducing that cost as much as possible but you do have to figure it out to see if this is going to be beneficial moving from one package to the other with the transaction fee to see if it's actually gonna save you any money across the year so even though they do operate different pricing structures there are incentives on both platforms to actually move up through the packages so why did you actually get for your money well with ekm you get up to 500 products that you can have on the basic package and for most new start up ecommerce businesses that is more than enough you also get as I mentioned you can have up to 50,000 pound a year annual turnover before you moved up to the next package but there's no transaction fees you get unlimited data storage and you get a free SSL certificate shock fight on the other hand has unlimited product so if you want a 10,000 products on your store you can do that on the basic package there's no turnover limit but you do have that transaction fee that I previously talked about as with a comb you also get unlimited data storage and a free SSL certificate so the only real difference between the two platforms is that pricing structure that both from use but with both of them eventually as your business starts to grow you're going to be moving up through these packages with either platform because it's just going to help your business grow now with the pricing out the way I'm gonna talk about the performance but actually before I get there I just want to talk about the main feature that both ecommerce platforms offer now I said I wasn't going to cover features but this is just one main one that helps these platforms stand out from other platforms are right there now ekm offers something called evolution mode and what this is this is a team of specialists within a km from designers to web specialists and marketing every different kind of speciality that you can think of within e-commerce developed this evolution team and what they do is once a year they will look through your website and see if there's any changes that can be made to potentially help you grow your business and get more sales and the best thing about this evolution mode and the evolution team is they will present you with a list of suggestions you can go through and see which ones you like and don't like any ones that you want to implement you can just give them the go-ahead and they will do it for you free of charge which is really really good and it's like I'm your own team of e-commerce specialists you send your sites off a review every single year now as you move up through the packages and you're onto the advance package you actually get this on a monthly basis so this is what I mean by through the tiered pricing structure you get more resources and support from the ekm team to help your business grow and go on to the next level which i think is a really good feature because having that support and having that external review of your site can be really invaluable because they can just see little things that might be holding your site back now Shopify one of their main features is the Shopify app store because the Shopify as a platform is a pretty complete platform as I'll show you later in this video when I go through weights like to actually use but they offer so much more functionality through their app store and it's full of over 3,000 apps that have been made by not only the Shopify team but also third-party developers who have seen that there's areas where the Shutterfly platform can be improved they've created their own apps and they're available to use now granted a lot of these aren't free to use they may have a free package but it doesn't give you access to all the features so if you do want all the features you're probably going to have to incur an additional charge on a monthly basis to get access to all the premium features that some of these apps offer but there are a few that are free to use as well so you might want to go and check that out if you actually take out a Shopify trial which can do by clicking the partner link below you can also take out any control if you want and I'll leave my partner link in the description below for that as well so I just wanted to cover those two features because they are things that do make both platforms stand out from the rest so without the way let's talk about the performance of these two platforms because it is a really important thing when it comes to an ecommerce store is having a site that performs really really well now fortunately both of these companies are very up front about what they are fighting terms of their host and environment so with both platforms you get PCI compliant hosting which is really good if you're using more traditional payment gateways such as WorldPay or sage Bay that may require this they also offer unlimited bandwidth unlimited data storage 99.9% minimum guaranteed uptime and most importantly fast servers but what these platforms like to use in the real world how do they perform well I wanted to put them to the test so what I did was I took three of their customer example sites and ran them through Pingdom speed tests all based on their London server once a day for three days to give a nice good spread of data and the average results were as follows a km just pips Shopify on this one with an average load time of one point three zero seconds compared to Shopify is one point six zero seconds so they are really really close in terms of average performance but ECAM was a little bit more consistent across the three website as you can see there wasn't a great spread of time between the three average load times Shopify there was a bit more of a spread and one of their sites did have an average over that golden to second time which has the second website I tested which averaged a two point three six second average load time which is still pretty good but you would ideally like it to be under that two-second window because it does really help with getting people onto your site and keeping people on to your site but really either platform are great when it comes to the performance no major issues with either platform so nothing to really choose between them there so let's jump into what these platforms are like to use now son not with the platforms is a little bit different because ekm have added an additional step into their signup process and what you need to do with them is you actually need to give your credit card details before you can sign up to their free trial now if you don't want to progress past the trial period you do need to let the ECAM team know so that they don't take a charge from your card it's just something you do need to make them aware of that you don't wish to proceed from your free trial into having a fully paid ecommerce store with them so that's just one thing you do need to be aware of but once you've gone through the sign process and so my partner link is in the description below and you get an exclusive 28 days over the standard 14 days you did get to try it out for nearly a month so you can see if it is suitable for your business and on a side note I do recommend this with every single platform don't just take my word for it or anybody else whose word for it go and try these platforms out for yourself see what you like to see if you don't like it because it's going to make life so much easier for you on choosing your business when you're actually getting hands-on with these platforms but without the way once you have signed up with ekm you'll be taken into your dashboard and you are greeted by this really quite nice homepage that has a very good set of guide now as you can see from the sidebar here I have completes a few of these steps because I've been playing around with my ETA and dashboard but these three steps here to the name your shop add your first products and customize your design will be above these three elements here and this makes it really easy to work through your set or guide so you can start getting your site set up so it's ready to go now outside of the set of guide the Eco dashboard is pretty cool it's actually a little bit different to the majority of other platforms out there and the majority of the ECAM dashboard is really easy to use because everything is pretty well labels you've got your orders your analytics your design your features it's pretty self-explanatory what all these sections do the only section of the ECAM dashboard that's a bit quirky shall we say is the shop section and the reason for this is because it's not clear defined as what the main purpose of this section is because there's quite a few elements within this section as you can see there's things to add products add categories but you can also edit elements of the design as well and it just seems to be a lot going on within this main section and it just I don't really work quite right for me I just like to see things separated a little bit more and I'll cover that when I get to the design and what it's like to actually customize your theme but generally the ekayon dashboard is a pretty nice place to be everything works really well it's just this shop section is a little bit quirky as I say but what's it like to get started with Shopify well okay so I wish Shopify is really really simple we need to do is go to the Shopify website and say more the link is in the description below go there click on the start new trial button fill out your email address and password you'll be then taken to a section may ask you a few questions about where your company is at so you start up or you're already trading more your short turn over like things like that so they can tailor the dashboard a little bit more to you and your business once you've answered these questions you'll be asked on business information so your name address things like that so they can populate the business information on your website then once you've gone through all this you'll be taken into the Shopify dashboard which looks exactly like this and I really like the Shopify dashboard because it's got a very minimalistic feel to it to me it's not cluttered there's not too much going on and it everything is clearly labeled the navigation menu is really easy to use everything is where you need it to be but on your first sign into the Shopify dashboard you're greeted by the setup guide and this setup guide is a little bit on the light side for me because it miss out things like setting up your delivery information which is really really important also setting up your categories or collections or shop if I call them there's just a lot of things missing from this for me especially a Shopify is geared towards people who are brand new to ecommerce I just feel this could be a little bit more complete and I'm surprised it's not the one thing Shopify have done to counter this is they've created their own almost Shopify Academy so if you click on the learn more about getting started button you'll be taken through to Shopify kompis which is basically their Shopify Academy and on here is a series of videos to help you get started with Shopify and that all gone through by this lovely lady here and what she does is takes you through pretty much everything you need to do in order to get your Shopify store set up properly and the reason why she's so good at this is not any easy employee of Shopify but she's also got her own business and e-commerce website running through the Shopify platform so she knows what this is like from not only an employee point of view but also using this to run your own business so this gives her a really great insight into the platform and you take span hour-and-a-half to go through this and there's 27 videos to go through but there was lots of information and he really does cover some really useful hints and tips so if you are getting started with Shopify I definitely would recommend going through so that's why it's like to get started with the two platforms they say they've got a slightly different approach but it's not really difficult to get started with either of them you just have to be aware with ekm that you do need to let them know before your trial ends if you want to cancel the trial because it's not you will be charged unfortunately but what are they actually like to use from an e-commerce perspective so the two things I'm going to look at is managing your inventory and managing your orders because these are two of the most important things you're going to be doing when you're running your e-commerce website so we're going to go back into e km and ECAM is a little bit funny when it comes to this say it's this shop section of the website that just doesn't really work all that well would like to see a few changes to this personally because it could work really really well if they made a couple of changes to the platform now to add a new product is really simple just going to your shop section click the add new product button and you'll be presented with this pop-up which has all the sections you need to fill out in order to properly create a product on the ekm dashboard now this is really simple it doesn't take long to get used to the tab structure works really really well and these are all uncovered when you start typing in the name and then you'll be able to access all these different sections and as soon as you click Save it'll automatically added to your website so that's how easy is to create a new product and closer that saving I don't save that product and adding new category is equally as simple just go to the add new category button another pop-up will come up and as you'll see you get a few less options but once again is really easy to add a new category and you can create these as parent and sub categories and this makes it really easy to manage your product hierarchy so to show the rest of you that's gone product test click on category management and what you can do is set your parent and sub categories this makes it really easy to say to create product hierarchy because you can have subcategories within your main categories it just makes it so much easier knowing if you two manage your inventory but also for your customers to navigate around the website because they can easily navigate from one section to another just makes like really really easy now when it comes to actually managing your inventory within ekm it's a little bit strange in the way word because you do really need to install the feature in order to be able to do this effectively because in the standard ek and what you have to do is scroll down and edit your products and an individual basis so you actually have to go through your website and find where your products are and then edit them this just really isn't an efficient way of using your time when it's managing your website so to get around that if you go to the features section of your dashboard and you install the advanced inventory manager feature it'll make your life considerably easier I don't get why this isn't installed as standard because it's actually a fantastic tool and one of the better ones out there when it comes to managing your inventory so you click on the advanced individual manager and it'll bring up all your products now from this advanced imagery manager you can add new products and you can add new categories so this is kind of an all-in-one feature for managing your inventory it's a really really good tool but one of the good things you can do is you can actually edit a lot of information from the actual products overview page so if you just click on the product you can edit the product name you can edit the code the stock quantity the price it's just a really good tool because you can do everything from this main overview page you don't have to go in and edit products on individual basis and this can just save you so much time when it comes to managing your imagery I really like this tool and as I've already said I don't get why it's not installed as standard to me this is what the shop section should be because if it just made life so much easier to run an e km store so that's why it's like to manage your inventory within ekm in its standard form it's not particularly great but when you install the advanced in Romania it actually becomes really easy and really efficient to do it's a great tool if I haven't already mentioned that so what's it like to do all this within Shopify well you just go into the Shopify dashboard click on products and then it will bring up an overview of your products and to add a new products implicate that add product button and it will bring got this really simple single page layout now this is very much a theme that recurs through the Shutterfly dashboard which I mentioned already which is a minimalistic feel it's not overcomplicate everything is just kind of there everything you need so and your title description of loading your product setting your price scene managing your inventory setting your shipping everything he's just there and it just works it's a very simple page but it works really really well I really like you I really like the shop of a dashboard in general I think it's a fantastic place to be so that is how you add new products it's really simple and really easy to do but what about when it comes to actually organizing your inventory so actually creating a product hierarchy or category hierarchy well Shopify operates on a collection system which is something they actually developed in-house and it's a little bit different now if you click the Create collection button you'll be taken to the create collection page which once again is a very simple one page layout but what makes it a little bit different is the fact there's two options when it comes to the collection type and what this means is if you select a manual one it was very similar to a traditional category so you just add products to that category it works really well it's really simple but they do have a second option which is this automated one and this works off rules that are based on your product tags so when you create or edit of products you can create tags for that product and then you can have them go into collections based on those tags it's a little bit complicated to start with especially when you just start using it so for anybody who's planning to use this automated setup I would recommend reading through all the documentation and watching a few videos on how to actually do this because say it's not completely straightforward and if you just go and try and figure it out for yourself because there are a few options as to how to configure it you may get it wrong and you may not get it working properly I know I didn't when I first riding so it's definitely worth doing a little bit of research and some spending some time learning how to do that if you want to use the automated setup and another quirk with the Shopify collections is if you want to create parents and sub-collections it's not immediately straightforward how to do this because if you are actually in the main create collection page there's no way to set this collection as a parent or a sub collection and the reason for this is it's a little bit kind of around about how you have to do it because we need to do is go into online store click on the navigation click on your main menu and then you have to all organize your collections within the navigation menu so you have to add it as a sub collection under a main collection it's just a little bit of a roundabout way of doing it to me it does work but it's not immediately evident how you actually do this so there you go I've just shown you how to do it if you want to say thank you you can drop a like on the video I would really appreciate it and it would really help the channel out as well so thank you for that so once you've gone through and you've set up your products you've set up your collections you want to be able to manage your inventory effectively if you've got a large inventory you'd only be going through and having to edit products on a product by product basis because it's just going to take so much time to help you alleviate this the Shopify how to develop their inventory page am I allowed you to do is add a remove start quantity really quickly and really efficiently by just going in and clicking the up and down arrows whether you want to remove or add imagery so that's your inventory out the way that's where it's like to mange your stock so the second the important thing when it comes to e-commerce is actually managing your orders which hopefully is where you going to spend most of your time and with ekm this is really easy to do because you just go on to the orders section and he'll present you an overview of all your orders and why I like about this is there's quite a bit of stuff you can actually do when it comes to bulk management of orders because if you're having lots of orders you want to be able to manage them in bulk you don't have to go in and do everything individually because it's just gonna take a lot of your time which honestly when you're running the business you want to save as much time as possible and what you can do in bulk is you can change your order status so you can change it from incomplete to pending to dispatch to anything like that you can also print the invoices off so you can print invoices / packing slips off and there's a few different layers on this ekm platform there's actually four you can choose from and these all correlate to packing slips that he can actually provide so you can actually buy these packing slips with removable labels and now just make managing your orders so much easier now if you want to export your orders so that you actually can import them into third party management software you will have to install another feature so what you do is you go to features and then you install the import/export system let's close that it installed the import/export system and what this will allow you to do is you can either import data or you can export data you can explore your order information customer information anything like that so you can't do it directly from your order management page but you can export the information if you need to it's just not directly dumped within the order management page but what's it like to do all this in Shopify well Shopify is a little bit of a letdown on this front for me because if you go into your orders days quite a lot of stuff you can do in bulk so if you select your orders you can fulfill the order so you can change the order status you can capture payments and you can also explore them if you want to but the one thing you can't do in bulk from the core Shopify dashboard is print off your audio information and even if you go on an order by order basis the actual packing slip that you can print off isn't that great what you need to do is you actually need to go into the App Store and install an additional app that allows you to do this and I really don't get why shop if I don't do this a stander because it's basic ecommerce functionality in my opinion because not everybody especially businesses just are to know they're going to be using third-party order management software they're just not going to have that infrastructure in place so what you can't manage all this just directly from your Shopify dashboard I don't know it's just one thing that does let the Shopify dashboard down a little bit for me so that's the main ecommerce functionality of both platforms that's dkm and Shopify with managing your inventory and managing your orders so that both got their own quirks when it comes to doing this and you do need to tweak both platforms so that they work properly in my opinion but what it like to actually manage the aesthetics of your site the design theme customization well we'll jump back into ekm if you go into the design section of your dashboard it'll bring up some of the options that you have now II came has the better selection of free themes because there are over 60 free themes that you can choose from they've all been made by ekm and there's some very nice themes and they cover a variety of different niches and to change themes are just going to edit and change theme really simple to do but what about when you actually comes to customizing your theme well this is where ekm is a little bit quirky again because the design elements are actually split over two sections within the dashboard there's some stuff you can do in the design section so you can edit the layout which means you can change the layer of the different sections on your page unfortunately there's not the option to actually add additional sections which it's a little bit of a letdown to me I would like the option to actually be able to really customize that homepage not just hide things or change the layer I would like to be able to actually go in and add custom sections so I could build the site out exactly how I want it but outside of the layer other things you can do are you can edit the colors you can change the logo you can inject custom code and this makes it so there's quite like you can't actually do to the look and feel of your site but if you actually want to edit any of your on-page stuff you actually need to go back into the shop section of your dashboard and click on any areas of content so if you want to edit the logo you have to click on it if you want to edit your images you have to click on it and this just doesn't really aid workflow to me because I'd like to just be able to go in and edit everything under one section I wouldn't want to be moving backwards and forwards between two different sections so this is where the shop section just doesn't really work all that well for me in my opinion I'd like to see all the design elements pop under the design section and the advanced team retreat manager actually bought in as the shop section for me it would just change the ekm dashboard massively but that's just my opinion so that's why it's like to customize your theme it is a bit of backwards and forwards between the two sections but there is quite a lot you can do and you do have a lot of control over the actual aesthetics of your website but what's it like to do this with Shopify while shuffle has always been really well renowned for actually having really good design elements and their customizer is one of the best tools on the market so if you click on your online store it will bring up everything you can do so you go into the customizer by clicking the customize button and it will bring up the Shopify theme customizer which say is one of the best tools out there and what you can do on the home page of your site is really quite good because you can add and remove sections as you want there's a good selection of additional sections that you can choose from as you can see there's lots of options you can do and this makes it really good to customize a Shopify theme even one of the basic knowing free themes that you can choose with a little bit of playing around adding and removing sections adding and removing content you can quickly and easily customize your site so it doesn't look like every other Shopify site that's out there and when you get these sections you can go in and you can edit all these sections so you can edit the text you can edit the image you can edit the header it just gives you a lot of flexibility as to what you can actually do with the theme customization of your Shopify website the only negative I have about the shop if I think customizer is that you can only really do this on your home page if you actually go into another page on your shop so you're going to the back me page all of these sections disappear and this is just a bit of a letdown for me because if you actually go in and edit this page it just brings up a very basic text editor which you do have some formatting options you can add images and things like that but it's still not as good as having all the sections that are available on your homepage if Shopify expanded this to cover all of the pages on their website it would be without doubt the best clean customizer on the market but unfortunately it's just limited to your home page so it's really good it is a little bit limited so that is an overview of what both of these platforms are like to use in terms of managing your inventory managing your orders and being customization but the next thing I only talk about is the support available on both of these platforms because it is really important when you sign up to a fully hosted e-commerce platform is that your gonna get good support from the team behind the platform because it's one of the reasons why you pay a monthly fee now with AKM you do get really good support now on the basic packages you just get standard ekm support which means it's within business hours here in the UK which as far as I know it's like 9:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 till 6:00 something like that but it is within business hours but it's really easy to actually contact the ECAM support team so if you're just go into your dashboard and if you just scroll down a bit you'll see this section on the left hand side which is the we're here to help section and what this is is you just go down a little bit you'll see the support phone number up here and this makes it really easy to actually contact what phone up and contact a member of the support team there's also probably behind my head at the moment but there is an icon in the bottom right hand corner of the dashboard which is a live chat icon which will appear whenever you click on it and it will take you through and it will tell you if there's a member of the support team available or if there's nobody available and they'll get back to you as soon as possible this makes it really easy to actually contact the team at ekm from within your dashboard there's also the Help section here which I'll show you all the ways you can actually contact support it came a very hot when it comes to support it's one of the things that they actually pride their business on and it's one of the things that they do get good feedback for and good reviews for is the quality of their support now when you move on to larger packages you do get better support options when you move on to the advanced and the pro package which are the top packages you do get 24/7 emergency support so should you have any problems you'll be able to contact someone 24/7 which is really useful especially when you've got a big ecommerce site but what's it like to do all these free Shopify I know seem to be saying that in every single section but yeah what's it like to do this on Shopify why Shopify offers a full 24/7 support to every single user so whether you're on the basic package or Shopify plus you get 24/7 support the only thing is it's not completely straightforward to actually contact the support team goes what you have to do is you have to click on your name in the top corner click on the Shopify Help Center which will take you through to the shop for a Help Center scroll all the way down to the bottom click contact Shopify support painter a search term so put contact click search and then scroll down to the bottom and get click the get help from the Shopify support team and it'll bring up all the options are available now while they do have genuine 24/7 support the fact that it they add a few hoops that you need to jump through to be able to contact them is a little bit frustrating for me especially if you really desperately need to talk to somebody really quickly this can just be annoying especially if you didn't know how to that now Shopify do have a really good selection of documentation and still ekm when it comes to showing you how to do things on the platform we shot fires rather he's also a community support forum which is frequented by members of the Shopify support team and also knowledgeable members of the community so if you felt kind of non urging questions you can pop a question in there and somebody will get back to you with a very informative answer but usually a very informative answer so that is a suppor options that both platforms offer and to be honest that both really good when it comes to support you can't really take away from either one of them their only possible advantage you could give to Shopify is that they offer 24/7 support to all users whereas ekm is standard UK support but on top of that standard support you do get access to the e komo evolution team as well which I mentioned earlier in the video so my conclusion of these two platforms which one is the better of the two actually I can't give it to one over the other because they both have their pluses and minuses both of their own quirks both have things that make them a little bit frustrating to use in some ways but on the other side they both have things that they're very very good at and it just makes it really difficult to choose between the two and that's what I do honestly recommend that anybody who's considering these platforms go and try them out for yourself because it's only when you get hands-on with them try them out for yourself you're gonna realise that one platform is better suited for you in your business than the other and so I've got links in the description below which are my partner links which you go through and we'll take you through and you can start free trial with both of them and it's a 28 day trial with ekm as well so if you have enjoyed this video and if you've learnt something I'd really appreciate if you could drop a like on this video cuz it really does help the channel out also if you want access to more content like this consider hitting that subscribe button and the notification bar to get notifications of when I post new videos which should be every single Thursday so thanks so much for watching guys stay awesome and I'll see you on the next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 837

Keywords: EKM vs Shopify, Shopify vs EKM, Shopify Alternative, Shopify Comparison, EKM Review, Shopify Review

Id: qVScy6XiLpw

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020