ShopWired Review (2021) - Is it Any Good?

shop word is it any good [Music] what's up guys paul from ecommerce gold and i'm back with another e-commerce platform review well actually this is an updated platform review because i actually reviewed shop word back in 2020 and it was actually the first e-commerce platform review i did on this channel and since i've done that original review they have made some changes to the platform so it's going to be interesting to see if they've made the platform any better or not now for this review we're going to be looking at six different sections to give a good overview of the platform and they are going to be the pricing the features the theme selection and customization options the support options available for you as the user the pricing and performance before looking at how easy the platform is to use and that's just going to be a general overview of what i think the platform is like to use before wrapping up with a conclusion at the end of the video so make sure you stick around because there's going to be lots of different things we cover because i do go a little bit in depth with my reviews more than a lot of other people do when it comes to reviews so with the introduction out of the way let's jump into my computer so we can get this review started so as i said the first thing we're going to be looking at is the pricing of the platform now shopwire's introductory package starts at 29 pound and 95 pens per month now you do have to add vit onto these if you're not fat registered so that's one thing you do want to be aware of but the introductory package is pretty much along the lines of every other e-commerce platform out there coming in at around about that 30-ish pounds a month and they do have two large packages which are the advanced package which is 59 pound and 95 pence a month and the premium one which is 119 and 95 pence per month now when it comes to the price instructor shopwired operate on annual turnover limits and this means when you hit certain annual turnover limits so 75 000 pound on the pro package you're automatically being moved up to the larger package but this does also include additional features and also more things included with your package so it's not just a greater basic annual turnover allowance you do also get more features as well and when you go over 500 000 pounds a year you actually go on to one of their enterprise packages and this is where it's basically custom for you and your business they work much more closely with you to make sure that the solution is perfect for you and your business they give you the tools you need the build you need exactly what you need in order to take your business onto that next level and go and be a million pound e-commerce business so that is the pricing of the platform it's pretty reasonable to be honest and you do get a pretty good allowance more than what you actually get with other platforms that are out there that operate on the same kind of pricing structure because a lot of other platforms on the basic package is only up to around about fifty thousand pound or if it's a north american package usually about fifty thousand dollars which is around about forty to forty five thousand pound depending on conversion rates so you do get a far greater allowance with shopwire than you do with other platforms now as i said when you move up through the packages you do also get more features included with that package which is a great time to move on to section number two which is features so when it comes to features shop wired is very well sorted which is to be expected from a fully hosted e-commerce platform and they offer a variety of different features now if you want to go and check out all the features that are listed on screen i'll leave a link to my full written review on my website ecommercegoal.com which covers this in a bit more detail than what i'm going to cover in this video because i'm just going to basically skim over this i do go into it in far more detail within the written review but you do get a lot of tools you get e-commerce tools you get a lot of marketing and seo tools you also get access to lots of different payment gateways that are very suitable for the uk market because this is where shopwired is primarily focused now one thing that does happen with the shopwire platform is you do get a set of core features that's included with the platform and you also get a set of features that can be added to the platform at a later date via apps or extensions and what's the difference between these when app is a one-click install they're very quick and easy to use now on the pro package which is the basic one some of these are going to be charged on a monthly basis but more of these become included with your package as you move up through those packages and when you get up to the premium package all of these apps are included now the other thing is extensions and these are all completely free to use but there is a little bit of a catch with that and that is that they need to be coded into your website now some of these are very simple to do and literally you can just follow the shopify documentation which is very well written and very well laid out and you'll be able to do some of these yourself but some of these are a little bit more extensive in terms of what they need required in terms of coding some of these will require css style sheets to be created and if you're just new to e-commerce and website building you're probably not going to know how to do that so you're gonna have to pay to have this done and it ranges from around about 45 pounds upwards to in excess of a hundred pound to have these things installed for you and while this is great that they are free of charge it is a bit annoying that you are using a fully hosted platform but yet some things still have to be coded in so i'm not the biggest fan of the extensions and i would like to see many of them if possible turned into apps because it just made life so much easier on the platform but as i say when it comes to features i would advise going and checking out my written review because as you can see there's lots of different features on the platform and i cover that with way more detail in my written review now one thing i do just want to point out is software do not charge transaction fees now none of their packages are you going to have to pay a transaction fee so it doesn't matter which payment option you're using whether it's paypal express or stripe you're not going to pay any additional transaction fees but when it comes to features there is one thing that does help shop words stand out and that is their b2b features now a lot of e-commerce platforms primarily focus on b2c which is business to customer which is what most ecommerce platforms are but shopwired saw an opportunity in the market to focus on the b2b aspect which is business to business and they have some really really good tools including bulk discounts if you're buying bulk you can offer a discount a quotation system which is a very premium option on a lot of platforms you can have trade accounts you have credit accounts and you also have the option to display prices with that or prices excluding that depending on the type of customers that you're going to be focusing on so these are some really good features specifically for b2b which is one of the reasons why i think shopwired is arguably the best b2b platform that's out there and the third thing we're going to be looking at is the theme selection and customization options now when it comes to theme selection shopwired has a pretty limited selection of things but they are very well designed so as you can see i'm in the shopwire dashboard now so what we're going to do is we're going to go into themes and click on the available themes and it will open up a new window and these are all the themes you get included with the shopware platform and all of these are free to use this is really really good now there is only a small selection available there's around about 20 to choose from which is quite a bit smaller than a lot of other platforms are out there but say they are all free to use now one option that is available with some of these themes if you actually click on them is you can upgrade this theme and what this means is they'll actually install some extensions along with the theme and this costs 89 plus v80 which is pretty reasonable especially when you add up the cost of installing these extensions on their own it does save you a fair bit of money now as you can see this is a version 4 theme and this is something i do want to talk about because this is a recent update to the shopwire platform because previously shopwire didn't have the greatest theme customization options available and they had no live editor you couldn't see the changes that you were making to your site unless you saved it and when it looked at the front end of your site and this is where they updated to the version 4 framework and it is definitely an improvement over the old system so we'll come out of the theme selection we'll go into installed themes so we'll click on theme settings and as you can see it opens up a live editor which is something that wasn't available on shopwire before and it's definitely a welcome edition as you can see under the starletter you have a few options so you can change the name of the theme you can change the colors around your site text snippets action buttons this changes the actual wording on the buttons which is quite cool a lot of places don't actually allow you to do that you can change your home page images your logo card logos things like that link list is your options so in the footer you've got your link list down here and this is where you can change them all within the live editor which is way better than the old system you've also got features so your product page settings and ads verification pop-ups so if you're selling products to older people say you're selling alcohol or things like that you can have an age verification popup which is a very useful feature and then you've got your general settings as well now let's say this is a very welcome addition but it's still a bit limiting as to what you can do because there's still no real control over the kind of layout options on your site there's no page builder options which is something that i think if shopwired added would really take the platform to the next level and it's just the one thing that's missing from the theme customizer is the ability to be able to create a kind of custom home pages custom about me pages just custom pages on your website so you've got lots of different sections to choose from so you can really customize the layout of your site so it fits your business and brand just gives you a bit more control and gives you the ability to make your website stand out from everybody else so there might be a numerous other people using the same theme as you but if you had a page build it you could make it look really custom and fit your business and brand and give you some individuality so while it's definitely an improvement there's still some ways they could go to improve it even more and by adding a page builder it would just take shopware to that next level when it comes to theme customization so the fourth thing is the support options are available for you as the user now one thing that shopwire do pride themselves on is the support that they offer to their users need something they do brag about on their website by pointing you to their trust pilot rating which is i think about 4.8 or 4.9 out of 5 stars and lots of people on these ratings do talk about the quality of the support and i've always had pretty good experiences with the shopwired support whenever i've contacted them they've been very quick to respond and try and sort the issue out and keep me up to date with what's going on now when it comes to the availability of shopwired support it is available between 9am and 7pm monday to friday and 11am to 5pm on a saturday now it would be great if shopwired upgraded this to seven day support because a lot of people when they're working on the website seem to do it on a sunday this is because it's the one day you do really get off from an e-commerce business because you're not having to worry about orders so it would be nice to see them upgrade to seven-day support but generally the support is very good from shopwire to say i've never really had any problems with the support it's also easy to contact them as well there's a live chat icon directly within your dashboard which is the best way to actually contact shopwired now shopwire do also offer phone support as well but because of the current situation that's going on the world and all of their staff having to work from home this is currently suspended but as soon as things start getting back to normal and they can have the stuff back in the office this will be restored but as of making this video the options that are available are live chat which is very good and also email support as well and they do aim to get back to you within 24 hours when you drop them an email and from my experience they have been very quick on their responses so when it comes to support shopify is very good and it's all uk based support as well and hopefully once this situation that's going on in the world does cease they will be back to full functioning support with phone support available as well now the fifth thing we're going to be looking at is the hosting and performance that shopwire offer now as a fully hosted ecommerce platform it's expected that shopwired offer a lot in terms of hosting now they are hosting on amazon's web services which is one of the largest and most reliable web hosts in the world but what you actually get as a user of shopwired where you get unlimited bandwidth unlimited file storage fully pci level one compliant servers a global content delivery network 99.99 uptime and continuous backups and according to shopwired most importantly blazing fast servers i just had to add that one in but what does this actually mean in the real world well to put them to the test i took five of their customer example sites and ran them through pingdom's speed test tool using their london server and also google's page speed insights to get their mobile and desktop scores and i've done this once a day for three days to get a nice spread of data so how well did they do well in terms of load time it was absolutely fantastic an average of 1.17 seconds which is very very impressive and puts it towards the top of the list in terms of performance they also done pretty well on the mobile scores averaging 42 out of 100 and the desktop scores was very very good at 81 out of 100. now one thing i did notice when i was doing my performance testing was the difference between the load time in sight and it soon became obvious which were new sites running on the version 4 framework and which were old sites running on the old framework because there was a marked difference in terms of performance now the load time wasn't too much different but in terms of the google scores these were massively different and some of the mobile scores the new version 4 framework was up to three times better than the old framework that shopwired was using and it was sometimes up to twice as good on desktop this is a massive improvement and this shows that the version 4 framework was definitely a good investment and upgrade by the shopwire team because not only does it improve their google scores but their average load time was also slightly lower on the version 4 framework as well than the older ones so definitely a good upgrade and anybody who's just getting started with the shop wired platform will automatically go onto this version 4 framework and they're going to have very good very fast e-commerce websites which is something you definitely want when it comes to e-commerce so the final section we're going to be looking at is how easy is shopwire to use because looking at facts and figures is great but it doesn't show you what it's actually like to use as the user and that's what i'm going to cover in this section and i'm going to look at four main things the first half is what it's like to get started secondly what's it like to get all your settings and everything configured thirdly what's it like to manage your inventory so add a new product things like that and finally what's it like to manage your orders so let's jump back into my computer so i can show you what this is like now getting started with shopwired is very very simple this is because they offer a 14-day free trial and you can go and check shopify out for yourself by using my affiliate link which i will leave in the description and it's very much appreciated if you do go through that link because it does help the channel out massively but to get started is very simple you need literally the basic information so you need an email address create a password enter your name and enter your business name as well and you'll be taken through to get started and on your first signing you'll be greeted by this short tutorial now as you can see i've already completed some of the steps in this tutorial when i've been playing around with the system but it is a very good tutorial it's more than enough to get you started with the platform so firstly you've got your business information so this is things like your address email addresses contact details things like that then you can configure your vit settings if you're that registered or if you're not that registered then you go through and you create a category creates product set up your checkout so you add your payment gateway and you'll set your delivery methods choose a theme and then customize it if you want to then go live by adding your own domain name it's a very short concise setup guide but it is very useful and does take you through the important sections if there's one thing that's missing from the setup guide it's setting up your legal pages which is things like your privacy policy terms and conditions things like that because it's a very important part especially if you're uk business you have to be legally compliant you have to have all this information available to comply with things like gdpr distance selling regulations things like that so i would like to see a prompt in this setup guide to go through and set up your legal pages because it's something that a lot of people when they're just getting started with e-commerce are gonna overlook and likely forget so it would be nice to see this prompt but other than that it's a very very good setup guide and honestly it's one of the better ones out there that i've used so once you've gone through and got everything set up got the basic information set up what's it like to go through and configure all of your settings well to do this we go into settings and then you've got all these different setting options so you've got your website information so you've got your basic information so you enter your name address postcode which are all legal requirements here in the uk you have to have these on your website your logo and favicon your social networks if you don't know what favicon is it's this little symbol that hit appears in the browser up here if he was unsure what that was then you can configure your website emails so what notifications are sent out what's included in the emails things like that you've got your seo this is for your main site so you've got your like google search console verification bing webmaster tools and then you can set up seo so things like metadata and things like that for all of the pages on your site and you've got things for products order statuses visitor monitoring lots of different settings available within the option menu and it's very easy to go through and get these sorted because then the pages aren't overfilled with information which is a problem that some companies do have whereas with shopwired they keep it very simple and just literally list the information that you need to fill out or you need to change it's very easy to get all your settings configured because they've made it very simple and very easy to use user experience is something that is very high on the list of priorities when it comes to shop wired and you can tell that just by using the platform they've tried to make everything as simple and easy to use as possible including things like navigating your way around the dashboard they've gone for the sidebar navigation menu and it just makes it really easy to move from one part of your dashboard to another as i say it's just something that you can see that shopify have put a lot of thought into is how easy it is for you guys to use as the actual user of the dashboard so the next thing we're going to look at is the products so if we go into products and we're going to create a new product now the add new product page is a single page layout on the shopify platform so you need to do is add your title basically the name of your product you can then enter your description you then can select your images you can also add a product video if you want to this is something that's a premium feature on a lot of other platforms but it's something that's offered as standard with shop word so if you've got a demo video for your product you can add that video in here then you've got your product categories which i'll cover in the next section add your price inventory management and these are all the essential parts of your product page then at the bottom you have basically the non-essential parts the things you don't actually have to do in order to make your product live and these are things like product variations so if you have a t-shirt for example and you want to sell it in different colors or different sizes this is where you come in with product variations you can add custom fields once again this is an additional thing that i've installed on my shop or that site you've got related products so if you want to link products together you can do buy related products you've got things like additional information such as mpn or gtin this is if you want to link it up to kind of shopping feed so if you want to link it to google shopping or kind of facebook shopping you're going to need these identifiers in there and then at the bottom you've got your seo so your meta description your url your meta title things like that so you can do all this on a product by product basis so you get lots of control over your seo which is a really really good thing so adding a new product is very simple to do on shop wired it's just a really easy to use page i like the fact that i've gone with a single page layout it just makes life so much easier but what about when it comes to organizing your products so say in your product categories well for this if you're going to create a new category as you can see it's a very similar layout except it's a lot shorter so for this you add your category name your description you can choose an image for the category if you want to then you can have an alt tag for the image but the important part of this page is the parent categories so this allows you to create a hierarchy for your basically your categories so you can have parent category child category then you can actually have a child category under that as well so you can create a really good product hierarchy which makes it one easier for customers to use because it makes it easier to navigate around your site also search engines like this as well because it makes it easier to read your site they know what links with what and it just it does work really well having a good product hierarchy on your website so the final thing is managing your inventory and what i mean by this is once you've created your products how easy is it to go in and basically update your products update start quantities update pricing things like that while shopify do have a useful tool which is their manage stock option and what this allows you to do is quickly and easily update your product quantity so if you just click on the quantity it comes up with an editable box so you can update that so if you want to add that to 12 do that and it's automatically updated that inventory for me this is a really useful tool but it is limited to just your product quantity if you want to go in and do anything else you're actually going to have to go in and do it on a product by product basis so to do that you'd have to go into view products and then you'd have to go into edit and then you'd have to go through and change whatever you need to change so if you need to update the price or things like that you're going to have to do this on a product by product basis this is not really ideal for me i'd like to see more options added to the managed stocks such as being able to manage the price on the go sale price or be able to do this in bulk because it would just make it so much easier to manage your products that way but overall having some bulk editing tool is better than not so the next thing i'm going to look at is order management so if we go into orders and view orders it'll bring up all your current orders that you have as you can see i've placed an order with my own store now this is hopefully the section where you're going to spend most of your time in your shopware dashboard because you're going to have lots and lots of orders but how good is the order management system well if we select the orders we've got you'll see that there's two options appear in the top right hand corner the first one is print slash download so you can either print a pdf basically invoice packing slip directly from your browser which is really useful or you can prepare a csv file for all of your orders so if you're using kind of like third-party order management software or third-party accounting software where you need all this information to go from shopwired to the third-party software you can do this in csv format another thing you can do in bulk is you can update order statuses so you can change this if i wanted to to not paid very quick very simple to do this is a very useful feature to have because being able to update all the statuses in bulk will save you a load of time if you are having lots and lots of orders now you can also edit orders on an individual basis so if we click on the order it brings up all the information about the order so you can change the customer details so shipping or billing address you can edit the products that are ordered so if somebody's made a mistake on their order you can go in and change it you can also set the order to archived if you didn't want it or you can change the order status set refunds as you can see with when it comes to refunds this will actually be done directly from your payment gateway you're just updating it in your own system because it doesn't update automatically and then you can add comments to the order if you want to so the order management system is very very good with shop wired now one thing shopify do also offer is some integrations with shipping companies so there's some integrations with raw mail click and drop in terms of they generate a csv file that is ideal for what is required for royal mail click and drop they also offer integration with shipstation as well which enables you to get a very competitive shipping rates as if you was a very big company that can be something that's very useful especially if you need to lower your shipping costs so something you might want to check out if you sign up to shop wired now before i give my conclusion on shop word i do just have a couple of small requests for you the first one is if you found this video helpful i'd really appreciate it if you could drop a like on it because it does really help the channel out also if you want to see more e-commerce and online business related content consider hitting that subscribe button on the notification bell also this one's a little bit cheeky if you would like to support the channel you can do by buying me a coffee and i will leave my link in the description below so shopwired is it any good yes i think shopwired is a very good and very competent e-commerce platform so much so that i actually ran an e-commerce website we shopwired a few years ago and it's only got better since now they offer a very good set of features they've got uk-based support there's a lot of very good positives with the platform it's very easy to use but there are a couple of negatives for me as well it's not perfect but no platform is the two main ones i've basically already covered in this video the first is the theme customization it's just a little bit lacking for me i'd like to see some kind of page builder added and secondly is the extensions i don't like the fact that you have to code things in onto a fully hosted website i'd much prefer to see these offered where possible as apps because it just made the user experience so much better but those are the only two real gripes i've got with the platform everything else is really good it's very easy to use they've definitely improved with the version 4 framework the support is really good overall it's a very good platform and something you definitely should consider now if you want to go and check shop wired out for yourself i will leave my affiliate link in the description below and it is very much appreciated if you go through that link so that brings me to the end of review i hope you found this helpful and thank you so much for watching i really do appreciate it so make sure you stay awesome guys and i'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 1,783

Keywords: shopwired review, shopwired.co.uk reviews, shopwired demo, shopwired dropshipping, shopify alternative, ecommerce website

Id: KsMMPpaImXI

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021