Warning! Ecwid Is 100% Free To Sell Products Online But There's A Catch...Here's My FULL Review

if you want to start an online store and you think that Shopify is just way too expensive then you might want to give ecwid a try now I've been getting a ton of requests to do a review of the ecwid platform and that's what this video is all about so in this review I'll cover the pros and cons of using ecwid and let you know how it compares to other top Ecommerce Solutions like Shopify also walk you through the features of each ecwid plan to help you decide if ecwid is right for your business now first off what is ecwid ecwid short for e-commerce widget is an e-commerce plugin that allows you to create an online storefront for your website or blog social media accounts or other marketplaces now unlike most Ecommerce platforms that I've reviewed on this channel ecwid allows you to build a dedicated online store or add e-commerce features to your existing website so basically you can use ecwid to run an online store on social media or your blog or as a standalone website and all of your inventory accounts will remain synced across all the platforms so in essence ecwid is a viable and cheaper alternative to Shopify and more now getting started with ecwid is easy you simply add the ecwid plugin to an existing website to accept transactions online now if your website doesn't accept the ecwid plugin ecwid will provide you with code that you can just cut and paste into the back end of your website now how much does it cost ecwid pricing ranges from zero dollars to ninety nine dollars per month with discounts of up to sixteen dollars and fifty cents per month if you agree to pay annually now what most people love about ecwid is that they have a plan that is a hundred percent free their free plan lets you build a one-page online store to sell up to 10 products online now to run a fully featured eCommerce store I recommend the business plan which lets you sell up to 2500 products and provides access to the Amazon and eBay marketplaces now I'm going to cover all the various ecwid plans in more detail later on in this video now in addition to the monthly plans you'll also need to choose a free or a paid theme for your online store and ecwid has about 70 plus free themes but they're all pretty basic now depending on your CMS a paid ecwid theme can cost approximately ninety dollars a year or two hundred fifty dollars for Lifetime access now if you're on WordPress you'll have access to plenty of free themes and paying for an equid theme is generally not necessary now for a full-fledged Ecommerce store powered by ecwid you should expect to pay at least nineteen dollars per month by the way if you're enjoying this review so far make sure you sign up for my free six day mini course below now the million dollar question I often get asked is is ecwid really free and ecwid offers a 100 free plan that allows you to sell up to 10 products in your online store now while the plans features are limited you will not be charged an upfront or a monthly fee now with the free plan you cannot sell digital Goods or offer discounts or gift cards on your merchandise but you can probably get pretty far with the free plan if you sell physical Goods now ecwid offers three paid plans Venture business and unlimited that allow you to sell anywhere from 10 to an unlimited number of products now as you would expect the free plan is limited in its features but let's take a closer look at the paid plans the first one is called The Venture plan and it includes the following features you can set up an online store a Facebook shop and an Instagram store you can also manage Facebook Google Pinterest and Snapchat ads from the admin panel you're also allowed to sell digital Goods with a file size of up to 25 gigabytes and you can offer a percentage fixed value free shipping and a combination of different discounts on your products you can also send gift cards to customers via email as well and ecwid automatically calculates sales tax rates based on your state law and customer location ecwid also lets you track stock quantity in your store and they also provide structured data and SEO friendly URLs by default for search engine optimization so basically ecwid's Venture plan lets you install a shopping cart feature so you can start selling immediately but it does have some limitations for example you're only allowed to add 100 products and you can't integrate your site with Amazon or Ebay now if the Venture plan doesn't cover enough products or lacks other essential features you can opt for the next hire plan which is the business plan and here's what you get you can integrate your store with Amazon and eBay you can also send out abandoned card emails which lets you send emails to customers who have abandoned their carts and haven't completed the checkout process you can also create a special discount just for wholesale customers you can also create product filters which lets visitors refine their search by category price color size and more you can also add variations for your products such as color size and material and you can also manually create orders in the back end the business plan also allows for two staff accounts and you also get two hours of free customization from the ecwid support team now the biggest plan is called the unlimited plan and it basically gives you access to two additional features you get your own branded Android and iOS app if you pay annulate you also get a point of sale system such as Square Clover and Alice with your store and in addition to these features you get unlimited staff accounts and 12 hours of customization in the ecwid unlimited plan now does ecwid charge any transaction fees now no matter what payment processor you use you'll end up paying a transaction fee of up to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per sale here's a breakdown of the two ways to accept payments with ecwid the first one is called light speed payments that is their in-house payment system that lets ecwid users accept all major credit cards and debit cards they also support Apple pay and Google pay for quick checkout but it's only available in the US now the downside of light speed is that their transaction fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per sale does not get lower as your store grows unlike its competitors ecwid maintains the same transaction rate on all plans regardless of sales volume now as an alternative light speed you can actually choose from over 70 third-party payment gateways for your ecwid store such as Amazon pay to check out stripe and PayPal now the best part is that ecwid doesn't charge transaction fees for payments made via third-party payment providers some other Solutions like Shopify charge a transaction fee of 0.5 percent all the way up to two percent on top of the fee charged by the third party payment provider now do ecwid stores look any good ecwid provides 70 plus free themes that you can use to give your store a custom design and you can filter the themes by category to help you find an appropriate theme for your business now when I was looking through their theme Library I noticed that there wasn't that much variation in their themes they all look the same since they're all designed for single page stores now in 2021 ecwid introduced a website builder called instant site which allows you to edit or add customizable content blocks and create navigation menus however the instant site Builder is pretty limited when you compare it to Bigcommerce Shopify or woocommerce all you can do is add and edit some basic blocks now is equity easy to use I would say that ecwid has a clean and minimalistic user interface that is easy for first timers to learn and use the backend interface looks similar to Wordpress with a vertical menu on the left and site content on the right their onboarding wizard guides you through the entire setup process from adding products to setting up payment options and if you run into trouble you can always contact ecwid support now on the downside instant site which is ecwid's drag and drop website builder lacks the functionality of its competitors let's talk about third-party apps now ecwid has 250 app Integrations in its app market of which 45 are free by comparison Shopify has over 8 000 plus apps and WordPress has over 60 000 apps now ecwid does cover essential Integrations like tax jar printful and shipstation but many useful Integrations are missing like Clearview PostScript gorgeous QuickBooks and privy there is a workaround however you can use zapier to integrate applications though you will have to pay an additional fee also since ecwid isn't as popular as other e-commerce Solutions the pricing per app is actually more expensive now in my opinion this is the biggest downside to using equine there just aren't that many third-party apps that support it let's talk about point of sale ecwid has their own mobile point of sale platform for iOS devices that lets you accept payments online and in physical locations like flea markets and retail stores ecwids mobile POS is available with the Venture business and unlimited plans all you need to do is download the sell on the go app from ecwid and connect it to PayPal or your Square card reader now this app is free and syncs automatically with your ecwid store now the only major drawback with ecwid's mobile POS solution is that it's iOS only in addition you can only use the app in select countries now the good news is that ecwid integrates nicely with other POS services like square and vend let's talk about search engine optimization ecwid only provides you with limited control over your website's SEO and lacks critical features that can adversely affect your search rankings for example Equity doesn't allow you to tweak autofilled alt text for images you can't create or edit URLs and you're stuck with whatever URLs ecwid generates for you although product URLs are based on product titles you have no control over them ecwid also doesn't let you create 301 redirects to let search engines know a url's new location now on the positive side you can edit page titles and meta descriptions easily on ecwid and wherever necessary ecwid pre-populates relevant fields for you which you can edit in seconds the bottom line however is that ecwid doesn't offer many e-commerce friendly SEO features let's talk about International sales ecwid offers a multi-currency converter which converts the prices in your shop storefront into the buyer's currency but it's not available out of the box the only way to add multi-currency support to ecwid is by installing the currency converter app for 449 a month but if you're selling internationally multi-currency selling is crucial since it lets your customers Buy in their own currency the currency converter supports the currencies of over 130 countries and it's all fully automated including exchange rates which are updated regularly now one drawback of the currency converter app is that it displays your and your customers local currency on the product page cart and checkout which can get a little bit confusing let's talk about shipping ecwid offers a range of shipping options including free shipping real-time flat and custom rates now as a store owner you can also set up shipping regions for various shipping or delivery methods and ecwid provides calculated rates for customers upon checkout with the most popular carriers now these shipping rates are based on the item's weight and are available on all paid plans now package dimensions are required for more accurate calculated shipping rates but are only available with the business and unlimited plans let's talk about different languages Equity provides customers with a multilingual shopping experience by tracking your visitors primary language based on their IP address and from there they automatically translate the main components of the store into their local language ecwid stores can be translated into 53 languages which is more than what Shopify and Bigcommerce offer however they only translate the content on buttons email notifications and invoices you must manually translate product names descriptions attributes payment methods and meta fields Let's Talk About Drop Shipping since I get asked about Drop Shipping all the time you can use ecwid for your Drop Shipping business as they provide access to several popular Drop Shipping apps such as spocket Scentsy sub Drop Shipping X catalog and wholesale 2B but that being said Shopify Wix and WordPress have way more Drop Shipping apps than ecwid for more information check out this video on the best eCommerce platforms for Drop Shipping now tax collection is an essential part of selling online and ecwid helps by providing automatic tax calculations for the following countries now if your country is not on this list you can set it up manually by specifying tax rates per Zone ecwid also caters to the European Union's vat Moss rules for selling digital items in the EU let's talk about customer support ecwid offers customer support via email live chat phone and priority support now the type of support that you're going to get depends on your plan on the free plan you only get email support Live Chat is only available in your first 30 days if you're on the Venture plan you get email and live chat support if you're on the business plan you get email live chat and phone support and on the unlimited plan you get email live chat phone and priority support business and unlimited plan users also get customization support where you can seek help from the ecwid team to add new functionality or to improve your design the business plan users also have access to two hours of support a month while Unlimited Plan users get 12 hours of assistance ecwid also provides extensive documentation in seven languages now overall here are the pros of selling with ecwid it's beginner friendly you don't need any Tech or design skills to use ecwid there's also a great free plan their free plan you can build a one-page website with up to 10 products it's also pretty cheap you get several features in the Venture and business plans for a very reasonable price and there are no transaction fees ecwid is actually one of the few e-commerce solutions that don't charge their own fees when you use a third party payment Gateway hear the downsides though there are no Advanced e-commerce features ecwid lacks many of the features offered by other leading platforms like Shopify it's also difficult to scale ecwid doesn't integrate with some of the third-party eCommerce apps you need to scale a business there's also product limitations only the unlimited plan removes limits from the number of products that you can sell and there's poor SEO ecwid doesn't let you edit or create alt text URLs or 301 redirects so the million dollar question is should you use ecwid all in all ecwid offers a cost-effective way to add e-commerce functionality to an existing website or a standalone one and if you are a solopreneur or a small business looking to start selling online on a budget ecwid is a solid choice in fact their free plan places them on my list of the best free e-commerce platforms and ecwid is a popular platform they currently power over 1.4 million websites worldwide now the downside to ecwid is that they only include a handful of advanced e-commerce features out of the box especially compared to other top eCommerce platforms like Shopify or Bigcommerce and unfortunately there aren't that many options available in the ecwid App Market to compensate for the lack of e-commerce functionality so if your goal is to build a large eCommerce business I recommend building a standalone website using woocommerce Shopify Bigcommerce or ship for shop these platforms let you create an online store using their website builder and host your store on their servers now that you have a better feel for ecwid make sure you watch this video here for a complete list of free e-commerce platforms that you can use if you are on a budget

Channel: MyWifeQuitHerJob Ecommerce Channel

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Id: M19uMfXt0v4

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023