Wix Ecommerce Review - A Good Choice for an Online Store?

what's up guys Paul here from e-commerce cold and in this review video I'm gonna be looking at wigs which is the world's largest hosted website builder and also the guys who make those really quite annoying YouTube adverts ain't how easy is to create a website or an online store and it's those adverts that actually brought the Wix ecommerce set up to my attention and made them right for a review from me so that's what this video is about now as I said Wix are the biggest website builder in the world and it's estimated that they power over 3 million websites worldwide which is incredible and puts them out of a lot of their competition and only behind the lights of WordPress when it comes to user numbers but how good are they for actually building and using the website and specifically ecommerce which is going to be the focus of this video so I'm going to be looking at mainly the Wix stores up now before I jump into my computer I just want to say that I'm not going to be covering pricing in this review because it all depends on where you are in the world and pricing does change slightly from location to location so I'm not going to cover that because whenever I try and check Wix pricing I always brings it up in my currency which is the UK pound and it's very difficult for me to try and find like in u.s. dollars or anywhere else because the automatically converts on my browser so I'm going to completely avoid covering any kind of pricing if you do want to check out pricing just simply Google Wix pricing and you'll bring it up in your local currency or as close to your local currency as you can get so that the way it let's jump into my computer so we can get started so as I'm not covering pricing like I usually start most my videos with I'm going to jump straight into the features of the Wix platform now on the Wix website it's quite difficult to actually find definitive information about their e-commerce setup because a lot of the Wix stores app features are very much interlinked with the general features of the Wix website builder so he's quite difficult to try and separate what is their core ecommerce features but this is what I managed to find by doing lots of research on the week's website and that is that you can sell physical and digital products via the Wix platform which is good it gives a lot of variety to what you can sell you can create discount coupons or discount codes which you can use for marketing campaigns so for email campaigns or social media campaigns things like that you create discount codes you can also create promo videos for your products and this is done by combining your product images into a very arty kind of promo video which you can then send out on social media or via email it's pretty cool tool in this something that's not really available with any other platform but that's pretty much it when it comes to the basic ecommerce tools it's not too much more you can actually do but they are really quite good when it comes to marketing because you can manage email marketing campaigns directly from the which dashboard another thing you can do is you can directly show your products to your social media platform so your Facebook page or Instagram account and things like that another thing you can do is you can sell direct via these two platforms that I just mentioned you can sell direct by Facebook with the Facebook start and you can start direct by an Instagram so you can actually encourage your audience to buy from you without having to actually visit your website which is a great way of increasing conversions especially if you have a large social media following so that's really quite good so now they also have pretty good reporting when it comes to e-commerce you can see how many orders you've got what your conversion rate is what your overall revenue is you can also see how your purchase funnels working so your landing pages you checkout through to the completed checkout you can see where people are abandoning the checkout process so you can work on it to try and increase your conversion rates and you can also see which are your best email campaigns as well and this is a great tool once again for seen how you can improve on your marketing to try and increase your website's conversion rates now one of the things that is a little bit with the Wix platform is their number of payment gateways you get this very much ties into the fact that Wix is aimed at small ecommerce platforms and more like boutique online retailers rather than big fully fledged ecommerce websites because the my payment gateways is very limited in the majority of countries you will just have PayPal and Wix payments and which payments allows you to take credit card payments but generally there's not much else on there there are some locations if it ones there's a leap a which is popular in the Far East and there's also ideal as well which is quite a popular payment gateway in parts of Europe but for the u.s. the UK can add a place like that you are quite restricted on the amount payment gateway as you get which is a potential limiting factor as to how big you can grow your site and how successful it's going to be because not being able to choose your payment gateways could end up costing you money in the long run especially if you start getting large amounts or sales and you want to transfer to another payment gateway that's going to save you considerable amount money in transaction fees talking of transaction fees with weeks you don't get charged any additional transaction fees by the platform you just get charge of transaction fees by your payment gateway so that's one good thing so those are the basic features that's what I could pull out that's why we could find about the whigs platform and say they don't really over promote the features of their platform that much especially when you compare it to other e-commerce platforms who are very up front and forward about the features of their platform offer weeks and not so much a bit surprised by that one the next thing I want to talk about before I actually jump into the week's dashboard is I want to talk about the hosting and performance of the week's platform because this is something I like to test with every single platform I review and once again it was very difficult to find information on the Wix platform most ecommerce platform Shopify ekm be commerce a very up front and forward with the information on there hosting because they want to tell you how good their hosting is weeks really weren't upfront about this I had to do a lot of digging even just to find these very basic information that they have 99.9% uptime which is pretty much industry standard you get on limited bandwidth with every single package for the e-commerce packages and you also get an SSL certificate with each package as well but I did still test the platform out because just because they don't tell me how good that hosting is doesn't mean say I'm not going to go out and test it now what I do is I go to a website called ping des and use their speed tool it's one of the best tools out there for checking the performance of website and I took three of the Wix tours example sites from the Wix website and run them through the Pingdom speed tour once a day for three days so a good spread of information and see how about the site's performed unfortunately it wasn't particularly good for weeks they are considerably slower than the majority of their competition the likes of once again Shopify ekm are in the 1 to 2 second low time for their pages weeks as you can quite clearly see is way off the pace with ranging from 5.5 to second average to 7.48 second average that's a long time and you can see this when you go onto the week's web site so that what the web sites are used you could see elements loading in on the page so you come in and you just produce the background then you'd see an image come in and you'd see a bit of content come in then you see a button coming and this just really isn't good especially from a fully hosted platform like weeks I did expect much better performance from them and just a much better experience and the reason why this is really important is twofold really because number one eats a ranking factor for search engines I know that Google puts a lot of emphasis on sites that perform really really well and which just doesn't do this and the second thing is these impacts on your customers user experience because they're going to come to your site and they're going to be sitting there waiting for the site to load and majority of people if it takes longer than two seconds will click off your site it's a known fact that when you start getting past a two-second load time you start losing a considerable amount of your visitors back to the search engine to go to somebody else's site so this is a really big issue with the Wix platform and I actually have gone back in and retested this just to see through some kind of abnormality and no it wasn't this is unfortunately some issue with the Wix platform that their sites just don't load that quickly so that's covered the features and the performance and the web hosting of the Wix platform now it's time to actually go into the Wix dashboard and see what weeks is like to use now gain story Wix is really really simple you just go to Wix calm and click on the nice big button here get started and then it will present sign up page you just need to put your email in and a password and you're good to go now once you've completed this you'll be asked if you want to go through the ADI which is the advanced design intelligence setup guide and I would recommend anybody getting started with Wix actually go through this because it does do a really good job of saying up a basic website for you and it will automatically install if you want it to the Wix tours up because the Commerce features don't come with the call Wix software you have to install it in the form of an up and if you go through that Adi setup it will actually is thought it for you which is really useful it saves you having to do it yourself so why is the dashboard like when you actually get into it well this is what it looks like it's very well laid out it's a really easy to use dashboard one thing that is really good with weeks and I do like is their set up guide it's one of the most in-depth of all the platform's I use most have between four and six options for getting started as you can see weeks have quite a few to sell lots of different elements in your site and also teach you how to start marketing your site and using a lot of the features that the Wix platform has to offer and this is one thing I really do like about the weeks platform and I which other platforms would adopt a similar system some of them I just way too light on their set of guides which you can tell has been designed for people who have not used a website before built a website which is why they've gone such in-depth in their set of guide and as I said I do really like this but let's look at the e-commerce features of the website so once you've got the Wix app installed if you've gone through the weeks ad I set up you all have these options here in your dashboard if if you haven't had the Wix stores app installed or you've got a WIC site and you haven't installed the app I'll show you how to do that in a little bit so let's see what it's like to actually use some of these ecommerce features I'm I'm gonna start with this by looking at inventory and how you manage your inventory so to get to this you just go on to the store products tab and it will bring up all your existing product these are all demo products I haven't added these in but adding a new product on Wix is really really simple just click the nice big blue a new product button and it will ask you if you and it's bear digital products why physical now there's only a slight difference between the two pages when you go into digital products you'll have the option to upload your file and then you can add the information such as the name the price the description and any images and additional information and also you can manage stock inventory on this I don't know what you'd want to do that with digital products because you don't have an inventory of them so I don't quite get that one but that is how you add a digital product when you go onto a physical product you'll see it's very similar layout it's just kind of changed a few the sections order so instead of having the big upload file at the top each add your product images and add any video so if you've got any kind of promo videos for your products you can upload them straight into the product here then you just add your name your price in your description then there's an additional info section and this adds another tab to your actual product listing and this is great for adding additional info so if you've got a specialist returns policy for this or delivery policy you can add this info directly into the product which is really useful this is also great if you've got custom products because you can set specific information for that products because sometimes it might differ from your main like business policies such as your return policy because custom products are dealt with slightly differently and talking of custom products you can actually add a custom text field so if you sell personalized items say sell rings with engraving you can add a custom text field here this allows people to type in whatever personalized information they want on the products so if you was having like this example or watching graved they can type in what they want engraved on the watch and then that automatic comes through as part of the order that's a really useful thing when you're selling personalized products because it just makes the process so much easier for you to manage and then you've got product options this is if you want to create variations so if you've got different sizes different colors things like that this is where you add them on the product page that is the main difference between this and the digital products because you will have variations on your physical products and you don't generally have those with digital products and then at the bottom you can sell your track inventory which makes more sense on a physical product than it does to products because you actually have physical inventory but that is how you create a product in Wix it's really simple both the digital and physical products are really well laid out pages among things I do like is that you can promote them directly from the product page so you can create a coupon specifically for that item here you can create a promo video but you do need to add images to do that and whatever images you upload you can then create a promo video based off those images you can send it directly in an email campaign so if you've got a new range of something or you've got a new products a new part of a range you can email it directly out to your customers you can share the product by your social media platforms and then you can edit the SEO settings which is your title and your meta description so that is pretty simple it's a very short and concise page but it does everything you need to do when it comes to adding a product so once you've created your products and you've added your inventory you want to get right to organizing your products into categories or collections as they're called on Wix so it will navigate to the collections menu and what this does is it shows any existing collections you've got and by default you'll have all products it just loves everything in that or your demo products will go in there straight away but the add the new collection is really really simple click the new collection button type the name and you want your collection image so if you've got an image for that collection say it's a promo image or something like that you can add it directly in there and then you can add your products directly from this menu so you don't have to go back in and edit the products and change which collection they're in you can just do it directly from this page which is really useful now the one thing I don't like about the collections system on Wix is that you can only have top-level collections and wabun by this is you can't have sub-collections off them so if you created one saying men's clothing you couldn't have a sub collection under that of t-shirts than one of jeans and things like that you can't organize them in that way you can only have your top collection and while some small businesses this isn't an issue if you've got a large range of products this can become quite a bit of an issue as you're building out your side because you might start running into problems in the fact it becomes difficult for people to navigate around your site because you want to organize your product so people can move from one to another and quickly find the types of products that they're looking for sticking with the men's clothing example if people want to see what kind of hoodies they've you've got that go with t-shirts it's going to be very difficult for them to do that if you haven't got sub collections that they can easily navigate to it means they're going to have to scroll through your products and this can have an impact on your conversion rate and also your user experience and this isn't a great thing on the weeks platform then the next thing I usually look at at this point is managing your orders well unfortunately as I'm only on the free weeks plan I haven't actually got any odds and I can't create any orders to show you how to do this then she can see on the screen I've got no way of doing this which is really unfortunate as I'd love to be able to show you how to do this but fortunately I can't but what I can do is show you what it's like to customize the Wix platform because wigs have one of the best tools in the industry so to start in your site you simply click on edit site in the bottom and what it will do is it will bring up the week's Adi this is the artificial design intelligence and this is one of the best tools I've come across for building a website because you can go on and you can add sections to your website and you can see the amount of sections you have to choose from this makes customizing your quick site really really simple to do and even somebody who's very novice to building websites could build a really good-looking website in pretty much no time I've had a good play around this and I really like it there's so many options out there and there's also layout options for the sections so if you want to be the product slider for example there's all these different layouts you can go for so not only do you have all these sections you have layouts within these sections as well so the amount is nearly endless with weeks it's an absolutely fantastic tool I really do like it then it's fun the redeeming features of the Wix platform but they do have a second editor as well most platforms have an average editor at best weeks I've got two now the second one is the classic weeks editor which you can access by clicking on this tab here and it comes up you sure you want to switch if you switch to the classic editor and the one thing I will note at this time it can take a while to go between one editor to the other and this is something I've experienced with the Wix dashboard in general sometimes it can be quite almost laggy in terms of being able to move from one section to another it's not as quick and sharp as some other platforms and I don't know where this is to do with hosting because as I showed you when I was looking the performance weeks doesn't perform that well they don't know whether this is tied into that but the original editor is a bit more complicated to use and this put a lot of people off especially I know who used weeks because it was a bit too complicated there's almost too many things you can do in this editor because you can make little changes that you can drag things and there's just too many small minor changes you can do in this and you can not spend a lot of time and not really achieving much in there that's why I prefer the ADI editor because it's just easier to use and you get much more overall control rather than making tiny little changes here but if you tie the two in you can really really customize your site so it looks exactly how you want it to now from this editor is one of the best ways to add apps to your website because Wix works on an app system because Wix tours is an app and to install apps this is one of the best ways to do it so you go into the original Wix editor click on the add up and it'll bring up the week's app marketplace and you get lots of different ones to choose from I don't know exactly how many they are because they don't do an overall all applications but you can see the different kind of things that are available and for some of them that have front-end impact on your site so it all that menus and things like that this is the best way to add it because you can configure it straight away whereas if you install them using the app marketplace in the dashboard you have to come into this editor to set them off anyway so you might as well just do anything that's going to reflect the front end of your site you might as well just install them why you're in this editor and just do it all in one place in one goat just makes life so much easier so that is how you add ups just click on add and it will install it for you now the majority of these apps do have a free version or at least a free trial available but if you want to get access to all the features then you are going to have to pay for it and most of them do charge on a monthly button and this can make weeks become a little bit expensive if you have too many these apps installed so that is how the two editors work the one is very much an overview editor so you can add section and change things the original editor is very much for making minor tweaks but in my opinion don't spend too long in the original editor because you can end up making lots of small changes that don't really make a big difference to your site whether them maybe slightly changing the aesthetics but they don't actually improve how your site was overall so those are the two editors going back into the Wix dashboard I'll show you how you can access the apps in here so you go to the your sidebar scroll down to the bottom click on apps and then you can search the app marketplace in here and as you can see it's very similar to the way it's laid out in the Wix editor and you just go through search for whatever you want you can either scroll through manually or you can search the UPS here or here and you'll find the exact app you want it's really simple to use and there is a really large variety of apps as you can see there's things like 25 printful which are print-on-demand services but there's also things that can help improve how the Wix site works such as site booster and other ones there's lots in there so there's way too many for me to go through in this review but that is pretty much the Wix dashboard it's very simple to use it's very easy very easy to navigate your way around nothing is particularly difficult to find in there now the next thing I want to talk about is the Wix support because it's something they really do push in there I advertise material do you get really good support from the week's platform but when you start reading the reviews of the platform and people have supposed to have use Wix and they don't have the same opinion as what weeks do and the one thing I found was it's actually quite difficult to find out how to contact the wig support team because you think I'll go on to the Help Center which brings up the Help Center and pretty much you're just confronted by documentation and whenever you search anything within the Wix Help Center it would always bring up documentation it doesn't show you easily how you can contact a member of the wick supporting in fact they've hidden it quite well because to find it you've actually actually click the show more button scroll all the way down to the box and there it is he'd um right at the bottom I don't really like this I think platforms like they should be up front and center with how you can contact them majority of other platforms are but weeks aren't I don't like the fact they've tried to almost hide how you can contact them it doesn't really portray kind of transparency to me and this is a recurring theme I found through using Wix and testing work so when it comes to finding the information about the features that the hosting nothing's overly clear with the week's platform and I just I'm not a big fan of this I like companies to be upfront with me I like them to tell me exactly what they do how you can do things it's just not that simple to do with Wix I don't know why they're doing this but to me it's just not really a positive so my conclusion of Wix is it a good ecommerce platform it could be it has some pretty good features from what I could find it's pretty easy to use that Adi is a really really useful tool for building the website there's lots of great apps on there but there's a few issues with the platform the main one being that performance it's just too much of a hurdle to try and get over for me to really recommend the platform because it's going to have a big impact on your business the second thing is the lack of payment gateways which is just going to limit how much you can grow your business and the third one is the lack of sub-collections this just makes it really difficult to create any kind of category hierarchy for your product and that tied in with the payment gateways really does limit it to very small businesses if you need a proper econ solution weeks definitely isn't the way to go that are better options out there even if you are a small business looking for e-commerce there's still better options out there in my opinion because there's just too many issues with the Wix platform the main one being that performance and unfortunately it wasn't just the ones I tested I went through and tested a lot of other weak stores sites and they got the same kind of result and for me it's just too much of an issue now I hope you enjoyed this video and learned something from this video especially about the week's platform on what it's like to use if you have I'd really appreciate if you'd smash that like button also let me know in the comments below what do you think of weeks well it's been your experience is there anything in the review that I have uncovered or is there any questions you want to ask if there is drop them in the comments below and I will replace them as soon as I can and if I can answer your question I will also last requests honestly if you do want to see more content like this because I do lots of e-commerce reviews comparisons things like that then hit that subscribe button and education policy yet first notification and when I post a new video so guys thanks so much for watching stay awesome and I'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 2,824

Keywords: Wix Review, Wix Review 2020, Wix Review for Online Store, Wix Review for Ecommerce, Ecommerce Platform, Ecommerce Review, wix ecommerce, wix pricing

Id: BtPKo3tb0OM

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020