Ecwid Reviews—Pros and Cons, FAQ —How to Get Started Right Away
In this Ecwid review article, we walk you through the key pros and cons of an online store builder that allows you to add ecommerce functionality to any website.
Is Ecwid a Better Option?
Well, in this deep dive into the platform, you’ll learn all about its core features, strengths, weaknesses, and value for money.
By the end of the post, you’ll have a much clearer idea of whether Ecwid is the right ecommerce solution for your business—and what the best alternatives are if it is not.
Let’s start with an important question...
What is Ecwid? How does it work?
Ecwid is a tool for building your own online store. It’s a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) product, meaning that you don’t own the software, but pay a monthly fee to use it.
Much like other ecommerce platforms, Ecwid allows you to set up ‘catalogs’ of products, and add photos, pricing, weight, etc. for each item.
You can define shipping rates, accept credit card payments, and so on—all the key stuff that you’d expect to be able to do using an ecommerce solution. This is all done via a web browser—there’s nothing to install on your computer.
However, Ecwid differs significantly from competing products like Shopify, Squarespace, and BigCommerce, in that it is not really designed to let you create a standalone ecommerce website. Instead, it’s designed to allow you to add an online store to an existing website or online presence.
That said, in recent years, Ecwid has added some new functionality, called ‘Instant Sites’, that does let you create a basic, one-page standalone offering.
(You will read more in depth later in the review.)
When you use Ecwid, you get a widget that you can put on other websites. This is why it's called an "ecommerce widget." You get a few lines of HTML code (the widget) to add to an existing website or social media profile, and your store is displayed wherever you’ve inserted this code.
But how much does this functionality cost?
Ecwid pricing
1. The no-cost plan
If you’ve only got a few products to sell (up to 10), Ecwid is entirely free. This is something of a unique selling point for Ecwid—with the exception of Big Cartel, we’ve yet to review an ecommerce platform that offers much in the way of free selling tools.
The free plan is pretty basic, with key features like discount coupons and the ability to sell digital goods being unavailable, and it only allows you to sell up to 10 products.
Significantly, you can’t use this plan to sell on key social media sites like Facebook or Instagram.
But for merchants with very simple requirements, this may actually be sufficient; and using the free plan is a good way to try the product out.
Probably the most important thing to note about the free plan is that it is not great from a search engine optimization (SEO) point of view; you need to be on a paid-for plan to ensure that your product pages talk to search engines in the best way possible.
2. The paid-for plans
In terms of the paid-for plans, the USD pricing structure is as follows:
- Free — $0 per month) and lets you sell up to 10 products.
- Venture—$15 per month, letting you sell up to 100 products.
- Business—$35 per month, letting you sell up to 2,500 products.
- Unlimited—$99 per month, letting you sell an unlimited number of products.
Join Here & Start Selling Online for Free With Ecwid
As you might expect, the more you pay, the more additional features you get – discount coupons, integrations with other stores, better support, and so on. (More on all of these features in a moment.)
3. Ecwid pricing outside of the United States
Something to be aware of is that Ecwid can be more expensive for non-US users.
It costs a lot more to buy these plans in the UK than in the US. For example, Venture, Business, and Unlimited plans cost £15, £35, and £199 per month there.
In the EU, the equivalent prices are €15, €35, and €99 — a bit cheaper than the plans cost in the UK, but still nearly 15% more expensive than in the US.
The key differences to watch out for between Ecwid plans
A few key differences between the Ecwid plans to watch out for are as follows:
- The ‘Venture’ plan does not allow you to list your products on established marketplaces (Amazon and eBay).
- The ‘Venture’ plan is quite restrictive in terms of how it allows you to display your products. On this plan, you can’t use product variants or allow users to make use of product filters when browsing your store.
- The ‘Venture’ plan doesn’t allow you to edit existing orders (or create ones manually) — you’ll need to be on a more expensive plan to be able to do that.
- With the ‘Business’ and ‘Unlimited’ plans, you can avail of some consultation time when setting up your store (2 hours and 12 hours, respectively).
- Phone support is only available on the ‘Business’ and ‘Unlimited’ plans.
- Multilingual features are only available on the ‘Business’ and ‘Unlimited’ plans.
- Only the ‘Unlimited’ plan gives you full access to point-of-sale features.
Join Here & Start Selling Online for Free With Ecwid
Now, let’s drill down into some of Ecwid’s key features.
Payment Gateways
A payment gateway is the software that lets you accept payments via credit card.
With Ecwid, you can process credit card payments ‘out of the box’ using Paypal, with no extra charge other than Paypal’s commission.
There are also 82 other payment gateways you can connect to Ecwid; these include well-known options like Sagepay, Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.Net, and many others.
It will depend on where you live to see what kind of products you can get.
Some other online store solutions, like Shopify, offer a few more options in this area. Ecwid, on the other hand, has a wide range of payment processors that can be used.
Remember, of course, that using these payment gateways often means paying a monthly fee.
So, you may find it best to start off with Paypal and add a payment gateway down the line, if and when your volume of sales justifies it.
Point-of-sale functionality
Thanks to Ecwid’s point-of-sale (POS) features, you can use your Ecwid store to sell not just online but in physical locations too – in stores, market stalls, at concerts, and so on.
With Ecwid’s POS functionality, regardless of whether a customer buys a product in store, online, on their phone, or via Facebook, everything stays in sync—i.e., the merchant’s catalog, inventory, and customer/transaction information.
There are two main ways to use POS with Ecwid: using its ‘mobile POS’ option, or its full POS integrations.
Mobile POS
Ecwid’s first POS option involves downloading Ecwid’s ‘Sell on the Go’ app to your mobile device and connecting it to a Paypal or Square card reader.
It’s important to note, however, that this POS option is only available to merchants based in certain countries.
If using PayPal, you can use it in the US and the UK. The Square integration works for users based in the US, UK, Australia, Japan, Canada, and Ireland.
Significantly, Android users are not currently catered for — the Ecwid app is for iOS only.
POS integration in its entirety
For a more comprehensive POS system that lets you use a wider range of hardware (full-sized card readers, receipt printers, cash drawers, tablet stands, etc.), you can integrate Ecwid more deeply with a variety of third-party POS systems, including Vend, Clover, Square, and Alice POS.
The bad news is that you will need to be on the most expensive Ecwid plan to use these platforms to power your POS—the $99 per month ‘Unlimited’ plan.
Creating multilingual stores with Ecwid
So long as you are on a ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan, Ecwid storefronts can be translated into 53 different languages—this is generous by comparison to key competitors.
Ecwid provides this functionality by detecting visitors’ language automatically based on their browser settings / IP address, and displaying the correct language version of a store.
Key components of your store—such as ‘add to bag’ buttons, social media labels, etc.—are translated for you automatically; you will need to translate product descriptions yourself, however.
It's not ideal to have to use third-party apps like Google Translate or apps like Shopify to make your store available in different languages.
So, a definite thumbs up to Ecwid for making multilingual functionality a core feature.
One thing you should note, however, is that if you’re considering using Ecwid for a multilingual WordPress site, you’ll also need to install a language plugin like WPML or PolyLang to present your store in multiple languages.
Now for a quick look at importing and exporting products.
Importing and exporting products
Ecwid, like many other products, lets you import and export data to and from the platform in CSV format.
When importing via CSV, you can make use of 30 different columns, each representing a particular product attribute (product name, SKU, URL for product image, and so on). Your import file can be delimited by commas, semi-colons, or tabs.
You can also make use of the X-Cart or LiteCommerce CSV formats as part of this process.
The export option, as you might expect, allows you to export product data, orders, and customers (again, in CSV format) and means that if you ever feel the need to migrate your store to another ecommerce platform, you shouldn’t have any major problems doing so.
Selling digital products
Ecwid doesn’t just allow you to sell physical products: it caters very well to digital products too, allowing you to sell files of up to 25GB in size on all its paid-for plans.
This limit is a lot better than those set by competitors like BigCommerce and Shopify, which limit digital file sizes to 512MB and 5GB, respectively.
Search engine optimization (SEO) in Ecwid
The key things to watch out for with SEO features in online store building products like Ecwid are as follows:
- how fast you can get a product page to load.
The good stuff first: you can edit the title of your page and its meta description easily; the relevant fields are pre-populated for you automatically, but you can tweak them to suit your SEO objectives.
Changing alt text (the description of images that search engines and screen readers see) isn’t doable, though—you’re stuck with whatever Ecwid generates for you automatically.
And, significantly, you can’t manually create or change the URL of a product—you have to make do with the one that Ecwid generates for you. This isn’t great, because keywords in URLs are used by some search engines to categorise content during indexing.
It seems as though you can’t create redirects in Ecwid either, which is not ideal at all and effectively locks you into using a particular URL once you’ve created it.
However, the URLs that are automatically generated by Ecwid include the title you’ve given to your product, so if you include some keywords in your product title (not a bad idea anyway), your URL will include them too. This serves as something of a workaround, but I’d prefer full control over URLs.
Another area where Ecwid doesn’t perform quite so well on the SEO front involves AMP — accelerated mobile pages).
As the name suggests, AMP pages load faster on mobile devices. This encourages people to stay longer on your page, thus increasing ‘dwell time"—something which is believed by many SEO experts to be rewarded by Google with preferential treatment in search results.
Additionally, Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in carousels in search results, giving AMP content an extra little boost.
Ecwid, on the other hand, doesn't let you make AMP versions of your products like other products like BigCommerce or Shopify.
(You can use it to create dynamic order notification emails—you can find out more about these here—but being able to display products in AMP format is more useful.)
Even though there is room for improvement when it comes to SEO in Ecwid, I don't think its current shortcomings in this area are a complete show-stopper. It's important to remember that keyword research, link building, and great content on your site are just as important to SEO as the technical aspects of SEO.
But there are unquestionably some SEO shortcomings in Ecwid.
What about Ecwid and Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of Google SEO goals for the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a website. Sites that meet them are more likely to show up at the top of search results.
Now, it’s always much harder to ensure full compliance with Google targets like these when you’re dealing with a cloud product like Ecwid—simply because you don’t have much control over its code.
It looks as though Ecwid is aware of the requirements, and is developing its product in a way that makes meeting them more likely—but you will have work to do too, by ensuring that all your images are fully optimized and the use of third-party scripts and apps is kept to a minimum.
And speaking of apps...
Take Note: For some general pointers on SEO, you might want to check out our ‘Making Your Site Visible" post or our YouTube tutorial on improving site visibility.
Apps and plugins
In common with a lot of other ecommerce platforms, Ecwid provides a number of integrations with other web apps (via its ‘app market’).
However, the number of integrations available with well-known services is fairly limited (there are a couple hundred available).
Integrations do exist with key products like Freshbooks and Shipstation; but competing products like Shopify offer a much broader range of established apps (over 7,000 in Shopify’s case).
The picture is better when it comes to CMS plugins: these are available for WordPress, Drupal, Wix, and Joomla, allowing you to install Ecwid on one of these platforms very easily.
Dropshipping in Ecwid.
Dropshipping is a sales and fulfilment approach where you don’t keep what you’re selling in stock (in fact, you may never see any stock!).
Instead, you take an order via your online store, send it to a dropshipping supplier, and they deliver the goods to your client—your store becomes a middle man of sorts.
You can dropship in Ecwid by adding the Wholesale2B, Syncee, Spocket, NextsChain, Sup, Printy6 or Printful apps, which are all available in Ecwid’s app market.
The Wholesale2B, Syncee, Spocket, and NextsChain apps allow you to add a variety of products from hundreds of dropshipping suppliers to your Ecwid store.
The Printful app lets you make products with your own images or logos by uploading them to Printful. Printful then makes the products and sends them to your customers when they order them.
Other platforms do provide more access to dropshipping suppliers, but on the plus side, all the dropshipping apps that are available for Ecwid are from well-established providers.
As always with dropshipping, for ethical reasons, you may wish to perform some due diligence on how (and where) any products you are featuring on your site are being produced. Dropshipping suppliers don’t always have the best track record when it comes to working conditions in their factories.
Ecwid "Instant Sites"
Although Ecwid has traditionally been a product that lets you add an online store to an existing website, it now allows you to set up a standalone store too, called an ‘Ecwid Instant Site.’
An "instant site" is a basic, one-page affair based on a concept, but it’s nonetheless potentially very useful, and definitely represents a good ‘stopgap’ measure for merchants who are starting a business but have not yet finished developing a full website.
Creating an instant site simply involves choosing a template (from a range of 79) and adding some content / products to it.
You can either host your ‘Instant Site’ on the Ecwid domain (i.e., at a mystore.ecwid.com address) or map it to your own custom domain (www.yourstorename.com).
You can also add a blog to your Instant Site (something that is important for inbound marketing campaigns) — but this involves a really odd workaround where product categories are used to create posts.
An Ecwid Instant Site is not, in my view, a substitute for a proper online store yet, but improvements are being regularly made to the tool, and it will come in handy for many merchants. It certainly serves as a much better landing page than a traditional ‘site under construction’ effort.
And, although Ecwid’s Instant Sites are rather basic in nature, they do nonetheless technically provide users with one of the cheapest ways possible to build a standalone online store—you can get one up and running for as little as $15 per month, or even for free .
This all compares positively with Squarespace, Shopify, and BigCommerce, which charge upwards of $29 per month to let you create a standalone store (that said, the end result will be considerably more sophisticated than anything you’ll be able to create with an Ecwid Instant Site).
A whole ecommerce site for free?
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ecwid is that it can be used entirely for free. This is quite unusual in the e-commerce world. If your needs are basic, it’s a remarkably cost-effective way to start selling on an existing website.
The ‘Instant Site" feature—also included in the free plan—adds to this sense of good value. There aren't many ecommerce platforms that let you build a separate, ad-free store without having to pay a monthly fee.
The main limitations of the free plan are its product limit (10) and the fact that, unlike the paid plans, you can’t use it to sell on Facebook or Instagram.
You can find out more about using Ecwid for free here.
Multi-currency selling in Ecwid
You typically get more online sales if you sell your products in the currency used by your store visitors.
So, if you’re selling your goods in a lot of different countries, it’s a good idea to let your potential customers select their own currency — or better yet, have your store present your products in the local currency automatically.
To do this in Ecwid, you need to install the ‘Currency Converter’ app (pictured below), which costs $4.49 per month.
The Currency Converter app makes it very easy to display prices in local currencies automatically.
My only issue with it is that the original currency gets displayed again at the final stage of the purchase, which may put some buyers off completing a purchase.
But overall, it’s fine.
Shipping options
Like most leading ecommerce solutions, Ecwid lets you offer a good range of shipping options—you can charge a flat fee for shipping, calculate it by weight, offer free shipping, etc.
In addition, Ecwid has built-in integrations with the following carriers to show their shipping rates for customers' orders when they check out.
- Royal Mail (United Kingdom)
- MDS Collivery (South Africa)
- PostAustralia (Australia)
- EMS, Russian Post (Russia)
These rates are based on weight.
The good news is that this real-time carrier quotation functionality is available on all paid-for Ecwid plans. This is commendable, and makes Ecwid more generous in this area than many of its competitors.
However, if you want the most accurate real-time shipping rates—based not just on weight but on parcel dimensions too—you’ll need to be on a ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan to take advantage of these.
Using Ecwid with other platforms
You can use Ecwid with pretty much any platform you like: it’s simply a case of embedding your Ecwid widget’s code on your site. However, you might be interested in learning more about how Ecwid integrates with some of the ‘big-hitter’ online store builders.
Ecwid and WordPress
WordPress doesn’t provide any ecommerce functionality out of the box, so anyone wishing to sell on the platform will need a third-party solution like Ecwid.
There is a dedicated Ecwid plugin available for WordPress, so adding an Ecwid store to your WordPress site is very straightforward—you can get up and running with a few clicks.
Ecwid and Squarespace
When it comes to ecommerce, Squarespace is getting better and better. It doesn't yet support multi-currency selling, dropshipping, or automatic tax calculations.
Integrating Ecwid with Squarespace allows you to bypass these limitations, and adding it to a Squarespace site is very easy: it’s a simple matter of adding a code block to a page and pasting some HTML into it.
Ecwid and Wix
If you’re a Wix user, you can use a dedicated Ecwid app to sell products on your site. You can also avail yourself of preferential rates from Ecwid. The below video shows you how the integration works.
interface and ease of use
Ecwid’s interface is fairly easy to use.
Like many similar online store builders, you get a vertical menu on the left that allows you to access key functionality, and the area on the right is used to display or edit associated products, site content, and reports.
As with any ecommerce tool, you’ll need to spend a bit of time familiarizing yourself with creating catalogues and product variants, setting up shipping rates, and so on. But there is nothing here that should represent too much of a learning curve.
Matters are helped by an ‘onboarding’ to-do list that is provided to you when you log in for the first time.
If you get stuck, however, you can always get in touch with Ecwid’s support team—more on that later—or, if you’re on a ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’, you can take advantage of the included customization service (you get 2 hours and 12 hours of customization time from Ecwid on these plans, respectively).
Customer support
The level of customer support you get from Ecwid depends on the type of plan you’re on.
The free plan comes with live chat support for the first 30 days of your subscription. After that, you'll have to use forums and help pages to find answers to any questions you might have, but you can still use the free plan.
If you’re on the $15-per-month Venture plan, you can expect email and live chat support; if you’re on a Business ($35) plan, you get phone support in addition to this; and the Unlimited plan ($99) gives you phone, email, live chat, and ‘priority’ support.
This support comes in six languages—English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. This is similar to the multilingual support that some other ecommerce platforms (like Squarespace and BigCommerce) offer, but not as much as Shopify, which has support in more than 20 languages.
There’s another type of support available from Ecwid in the form of ‘customization hours’. If you’re on an Ecwid ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan, you get two hours or 12 hours of assistance customizing your store. This service is potentially very useful for users who are completely new to the whole area of ecommerce and web design.
All in all, Ecwid's customer support services aren't bad when compared to those of other products that do the same thing.
Ecwid review: conclusion
Overall, Ecwid is a cost-effective, powerful way to add ecommerce functionality to an existing site, or to place an online store on a Facebook page or other social media presence. If you’re building a standalone site, there are better options available—I’d be inclined to go for Shopify or BigCommerce—but ultimately, Ecwid does what it says on the tin: lets you add ecommerce to any website—and easily too.
Ecwid deserves particular praise for its completely free plan and its comprehensive multilingual selling features. There is, however, a bit of room for improvement when it comes to SEO.
I’m going to end this Ecwid review with a full summary of the product’s pros and cons below, but as ever, it’s a case of try before you buy, and you can register for the free version of Ecwid here.
The pros and cons of using Ecwid
The Benefits of Using Ecwid:
- The free Ecwid plan has a lot of features, but it doesn't have as many as the paid plans.
- Ecwid represents a really simple way to add e-commerce to any existing website.
- The product is cheap by comparison to other solutions.
- Point-of-sale functionality is available, and there are quite a few ways to implement it.
- If you want to sell in multiple currencies, you don't have to spend a lot of money on an app to do so.
- It supports multi-language versions of your store.
- Tax rates are applied automatically, meaning that you don’t have to worry about setting up state tax or VAT rules manually.
- The store designs are fully responsive.
- Plugins / apps are available that make it easy to integrate Ecwid with key content management systems (like WordPress, Drupal, and Wix).
- Real time carrier quote functionality is available on all plans.
- The ‘Instant Sites’ option is a good (and cheap) stopgap measure for merchants who need a store quickly.
Try the free ECwid plan here.
Cons of using Ecwid
- Phone support is only available on the more expensive plans.
- The multi-currency feature, which is good in general, doesn't show the local currency at the end of the checkout process.
- You can’t use product variants on the free or entry-level plans.
- The SEO features could be better.
- The mobile POS integrations only work with iOS devices.
- There are a limited number of apps / integrations available in the Ecwid App Store.
- You can’t change product URLs or create redirects, which isn’t ideal from an SEO point of view.
- You can’t create AMP versions of product pages using Ecwid.
- The free version doesn’t let you access any of the SEO features.
- The Instant Site feature, whilst useful, is not a substitute for a fully-specced standalone store.
- Depending on the country you live in, you may be charged higher monthly fees to use Ecwid.
Alternatives to Ecwid
If you’re starting an online store from scratch, then you’re spoiled for choice; there are many platforms available that allow you to build a standalone online store, and the big hitters include Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Volusion, and Squarespace (with Shopify and BigCommerce being the most fully-featured as far as ecommerce features go).
Ecwid FAQ
Is Ecwid good for beginners?
Yes. Ecwid is designed with a ‘non-coding’ audience in mind, so it is easy for ecommerce and web design novices to use.
Is Ecwid a good option for small businesses?
Ecwid is a good option for small businesses, because it is easy to use, provides a good range of ecommerce features, and is reasonably priced.
What are the main advantages of using Ecwid?
The main advantages of using Ecwid are: its entirely free plan; its comprehensive feature set; and the fact that it can be used to add ecommerce features to an existing website.
What are the main disadvantages of using Ecwid?
The main disadvantages of using Ecwid are that you can’t really build a professional standalone store with it (its' ‘Instant Site 'option is very basic) and that the SEO features need a bit of improvement (especially where creating URLs and redirects are concerned).
What’s the best alternative to Ecwid?
Shopify is probably one of the best alternatives to Ecwid, because, like Ecwid, it lets you embed a product catalogue on an existing website AND create a standalone store (Ecwid performs better when it comes to the former, and Shopify is one of the best options available when it comes to the latter). WooCommerce is also worth investigating if you are a WordPress user—this can add a lot of very sophisticated ecommerce features to an existing WordPress site. Now...
over to you!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Ecwid review! If you have any queries about the platform, do leave a comment below—we read them all and will do our best to answer any questions you may have about Ecwid or ecommerce in general.
Join Here & Start Selling Online for Free With Ecwid
