4.3
Very Good
The Best
Easy to use
Excellent option for existing websites
The Worst
Limited design options for non-technical users
Basic stand-alone store builder
Starting From
$15 / month
Free plan
Ecwid Review
While creating a website is fairly easy these days, you can’t really say the same thing when it comes to ecommerce - especially if you have an existing website.
Website builders like Wix or Squarespace are certainly easy to use and offer decent ecommerce features. But they’re not exactly useful (or cost-effective) if all you’re looking to do is add an online store to your current website.
The same goes for more powerful ecommerce tools like Shopify. Its cheapest plan with unlimited items starts at $39 per month. And while its Shopify Lite plan does let you add ‘Buy Buttons’ to your existing site, the in-site functionality is pretty limited.
Ecwid: A store plug-in with a freemium option
Chances are that you are looking for something in between: an ecommerce store that fits in seamlessly with your site, starts at less than $20 per month, and doesn’t take a cut of your sales.
Ecwid (part of the Canadian ecommerce company Lightspeed) seems to be able to do just that. Unlike other online store builders, its store ‘plug-in’ can be used with any type of existing website. Most importantly: you can use its basic plan free of charge (freemium model).
What’s more, Ecwid won’t charge any additional transaction fees when you make a sale, making it one of the more affordable ecommerce solutions for smaller stores.
Now there even is an option to use Ecwid without an existing website called Instant Site. It allows you to create your online store really easily, however, it's limited to a one-page website so it's only really suitable for very small stores.
So let’s review Ecwid’s features and see if it’s worth our time and money.
More than meets the eye
At first glance, Ecwid might look a little more basic than other ecommerce platforms. But, a closer peek under the hood reveals some surprisingly advanced features.
For one thing, its direct integrations with additional sales channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Google Shopping rival those of Shopify and Wix. There's even an integration with TikTok that lets you tag products in posts. It also integrates with multichannel app Codisto, making it possible to connect your store to eBay and Amazon. What’s more, Ecwid offers point-of-sales (POS) integrations for physical stores via Square, Clover and other POS providers.
Creating a multilingual site is also possible, as Ecwid allows you to display translations if you choose. It provides localized storefronts for 53 languages, based on the visitor’s browser language. Ecwid automatically translates store labels (e.g. ‘Add to cart’, ‘Product information’), while manual translations for product names and descriptions can be easily added in the backend. Incredibly, there’s no extra app (or cost) needed to enable this, and it's much more intuitive to set up than with other platforms like Shopify.
Other useful features include discount shipping labels, email automations, and an extensive app market for enhancing your store (e.g. displaying multiple currencies, adding product search bars, or even dropshipping).
All in all, it’s a very complete solution - see our detailed Ecwid review table below to learn more.
Setup
Installing Ecwid couldn’t be easier. You simply create a new page on your website and paste the HTML code they provide.
If you have a website builder like Wix, it takes just a couple of clicks to connect your website with your Ecwid store through the Wix App Market - no code needed. You’ll even be able to manage the Ecwid backend (products, orders, settings etc) from within your Wix dashboard - there’s no need to be logged into both.
Check out the video below that shows you how to set it up on a Weebly website.
Ecwid Pricing
Price per month in a 1-year contract. Find a full price comparison table here.
Ecwid pricing: Which plan should I pick?
Ecwid offers a free plan and three premium plans. The Free plan is great if you’re selling fewer than 5 products. Any more than that, and the Venture plan ($15 per month) is a smart choice – it’s powerful, and will be enough for most small stores to get started. You can add up to 100 items and you have access to all payment gateways and shipping companies.
A definite advantage of the Business plan (which is $35 per month) is the ability to use the product variations and filters as well as access to eBay and other marketplaces. You can also enable multilingual pages, send abandoned cart emails and other email marketing campaigns, as well as receive phone support.
Conclusion
Ecwid is a surprisingly powerful ecommerce tool that can even compete with giants like Shopify in terms of features. If you’ve read through our review table above, you can see that it literally ticks all the boxes – not many of the ecommerce platforms we’ve tested can claim to do the same.
In fact, up-and-coming website builder Zyro even uses Ecwid’s technology as part of its ecommerce offering, which speaks to its strong reputation in the industry.
Ecwid is affordable and offers some very advanced features: your customers can, for example, attach files to their orders, allowing you to sell customizable products like printed t-shirts.
Fortunately Ecwid fixed some of their SEO issues, which used to be their weak spot. Thanks to their URL improvements it is now much easier to get your store properly indexed in Google. It’s also possible to create deep links to your products: by doing so you can send your visitors directly to the item (e.g. when posting a new product to Facebook).
However, these links still include a product number, e.g. “/Mens-Boardshorts-p69981186” and you also don’t have full freedom to customize your product URLs as they’re automatically generated. We’d also like to see them redirecting old pages when a product title gets updated (which automatically creates a new URL), to avoid duplicate content.
They also seem committed to improving their product, with new features constantly being added. At the time of writing, for example, they were beta-testing a recurring payments feature, allowing store owners to sell subscription products such as food boxes or beauty products.
Perhaps the only thing that’s slightly jarring with Ecwid is how the product pages are presented. If you’re slotting your Ecwid store into an existing site, you’ll find that many of the functions you normally see in the top right corner of a store page (e.g. account login, product search, shopping cart) are presented in the footer.
It’s different to the user experience most people are used to when buying online, but it’s a small trade-off if you’re looking for an affordable and convenient ecommerce solution. (Plus, if you have some technical knowledge this can always be customized).
All in all, Ecwid is a very powerful option if you already have an existing website that gets a decent amount of traffic that you can direct to your ecommerce pages. For now, we fully recommend Ecwid as a plug-in for existing websites rather than a standalone online store builder. While it’s entirely possible to also build your website with Ecwid, we think the Instant Site feature is too limited right n
