Ecwid is a quite unique ecommerce platform that allows anyone to launch an online store even for free. But is Ecwid good? And can you even trust it? Below I look into these and several other important aspects regarding Ecwid.
Is Ecwid good?
That depends to a very large extent on what you are looking for from an ecommerce platform. That is because Ecwid can be an excellent choice for those who are looking for a cheap or even free way to launch an ecommerce store, but then on the other hand it is not the most advanced ecommerce platform.
Is Ecwid legit and safe?
I believe so. That is as 1) Ecwid was founded already in 2009, 2) the platform is popular, 3) the company nowadays has more than 50 employees, 4) the company has impressive partners, such as PayPal (one can assume that these have done background checks on Ecwid) and as 5) the company has received more than $40 million in venture funding.
And speaking from my personal experience, I have not seen any indication that you couldn’t trust Ecwid.
Lightspeed: Ecwid was bought by a relative large company called Lightspeed in 2021. Lightspeed is a stock exchanged listed company and at the time of updating this has a market valuation of more than $2 billion.
Is Ecwid easy to use?
If you are new to ecommerce and/or building websites it can take a little bit of time to figure out how to use Ecwid, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes pleasantly easy to use. A big part of what makes Ecwid quite easy to use, is that its admin interface contains clear instructions on how to do different things.
How can Ecwid be used?
There are two main ways to use Ecwid: 1) you can use to it build a brand new ecommerce website or 2) you can use it to add an online store to an existing platform/website. The latter means in practice that, you can embed Ecwid’s features on, for example, a WordPress website.
What are Ecwid’s pricing and plans?
At the time of updating this Ecwid offers four different plans. Those are “Free”, “Venture”, “Business” and “Unlimited”. The Free plan costs exactly what it says, the Venture plan’s announced cost is $19/month with a monthly subscription, the Business is told to cost $39/month when paid in a monthly basis and the Unlimited plan is said to cost $99/month when paid month to month.
Ecwid has increased the prices of its Venture and Business plans. Previously the costs of those were $15/month and $35/month, assuming paying in a monthly basis. According to Ecwid none of the listed prices include taxes, that should apply also to the prices mentioned in the next section of this page.
Does Ecwid offer discounts?
You can get a discount on all the three paid plans mentioned above if you pay for a year in advance. With the discount the price of the Venture plan is under $15/month, the price of the Business plan is under $30/month and the cost of the Unlimited plan is under $85/month.
What are the most important differences between the different Ecwid plans?
When comparing the free Ecwid plan and the paid plans, it is easy to conclude that the free plan is quite limited.
And in practice likely the two biggest limitations of the free plan are that it allows you to sell at most five different products and that it doesn’t allow you to connect a custom domain name to a store created with Ecwid.
Regarding that second limitation, it is however, good to note that you can use a custom domain name even with the free plan if you are adding Ecwid to an existing website and not creating a new site through Ecwid.
When comparing the paid Venture, Business and Unlimited Ecwid plans, it can be said that the most important thing missing from the Venture-plan is product filters. You can use those with the other two paid plans. I believe that there were previously bigger differences in the included features between the different paid Ecwid plans.
In addition to those possible feature differences between the plans Ecwid also has differences in what type of support is offered for members on each plan.
Which Ecwid plan should I pick?
Given the pricing and features of Ecwid’s plans, I would say that for most users the best options are the free plan and the Business-plan. And indeed, it might be a good idea to start with the free plan and then upgrade to the Business-plan if you feel that the free plan is too restricting. Pick your plan.
How can Ecwid afford to offer a free plan?
As far as I understand that is basically the result of two things: 1) it costs them close to nothing per user to allow additional users to use the platform (i.e. the marginal cost is tiny) and 2) enough people upgrade from the free plan to a paid plan to offset the small cost of letting others use the platform for free.
Does Ecwid offer good store themes?
In my opinion, Ecwid’s templates look modern and stylish. However, a potential issue is that most of the templates are quite similar to each other and as such it is possible that if you don’t like one template, you won’t like most the templates. Luckily though, all of Ecwid’s store themes are free and you can try them easily. At the time of updating this Ecwid offers over 70 themes.
Small and bigger nice things about using Ecwid
- It doesn’t charge additional transaction fees. That can mean big savings compared to some other ecommerce platforms.
- You get easy-to-understand visitor/customer reports.
- You get access to a decent selection of apps for improving your ecommerce store.
- It is easy to change the admin interface’s language.
Ecwid review summary
Ecwid can be a good choice for running a small ecommerce store and especially so if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on your store. However, if you are looking to build a midsize to huge ecommerce business and have some flexibility in your budget, you might want to look, for example, into Shopify and see if it might fit your needs better. In a terms of a rating I would give Ecwid a total of 4/5.
Is it possible to do dropshipping ecommerce with Ecwid? Yes. You can find more information about it from this page.
Can I somehow find examples of Ecwid stores? Yes. At least at the time of writing this, Ecwid’s website has a section which lists a bunch of online stores that should be using Ecwid for ecommerce.
Are you unsure about if Ecwid is the correct choice for you? In that case, it might be a good idea to get to know some possible Ecwid alternatives. After that you might have a better idea about if you should pick Ecwid or some other ecommerce platform.
