Ecwid Review: What Makes It Stand Out in 2024?

Ecwid at a Glance

Should You Use Ecwid?

Ecwid is a bit of an underdog when it comes to e-commerce platforms. While it’s definitely a known name (more so now thanks to its considerable marketing effort) it’s still not as big as Shopify or BigCommerce. Should it be? Ecwid has a lot going for it: it’s by far one of the most beginner-friendly e-commerce platforms. Plus, it offers plenty of options for integrating with other sales channels, and it’s available in 53 languages.

However, the only way to know if that’s enough to measure up to the greats was by testing it myself, which is exactly what I did. I considered its tools, customizability, customer support, pricing, and more. All in all, I think Ecwid is a great beginner-friendly option for those who are looking to create an e-commerce store and don’t have much experience with website-building. But it might not meet the expectations of more ambitious projects.

Will Ecwid be the Rocky Balboa of your story, or are underdogs sometimes just underdogs? Keep reading to find out.

Few, but High-Quality, Templates

Ecwid offers a total of 43 templates divided across eight categories (apparel, health & beauty, electronics, services, home, art, jewelry, and food). Each of which is fully mobile-responsive. Though the template selection is noticeably smaller than that of other e-commerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, it’s still wide enough to give you a variety of choices for creating your website.

Each template follows the latest web design trends with big hero images, minimalistic and scroll-friendly design, and a focus on readability and color consistency. Though each template is different, I can’t shake the feeling that they all look like “Ecwid templates.”

That might sound like an asinine thing to write on an Ecwid review but what I mean is that there’s no option that stands out from the crowd all that much. Since Ecwid doesn’t offer that many tools for customization, that means that while your site won’t look like a carbon copy of another, there isn’t much you can do to make it unique, either.

Design and Customization

Ecwid uses a section-based editor, which means that you design your site by adding and rearranging premade sections. These sections come in 10 categories: Intro & Cover, Announcements, Promo Sliders, Videos, Special Offers, Customer Reviews, Company Info, Delivery & Payment, Location, and Products. You can modify and toggle some elements within each section, but you can’t freely add new widgets like you would with other website builders.

So, for example, if I want to add a hero section, I can choose whichever fits my site best, and choose from a selection of pre-determined layouts for how and where the image, title, and buttons appear. I can change the image, text, and toggle buttons to appear or disappear, but I can’t add a third button or media carousel if I want to.

On one hand, this ensures that your design remains consistent, and the premade options look good, but you don’t get that much freedom to make a unique website.

On the “Design” tab of your user dashboard, you can also change some general design features about your site, like the size of images and videos (you get three options: Large, Medium, and Small), aspect ratios, how products are displayed, and more. Once again, making the changes globally ensures that your site’s design remains cohesive, at the cost of some room for creativity.

Though I find the overall customization options for Ecwid lacking, I should mention that your possibilities open up a lot more if you’re proficient with CSS, since every section allows you to add custom CSS code. However, taking into account that most people aren’t web designers, that’s more of a nice-to-have feature for a small number of people than an actual alternative to Ecwid’s limited editing.

You’ll Find Everything You Need to Manage Your Online Store

Ecwid is far from an all-purpose builder, and you’ll even find that it lacks some of the more general nice-to-have features that other e-commerce platforms offer — for example, general tools for customization or an easily updated blog. However, Ecwid isn’t scant on features, it’s just a platform that knows what it’s for.

If you’re planning to create anything short of a multinational large-scale operation, Ecwid offers every tool you need to fine-tune your online store and your customers’ shopping experience to fit your ideal store exactly.

Since it’s such a specialized tool, I’d especially recommend Ecwid if you can integrate it with another portal. Whether that’s a nice Instagram page or a full site created with another builder, Ecwid could be the perfect e-commerce compliment for a complete buying experience.

Not only that, but Ecwid itself offers useful tools to help you integrate it with other platforms. If you’re looking to create a high-quality site to go along with your e-commerce store, I recommend checking out our extensive guide to creating a website in 2024.

Extensive Product and Category Editing

Being able to customize your product details might be the minimum you’d expect from an e-commerce platform, but Ecwid gives you more customization options for your products than most other platforms. On your “Products” tab, you can edit the classics, your product’s name, price, and showcase images and videos.

Now onto the fun part: you can add and edit different product variations, and Ecwid allows you to add customizable product options instead of offering a series of pre-made options. You can also add customer input fields for things like personalized messages on products or additional requests.

If you are selling a physical good, you can input weight, volume, and other shipping details, or you can sell completely digital products if you upgrade to the “Venture” plan or higher. You can also link products through the “similar products” tab and even create a custom embedded “buy now” button to insert on other platforms, like your blog or another website.

When you need to bundle your products together, Ecwid provides a simple but useful user interface to create category hierarchies and interactions.

Customizable Shipping & Pickup Options

For physical products, Ecwid allows you to offer three different delivery methods: self-pickups, local delivery, and regular shipping. For each of them, you get several customization options to cater to your and your customers’ convenience.

If you opt for traditional delivery, you can choose between USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, or a custom carrier. For each carrier, you can select shipping options (free shipping, calculated rates from the carrier, custom rates, or flat rates), and fill custom fields like carrier description, show estimated delivery dates, and set shipping regions.

If you choose local delivery (you or someone from your company delivers the products personally), you can set operating hours, delivery zones, and select custom delivery rates. Finally, if you choose self-pickups, you can customize your instructions, price, and hours. All of this means that you can get your products to your customers in the most convenient manner possible, and ensure they always have all the information they might need.

Improve Your Business’ Performance With Actionable Analytics

If you upgrade your plan to the “Venture” plan or higher, you’ll get access to Ecwid’s reports and analytics. With these, you can track buying tendencies, get visual descriptions of your store’s movements, and get in-depth information about your customers’ behavior. Thanks to Ecwid’s mobile app, you can track important information wherever you are.

You can also get a more specific view of your performance on a product-by-product basis thanks to the “My Sales” tab, which houses all the important information about each sale you’ve made.

Discount Options and Plenty of Apps

As extensive as Ecwid’s feature set is, you could broaden it even more if you needed, thanks to its extensive app market. Ecwid offers over 240 apps that can help you do everything from creating AI product descriptions to age-verifying your store or integrating with popular tools like Zapier and QuickBooks.

If you want to reward loyal customers, Ecwid also offers plenty of options for creating and managing discounts. These include gift card creation, discount coupons, and the option for your customers to get discounts for bulk orders, or even “pay what you want” options for donations.

Ecwid Is the Easiest E-commerce Builder That I’ve Used

There are no two ways about it. Though e-commerce platforms have been getting more user-friendly, I’ve never encountered one that’s as intuitive as Ecwid. In total, it took me less than one hour to set up a sample store. The streamlined design options help you get a good-looking storefront in a matter of minutes, and the user dashboard is so easy to navigate that you can get familiarized with it in no time.

Easy Integration With Multiple Sales Channels

It’s important that you use every bit of your social presence to your advantage. If someone likes what they see on an Instagram or Facebook post, you should make sure that there are as few steps as possible between that first impression and the moment they make a purchase.

Ecwid makes it easy to approach different sales channels holistically with its “Sales Channels” tab. From there, you can integrate your main store with your Facebook and Instagram shops, create a mini “link in bio” page to integrate with other social media platforms like X and integrate your store with online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.

You can also get specialized links for selling your products on a separate website or blog, add point-of-sale (POS) systems, and even create a unique mobile app for your store.

No-Fuss Marketing Options

It’s important to promote your store as much as you can to ensure maximum performance. Ecwid’s “marketing” tab allows you to create and launch ad campaigns for Google, Facebook, and TikTok. On top of that, you get tools to maximize conversion rates like abandoned cart recovery features, automatic email campaign and newsletter options to create returning customers, and subscription payment tools for continuous services.

Edit Your Store on the Go With the Mobile App

You don’t have to run home to your desktop if you need to make a change to your store on the go, or if you think of something you want to implement immediately. Thanks to Ecwid’s easy-to-use mobile app, you can make changes to your store directly from any Android or iOS device.

I’ll get straight to the point: My experience with Ecwid’s customer support was pretty good. I filled out an email ticket asking about blogging features and adding featured-product videos to my store on a weekday morning, and I got an answer in the afternoon.

The answer, by the way, is yes to both questions, though the blogging process is a little more complicated than the usual dedicated blogging dashboard that other website builders offer. My issue wasn’t so much with the quality of the support as it was the availability of it. Ticket support (the only kind available on free plans) is only available Monday to Friday from 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. PDT. If you want to get access to live chat support, you can only do so with the Venture plan and upwards. Which, fair enough, I understand wanting to focus the more immediate support resources for paying customers.

What I don’t understand, however, is why phone support is only available starting with the Business plan. Making an entire support channel inaccessible for users who don’t pay enough doesn’t make sense to me. When you’re running an online store, any issues that might prevent or deter visitors from buying need to be resolved as quickly as possible. While Ecwid’s Venture plan isn’t insanely expensive, it does cost enough to merit quality support options.

Similar Prices to Shopify, but Fewer Features

Ecwid earns some points in my book from the get-go by offering a completely free plan, which isn’t very common for e-commerce platforms. Of course, it comes with the usual limitations of free plans, like not being able to use a custom domain name and displaying Ecwid ads on your site. You won’t get access to any of the extra features like selling digital goods, subscriptions, or creating custom discounts either. Even though your store is limited to a maximum of 5 products, the free plan is still a good option for starting out.

The venture plan (coming in at $21.00 per month if you pay annually) expands your store’s capabilities greatly by giving you access to the bulk of Ecwid’s feature set. You also get to connect your own domain, remove branding, and expand the number of products you can sell to 100. The Business plan ($39.00 per month) gives you access to phone support, allows you to create a multilingual storefront, and expands your sales channel options.

Finally, the unlimited plan ($87.00) allows you to add an unlimited number of products to your store, access priority support, and integrate with Square POS devices.

I should also point out that Ecwid charges a 0% transaction fee on all plans. That means that Ecwid doesn’t take any cut off your sales, which is incredibly rare, especially on the more affordable plans. Keep in mind though, that you will still have to pay your payment processor’s transaction fees. Still, that’s more of your own sales money that you get to keep.

I singled out Shopify in the title for this section because while Ecwid is significantly more affordable than other e-commerce platforms in the market, its paid plans are similarly priced with Shopify, the most popular e-commerce platform worldwide. While I wouldn’t call either platform “cheap,” it is about as low a price as you should expect to pay for a quality e-commerce builder. Now, Ecwid has a lot going for it, but when you actually compare similarly-priced plans between platforms, you’ll quickly find that pricing-tier-by-pricing-tier Ecwid offers considerably fewer features than the competition.

In a vacuum, my opinion of Ecwid’s value-per-plan ratio would be considerably more favorable (it is, I reiterate, pretty good, all things considered) but when you take into account that its most popular competition costs about the same and offers a lot more, it definitively lowers my overall opinion of its pricing. Maybe it’s not entirely reasonable, but in e-commerce, every cent counts.