If you’re looking for a lightweight ecommerce solution you can add to just about any existing website, Ecwid is a smart choice. You can get set up and selling in just a few minutes for a very reasonable price, but it lacks some of the depth of customization that other ecommerce platforms offer.
Keep reading to learn who Ecwid is best for, what it’s good at, where it’s lacking, and how its features stack up against its biggest competitors.
Who Ecwid Is For
Ecwid is an ideal ecommerce solution for sellers who are looking for an easy way to add shopping functionality to an existing website. It’s also great if you want to keep your website and store separate so you can move or make changes to one without affecting the other.
Either way, this platform works best if you already have a website on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or just about any other site building platform.
Overall, Ecwid provides a seamless way to get quickly list products and make sales using the digital properties you already own. Whether you’re dropshipping trendy goods, selling digital downloads, pushing your products on Instagram or TikTok, or offering a subscription-based service, Ecwid gives you a easy path to multichannel ecommerce.
However, if you’re a larger shop with more intricate, complex needs or you want an ecommerce site builder with deep customization options, Ecwid probably isn’t the ticket for you.
Our favorite alternatives for ecommerce site builders and platforms that are made for serious scaling include:
- Shopify – Best all-around ecommerce platform
- Wix – Best for stores with fewer than 100 products
- BigCommerce – Best for large inventories
- Squarespace – Best for cornering a niche market
- Hostinger – Best price for a full online store
See our full guide to the best ecommerce platforms to learn more about our top picks, how we assessed them, and what to consider when making your purchasing decision.
Ecwid Pricing
Ecwid offers four separate plans for using their ecommerce solution, with each successive plan adding new features and increasing the number of products you can list and places you can sell.
For some of you, there’s no reason to look any further than their free-forever option. The Free plan is perfect if you’re simply looking to add up to five products to an existing website. You’ll never have to pay a thing to use this tier of Ecwid’s platform.
The entry-level Venture plan is mad for newer online stores looking to establish themselves or take the next step in their growth plan. For $14.08 per month, you get the ability to list up to 100 products, including both physical items and digital goods. You’ll also gain access to social selling tools for Facebook and Instagram, plus advertising on TikTok.
The Business plan, at $29.08 per month, provides powerful features for rapidly growing stores. With the ability to list 2,500 products, enable subscriptions, and sell on Amazon and eBay, this plan can scale with your ambitions. You’ll also get advanced inventory management, key checkout features like abandoned cart recovery, and shipping integrations to help streamline your order fulfillment.
Need more than that? The Unlimited plan offers, well, unlimited products. At $82.50 per month, you also unlock some things that the other plans can’t access or are required to pay for, like a free branded mobile app for your store, integration with Square and other point-of-sale systems, and priority support. This premier plan provides the freedom and tools high-volume stores need in order to thrive.
How Does Ecwid Pricing Compare?
Compared to ecommerce giants like BigCommerce, Shopify, and Wix, Ecwid’s pricing is budget-friendly.
Ecwid’s introductory paid plan is about half the price of other providers’ entry-level plans. BigCommerce, Wix, and Shopify’s cheapest plans start around $25 to $30 per month, but they don’t limit the number of products you can add to your store. However, Ecwid’s 100 product allotment leaves plenty of room to get started.
If you have more products than that, Ecwid’s middle tier is around the same price as BigCommerce, Wix, and Shopify’s starter plans, but sports features you won’t find on those unless you upgrade to a plan north of $30 per month.
And the separation of prices gets more extreme at the top tier. While Ecwid’s full-featured offering runs $82.50 per month for unlimited products and much more, BigCommerce and Shopify’s comparable plans will cost you at least $299 per month. Wix is the only one whose highest-end plan stays below Ecwid’s, not account for Wix’s custom-priced enterprise plans.
Pros and Cons of Ecwid
Ecwid is an affordable, easy-to-use ecommerce solution for online businesses. However, as with any software, it has its strengths and weaknesses.
In this section, we’ll explore Ecwid’s major virtues and flaws so you can determine if it’s the right platform for your ecommerce hopes and dreams.
Ecwid Pros
Ecwid excels in several key areas that make it appealing for anyone looking to sell products online. Some of it’s more impressive positive aspects include:
- Affordable: Ecwid offers a capable free plan and monthly subscription plans starting at $14.08 per month.
- No commission fees: Aside from standard payment processing fees, Ecwid charges no additional commissions on sales.
- Ease of use: The platform is user-friendly from front to back, with an intuitive dashboard, drag-and-drop tools, templates, and simple product adding.
- (Almost) all-in-one: Ecwid provides the essentials a growing online business needs, including inventory management, tax calculations, and shipping and fulfillment tools in one lightweight solution.
- Syncs everywhere: Update products once and Ecwid syncs the changes to your website, mobile app, and all connected sales channels.
- Built-in marketing: Integrate with social networks for ads, create coupons and newsletters, and utilize abandoned cart recovery to capture sales that would otherwise be lost.
- Global capability: Ecwid works for businesses all over the world, with site-level support for multiple languages, over 100 payment gateways, and the ability to sell in dozens of different currencies.
- Branded mobile app: On an annual Unlimited Ecwid plan, you get a free custom mobile app. Or, you can choose to pay separately for one on any Ecwid plan.
Ecwid Cons
Ecwid is extremely capable, but may run into key limitations for some sellers and businesses. Downsides to consider include:
- Limited site builder: Ecwid’s drag-and-drop site builder is easy to use but limited to a single page. It is not a full website builder like you’ll see offered by other leading ecommerce platforms.
- Paid plugins: Extending Ecwid’s functionality often requires paying for add-ons that deliver features like bulk product editing, marketing analytics, and customer notifications.
- Underwhelming apps: Some of those features and plugins, like multi-currency support and translations, only work in some areas of your online store, which can create a disjointed user experience. Many other apps also have low ratings, indicating that they could use some improvements.
- Small developer pool: Ecwid is less popular than other ecommerce platforms, so there are fewer developers to help customize and enhance the software. That can create difficulties in terms of finding quality apps to extend Ecwid’s functionality or finding peer support and troubleshooting resources.
Ecwid Review: The Details
While Ecwid is not an ecommerce platform for building out an entirely new website, its capability as a way to graft ecommerce functionality to any existing site is incredibly valuable on its own. On top of that, it offers a ton of valuable features at a budget-friendly price. In this section, we’ll go through all of the main highlights of Ecwid, as well as some areas for improvement.
Integrate Online Selling with an Existing Website
If you already have a site for your business or venture, you can easily add ecommerce functionality without having to move to a new platform or start from scratch. That’s the main selling point of Ecwid in a nutshell.
What does this mean in practice? There are a couple ways to deploy Ecwid’s capability on your website.
The simplest option is a “buy now” button you can use to sell your products anywhere, from blog posts and your home page to social media properties or wherever else you’d like. You can customize the button to match your brand style and then place it wherever you want with a simple code injection that you paste into the site backend.
If you want more than a “buy now” button, you can place an entire storefront, product category pages, or single product listings onto your current website. It’s easy to do on any content management system or website builder, including WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Joomla.
Your online store will automatically match the style of your existing site, so customers won’t even realize that the two pieces are managed separately.
Social Selling and Advertising
On all of Ecwid’s paid plans, you can sell products directly on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Once you set up your store and product catalog, Ecwid’s integrations with these channels automatically sync, so any updates you make appear across all your channels right away.
Ecwid also comes with built-in marketing and advertising tools to boost your reach via Facebook, Google, Instagram, email, and more. Plus, it combines your inventory, sales, and marketing tools in one convenient dashboard to make it easy to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what the intelligent next step is.
Marketplace Integrations
If you want to sell on Amazon, eBay, or Walmart’s marketplaces, Ecwid makes it easier than just about any other platform. Manage inventory and sync your store with all of your vendor accounts. Just like with social selling, updates will happen in real time so inventory levels and product details are always up-to-date.
However, you’ll need to be on Ecwid’s Business or Unlimited plan and use either the Codisto or Koongo apps to accomplish this. Those apps run between $24 and $29 extra per month. Even though they advertise eBay and Amazon as selling points of the Business plan, it’s annoying that you have to pay even more to actually utilize it.
One-Page Site Builder
Ecwid offers a simple one-page store builder that you can use to build something in minutes. Choose from any of the 79 free templates to get started and then customize the design to match your brand.
The drag-and-drop designer makes it simple enough to add or remove sections, change colors and fonts, swap out images, and the like. While Ecwid’s customization options are limited in this regard, this tool is ideal if you just need a basic, single-page storefront to get up and running.
Keep in mind that you can’t add multiple pages or include a blog, among other limitations compared to full-featured ecommerce site builders. However, for a small business wanting to add uncomplicated buying options, the one-page site builder gets the job done fast. You’ll have a useful storefront up and running in practically no time.
Inventory Management
Ecwid includes an inventory management system on select plans that seamlessly integrates with your existing website. Quickly add SKUs and input product quantities and variations with a few clicks of your mouse.
Ecwid automatically keeps track of your stock levels, reducing quantities when orders are placed and increasing them again when items are returned or canceled. You can extend this capability with Ecwid apps for bulk editing, CRM integration, and fulfillment automation.
You also built-in options for displaying “sold out” labels, opening pre-orders up once a product reaches zero stock, or enabling low-stock notifications so you always know when it’s time to reorder.
Product Variations
If you need an easy way to offer variations of your products, Ecwid gives you an elegant solution.
Product variations do not count against your product limit, so you can offer numerous options without worrying about running into your Ecwid plan limits, even on the free plan. Offer different sizes, colors, styles, add-ons, upsells, and more, with unique product images to showcase each variation.
You can also set individualized pricing for each variation and assign unique SKUs to track inventory and shipping details precisely. On paid plans, you unlock extra fields for variations like checkboxes, text fields, file uploads for customized products, and dynamic variations that change based on customer input.
Digital Files and Subscriptions
Ecwid offers options for selling digital downloads and subscriptions in addition to physical products. All of their paid plans allow you to sell or offer digital files, gift cards, and services, while higher-tier plans let you create and manage subscription-based offerings.
Sell ebooks, online courses, photos, music, memberships, and really any digital product or service. Just attach your files (up to 25 GB each) to your products and decide if you want to limit downloads or set expiration dates.
Once a customer completes their purchase, they gain immediate access to digital products. Ecwid streamlines the checkout process by removing shipping details, creating an ultra-fast buying experience so your customers get what they paid for instantly.
For subscriptions, Ecwid gives you the flexibility to accept payments on a schedule you define, even integrating with Google Calendar so you can book appointments and let customers choose their preferred date right at checkout. However, this feature doesn’t feel fully developed, as the calendar is entirely separate and customers have to manually enter their preferred date and time at checkout.
100+ Payment Gateways
Ecwid offers their own payment gateway, with highly competitive processing rates of 2.6% + $0.30 per transaction for most major credit and debit cards. Their gateway lets customers pay using popular digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, in addition to traditional card payments.
However, Ecwid also integrates with over 100 other payment gateways should you prefer to use a different processor. Big names like Stripe, PayPal, and Square are included as options, but Ecwid also partners with smaller localized gateways to better serve customers from all around the world.
Some gateways even enable you to offer installment plans for payments through services like Klarna, or allow you to accept cryptocurrency. No matter which gateway you choose, Ecwid is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant so you can feel confident customer data and transactions are secure.
Shipping Partners
Ecwid gives you access to multiple shipping carriers so your customers can choose their preferred shipping method at checkout.
Set flat rates, offer free shipping, or use real-time calculations based on the package details. You can also define specific shipping zones with different rates depending on where packages are being delivered.
On top of that, you can leverage Ecwid apps for dozens of shipping partners around the world. Even if your preferred carrier isn’t included, you can still enter rates manually or use Ecwid’s shipping API.
Ecwid also gives you the option to print shipping labels directly from their platform. Plus, beyond traditional shipping methods, you can provide in-store pickup, local delivery, or offer customers their choice of all of the above.
The App Market
Ecwid sports a marketplace of apps to extend the functionality of their platform, with most add-ons able to be installed with a few clicks. Some apps are free to use while others require a separate paid subscription.
Add features like store banners, popups, and countdown timers, find solutions to help you market your store via email, social media and search, or integrate your store with dropshipping platforms, CRMs, shipping management tools, and more.
That being said, the range of apps is narrow and we wish more of what Ecwid does have to offer were available for free. On top of that, many of the existing apps have received low reviews or haven’t been updated in years, indicating the marketplace isn’t very active. The lack of high-quality free apps means you often have to pay extra to get the specific functionality you want for your store.
Your Own Branded Mobile App
Ecwid offers custom mobile apps for iOS and Android, included for free with their annual Unlimited plan or available for a one-time $590 fee on other plans. These branded apps match your Ecwid storefront and provide a dedicated mobile experience for your customers.
Ecwid builds the apps for you, handling all the technical work required so you can launch your own mobile app without the massive investment of time and money typically needed.
The mobile app syncs in real time with your Ecwid store, automatically updating products, inventory, and content. While functional, the apps an ability to customize them that would really set them apart from Ecwid’s peers.
While Ecwid’s app provides a good mobile shopping experience, but likely won’t “wow” your customers, it’s a huge edge to even be able to get this at all from an ecommerce platform provider. For many stores, the mobile app is a huge benefit even without granular control of how it looks or functions. If you absolutely need advanced features or design, you can pay Ecwid for further custom development.
Free Customization Hours
You’ll noticed we’ve lamented some of the lack of customization on the Ecwid platform. Fortunately, there’s a built-in way around this.
Ecwid provides free customization hours to help bring your vision of an ecommerce store to life. Their Business plan includes two free hours, while Unlimited plans offer 12 hours of custom work from Ecwid’s developers. After your included hours are used, additional customization time costs $100 per hour.
Ecwid’s developers can build just about any functionality or design for your web store that you can imagine. And, they’ll handle everything, whether it involves creating custom analytics reports, revamping your checkout process, or anything in between.
Just provide a concept for your ideal store, described through pictures, sketches, or a written explanation, and Ecwid will make it happen, building to your exact specifications. This can save you thousands of dollars compared to hiring your own developers.
How Does Ecwid Stack Up?
Compared to its competitors, Ecwid more than holds its own. But, it’s certainly best utilized when have an existing website and want an easy way to add ecommerce functionality to it. But if you want deeper capabilities (without having to pay for add-ons and apps) and customization, one of our favorite alternatives may be a better fit for you:
- Shopify – Best all-around ecommerce platform
- Wix – Best for stores with fewer than 100 products
- BigCommerce – Best for large inventories
- Squarespace – Best for cornering a niche market
- Hostinger – Best price for a full online store
Check out our full list of the best ecommerce platforms to learn more about them, what we like and don’t like, and how to choose the right one for you.