What is Wix?
Wix is one of the biggest and most well-established hosted website builders in the world.
But there lies a potential issue, they are primarily a website builder and not a dedicated ecommerce platform! To sell via the Wix platform, you do need to add the Wix Stores app which adds ecommerce functionality to your site.
And it is this ecommerce functionality, that is going to be the main focus of this review, to see if Wix is a good option for building an Ecommerce Website?
Total out of 5
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Wix Review: Quick Summary
Is Wix Good for ecommerce? It’s ok, especially when you look at the pricing of the Wix platforms as it is considerably cheaper than much of its competition and you get:
- A good set of features
- A full website builder (although changing themes is difficult)
But there is one major issue with Wix and that is the performance as they have been in the bottom two of our annual performance testing for the past 4 years and this is noticeable on the storefront and in the dashboard as it can be very slow to load, which will impact on user experience and conversion rates.
EcommerceGold Score
Wix Pricing
Basic
Unlimited
VIP
UK Pricing
- Business Basic – £16/m (£13/m if paid annually)
- Business Unlimited – £19/m (£16/m if paid annually)
- Business VIP – £25/m (£22/m if paid annually)
In terms of straight-up pricing, Wix is very reasonable and their two smallest ecommerce plans are cheaper than the entry-level plans for the likes of Shopify and Bigcommerce. It is a little strange having two plans so close together in terms of pricing and it does make me wonder why they don’t combine into one business plan?
The larger VIP plan is also very reasonably priced at $59/m and this does include a few more features and allowances that you get with the two smaller plans but on all plans, a couple of notable things are that:
- There are no transaction fees
- No turnover limits
- Unlimited number of products that you can sell
These are very generous and not many other platforms offer the same combination of no’s!
For larger ecommerce businesses, Wix now offers an enterprise package, which is custom-built for you and your business and the price of the plan is based on your requirements.
Free Trial
Wix is a little bit strange when it comes to testing the platform out as they offer a completely free plan and you can install the Wix Stores app but you can’t take orders.
If you want to fully test out the ecommerce functions, then you need to upgrade to one of the paid plans, which includes a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Customer Reviews
Before we get into the review, let’s take a look at what some of their existing customers thought of the platform. For this, we looked on Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra.
4.4 out of 5
4.2 out of 5
4.4 out of 5
Wix Features
Wix Ecommerce Tools
One area where Wix has improved over the last few years is the features that they offer as part of the Wix Stores app and below is a summary of these features:
- Sell Physical & Digital Products
- Multi-channel Inventory Management – manage all your sales channel’s inventory from one dashboard
- Subscriptions – allows you to set up a recurring payment for subscription-based products
- Product Variations – sell different variations of a product from one product page
- Integrated Members Area – lets customers manage their account and access to an exclusive forum if you offer it
- Sell in Multiple currencies – sell internationally by displaying your store in local currencies (only available on Unlimited & VIP plans)
Wix Marketing Tools
Wix comes with a pretty impressive selection of marketing tools that allows you to do a lot to attract customers directly from your Wix dashboard.
- Multi-channel selling – add sales channels to your site including Facebook & Instagram, Ebay can also be added on the Unlimited & VIP plans
- Email marketing campaigns – create automated email campaigns to promote your products to your existing customers
- Facebook & Instagram ads – create ads to promote your store via social media with Wix AI
- Create branded social media posts – share store branded posts to your social media accounts
- Create discounts – encourage sales by creating promotional discounts for your store
- Abandoned cart recovery – automatically email customers who have abandoned their cart
- Loyalty Program – encourage repeat customers by creating a loyalty program for your customers, only available on the VIP plan
Wix SEO Tools
Many of the marketing tools listed above are targeted towards social media, but what if you want to generate organic traffic from search engines, well Wix offers the following tools:
- Blog
- SEO tools to create custom:
- Page Title
- Meta Description
- URL
- Auto-generated sitemap
- 301 re-directs for old pages
- Google search console integration
Wix Payment Gateways
So Wix offers a good selection of payment gateways including:
But there is a distinct push by Wix for you to use their payment gateway, Wix Payments and PayPal as these options are displayed in the Accept Payments setting section and other options such as Stripe or Square are kind of hidden on a page that requires two clicks to get to.
Do Wix charge transaction fees?
No, Wix does not charge any transaction fees, no matter what plan you are on.
Wix Shipping Options
Wix offers a variety of different shipping options to help you get your products to your customers, including:
- Customizable Shipping Rates per Region, such as:
- Free delivery
- Flat rate
- Sub-total based rates
- Weight based rates
- Product based rates
- Local Delivery Options
- Local Pick-up
You can also mix and match these options, which can be useful for businesses such as small local shops.
Wix Reporting & Analytics
Being able to analyze your store can be very helpful in making decisions for your business and this one area where Wix definitely isn’t short of options.
Reports:
- Sales
- Traffic
- Abandoned carts
- Blog
- Marketing
There are multiple options for all of these sections and you can also choose whether you want the info displayed, either in a table or a chart. While having good information is helpful, having too much can be detrimental and Wix’s reporting does kind of fall into the latter as sometimes, less is more.
Analytics:
- Traffic
- Sales
- People
You can also access a selection of analytics to see a live snapshot of how your store is doing.
Wix App Market
Even though Wix offers a good selection of features as standard, they do have its own App Market, which is home to over 300 apps that can add a variety of different features and also integrations to your Wix store.
Unfortunately, not all of these apps are free to use and while many offer a free trial or free plan, if you want access to all of the features, then you are going to have to pay for them.
Wix Website Builder
Wix is primarily a website builder that has now added the ability for people to sell through the platform and in this section, we are going to take a look at the Wix website builder to see if it is any good.
Wix Theme Selection
Wix has a large selection of themes with their own theme library that are designed for online stores and all of these are available free of charge, there are also some Wix theme/template developers that provide a selection of paid options.
And while the theme selection is very good as they are well-designed and mobile responsive, the one thing we don’t like is that changing themes isn’t a straightforward process as it isn’t a case of choosing, installing and activating a new theme like with most platforms.
Instead, you need to create a new store with the theme you want and then transfer your existing store over and then get it configured etc, which is a time-consuming and frustrating process for something that should be simple and this is one of the things we hope that Wix changes in the future.
Wix Theme Customization
When it comes to theme customization, Wix has one of the most advanced editors on the market and it allows you to customize pretty much every page on your site by allowing you to:
- Add, remove and rearrange sections
- Make changes to the layout by dragging and dropping elements
- Customize different page types
- Change the colors and font
There are also options for your header, including creating a navigation menu and footer amongst many other things and you also install and manage your apps through the theme customizer.
And while Wix’s theme customizer is a very powerful tool that offers users a lot of control, it does have a bit of a learning curve and spending some time learning exactly what you can do in the editor would be time well spent.
Wix Pages and Blog
The final section we are going to look at is creating pages and blog posts on Wix.
Pages are created in the Wix editor and you can use all of the sections that are available in the editor to create completely custom pages and to help you out, they have also some pre-made templates so that you aren’t starting from a blank page.
To add a blog to your Wix store, you will need to install the Wix Blog app but we really like the blog builder and in our opinion is one of the best out there as it has a range of sections that you can add to your post that can make it more engaging for the reader, including the option to embed your product listings.
It is also simple and easy to use, which is something we would like to see applied to the theme customizer but overall, Wix’s website builder is very good and offers users a lot of control when it comes to building their site/store.
Wix Support
Wix offers 24/7 support to all of its English-speaking customers and varying support times for other popular languages around the world.
Like most other platforms, they offer a selection of different support options including email tickets, live chat and over the phone (via call back) and Wix recently added the live chat option to the admin dashboard, making it much easier to contact the support teams.
Hosting & Performance
It is always interesting to know about the hosting environment on which your ecommerce store is going to be running and usually, companies are very forthcoming with their information but that doesn’t seem the be the case with Wix, in fact, all the information we found was:
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Free SSL certificate
- 99.8% Uptime
- CDN
- PCI Compliant Servers
But to find the uptime, CDN and PCI Compliance, we had to put specific searches into Google to find out as the help page on the Wix servers is pretty much useless.
Even though they didn’t want to tell us about their hosting, didn’t stop us from testing the platform out using the following method:
We took 5 customer example sites and ran them through Uptrends Speed Tool, which allowed us to test the load time and Google PageSpeed scores for both mobile and desktop devices and we ran each site through the tool once a day for three days to get a good spread of data and the results were:
Mobile Load Time: 3.98 Seconds
Desktop Load Time: 4.10 Seconds
Mobile Score: 20/100
Desktop Score: 54/100
Those really aren’t a good set of results (even though load time has improved since 2020!), there does seem to be some issues with the Wix hosting environment and deeper testing into Wix does seem to indicate that the Wix Stores app is somewhat of a contributing factor to this.
Even though the load times are very slow, it is the Google scores that are very concerning, especially as load time is a ranking factor, this could not only impact your rankings but slow load times also impact user experience, which could result in people clicking off your site.
To see how Wix performed against its rivals in terms of speed and performance, check out our Fastest Ecommerce Platforms post.
Wix Video Review
How Easy is Wix to Use?
All of Wix’s adverts state that it is an easy platform to use and that anyone can create a professional-looking website in no time, so let’s see if they are telling the truth!
When we test an ecommerce platform out for ease of use, we look at 3 main areas:
- Getting Started
- Inventory Management
- Managing Orders
Getting Started
Getting started with Wix is really easy, all you need is your email address and a password.
You will then be asked a series of questions such as:
- What type of website are you starting
- The name of your site
- You will then be asked if you want to buy a domain
- What the goal of your site is (ecommerce, portfolio etc)
- Which apps you would like to add
Once you have answered all of these questions, you will be taken to the admin dashboard and on your first sign-in, you will be greeted by a rather comprehensive setup guide, which is tailored to the type of store that you want to create.
To set up the front end of your site, you will need to go through the ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) tool and this will ask you some more questions, including:
- Entering your business info (name, address etc)
- Choose a logo template
- Pick a theme (colors, fonts etc)
- Choose a template
- Which pages you would like to add
Based on your answers to these questions, the ADI will build out a site for you, which only takes around 5 minutes to complete and once your storefront has been created, you can then use the editor to customize it how you want.
So overall, the signup process for Wix is pretty straightforward and the admin dashboard itself is pretty easy to use (although the design and layout seems to change every few months!) and the main sidebar navigation menu is well laid out and the headings are clearly labeled.
But it can get a bit crowded if you install a lot of the Wix apps as many add their own headings, which results in you having to scroll up and down the sidebar navigation to find different sections.
One issue we did find with both the admin dashboard and the editor is that they can take a while to load at times, especially when you open up the editor and this can make it frustrating to use, especially as things like installing/removing apps and some other processes are done through in the editor.
Adding and Managing Products
Before getting to the add new product page, Wix will ask you whether you want to add a digital or physical product.
Wix has opted for a very simple layout for their add new product page. It includes all the sections that you need such as title, description, images and shipping. You can also add variations and additional sections if you need to add more than just the basic information.
On the add product page, you can also promote your product by creating coupons, promo videos, sending it in an email campaign, sharing the product on social media and editing the SEO settings.
Organizing your stock is also pretty easy, rather than categories, you create collections but they work very much in the same way. It is easy to add products to your collections, you can do it from the edit collection page or you can do it directly in the edit product page.
The only downside is that you can’t have sub-collections, which is something that does make organizing your stock easier.
Wix has recently added an inventory manager and it is a welcome addition to the Wix platform but it is limited to just updating stock levels, any other updates such as pricing need to be done on a product-by-product basis.
Managing Orders
Managing your orders in Wix is a very simple process as they have included some bulk tools, which allow you to:
- Filter orders by fulfillment status
- Change fulfillment status
- Export order information
- Print orders
You can also manage orders individually and overall, Wix’s order management system just works.
Conclusion
Wix Ecommerce
Is Wix a Good Ecommerce Platform?
Wix isn’t bad when it comes to building an online store and it has a lot of things going for it, including:
- A good selection of features
- Reasonably priced plans
- A good website builder
- It is pretty easy to use (some things could be easier)
These are all things you want from an ecommerce platform and for many small businesses it will be a very good option but there are a couple of things that do let Wix down, with the main ones being:
- Performance – there is no getting away from it, Wix really struggles when it comes to site performance and has been consistently one of the worst performers in our annual testing
- Changing Themes – this should be an easy and straightforward process but it isn’t with Wix
We would also like to see things like the theme customizer made a bit simpler to use and the ability to create subcategories but it is the performance that really lets Wix down as you can see from our scoring above.
Wix Pros:
Wix Cons:
Wix Alternatives
Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!