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
14 Day Free Trial, No Credit Card Required
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Wix Pricing
The pricing on the Wix website doesn’t include that much information as to what you get for your money. One thing they do promote is that they don’t put their ads on your site, I should think not on a paid plan as well!
Basic
Unlimited Products
Unlimited Bandwidth
No Turnover Limit
No Transaction Fee
20GB Storage
Free SSL Certificate
24/7 Support
Unlimited
Unlimited Products
Unlimited Bandwidth
No Turnover Limit
No Transaction Fee
35GB Storage
Free SSL Certificate
24/7 Support
Sell on Marketplaces
VIP
Unlimited Products
Unlimited Bandwidth
No Turnover Limit
No Transaction Fee
50GB Storage
Free SSL Certificate
VIP Support
Sell on Marketplaces
Custom Reports
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)
Now you may think that these prices are a little different to those quoted on the Wix website but these are the prices if you pay on a monthly basis and the cheaper prices advertised on Wix ($23, $27 & $49) are if you pay annually, a bit of a sneaky thing to by Wix there and something that I am not a fan of!
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 $56/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
- No limit of the amount 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 offer an enterprise package, which costs from $500/m and that is quite a big jump from Business VIP package but it is a bespoke package.
If you are interested in seeing how Wix’s pricing compares to other ecommerce platforms, then check out my How Much Does an Ecommerce Website Cost post.
Free Trial
As with nearly all of the hosted ecommerce platforms, Wix offer you a free 14 day trial so that you can try the platform out. You can also keep a free wix website after the trial ends but it won’t have any of the ecommerce features.
Start a Free Wix Website
No Credit Card Needed
Customer Reviews
Before I get full on into my review, I thought I would take a look at what some of their existing customers thought of the platform. For this I look on Trustpilot, Facebook and Google.
1.6 out of 5
No Reviews
No Reviews
Wix Features
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 channel 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
- Sell in Multiple currencies – sell internationally by displaying your store in local currencies (only available on Unlimited & VIP plans)
- Loyalty Program by smile.io – encourage repeat customers by creating a loyalty program for your customers, only available on 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 offer 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.
Now I kind of get this but just put all of the main options on one page, don’t hide them!
Do Wix charge transaction fees?
No, Wix do not charge any transactions 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:
- Customisable 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 analyse 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 have 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 snap shot of how your store is doing.
Wix App Market
Even though Wix offers a good selection of features as standard, they do have their own App Market, that is home to over 300 apps that can add a variety of different features and also integrations to your Wix store.
Unfortunately though, 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.
Theme Selection & Customisation
Wix has a very large library of themes that are available on the platform but only 86 of these are listed under the online store heading and there is no word as to whether or not any of the other themes will work with the Wix Stores app.
There are also a handful of developers who have made some very nice premium themes but the pricing does vary, depending on the developer.
One of the things that Wix say in their adverts is how easy it is to build a beautiful custom website and honestly, their system isn’t bad. When it comes to customising the look of your site, you have two options.
The first is the ADI, which I mentioned above. This is the mode that I would recommend using as I did find it the easiest out of the two to use. In ADI mode, the sections of your pages can be edited individually and it allows you to change the content as well as the layout of the section. This can be done by simply clicking on the settings and design buttons when you click on a section.
You can also add and remove sections from a page. When you want to add a new section, it will display all of the layout options for that section. Re-arranging the order in which your sections appear on the page is easily done by clicking the up or down arrows when you hover your cursor over a section.
In addition to this, you can also change the colours on your site, the font type and animations. The font type selection wasn’t great for me as they have pre-set match ups of header and body fonts but you can’t select individual fonts, which isn’t great if you have specific ones you want to use on your site.
The second option is the advanced editor, this is a drag and drop editor that allows you to make a variety of changes to your site. From minor ones like the alignment of text, to adding different sections to your site. While the advanced editor is very in-depth, you really need to dedicate some time to really learning how to use it properly.
Wix Support
Wix now offers 24/7 support to all of their 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 ticket, live chat and over the phone (via call back) and this all sounds really good but the problem with Wix support is actually trying to speak to a member of the Wix support team.
This is because they have buried their contact options in their help centre and it takes a bit of detective work to actually find out where it is. I completely understand that Wix have a large user base but I am just not a fan of them hiding the support options.
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 I could find was:
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Free SSL certificate
- 99.8% Uptime
- CDN
But to find the uptime and CDN, I had to put specific searches into Google to find out, the help page on the Wix servers is pretty much useless and one thing I couldn’t find out was if there servers are PCI Compliant.
I just don’t like that I had to go digging for this information, just be up front and honest! If your hosting is good then why hide it? Ok, mini rant over.
Even though they didn’t want to tell me about their hosting, didn’t stop me from testing the platform out using the following method:
I took 5, live customer example sites and ran them through Pingdom’s Speed Test Tool (Washington D.C and San Francisco servers) and Google’s Page Speed Insights. I did this once a day for three days and you can see the results below:
Washington D.C: 3.66 Seconds
San Francisco: 4.05 Seconds
Mobile: 10/100
Desktop: 31/100
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 for me, especially as speed and performance 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 it’s rivals in terms of speed and performance, check out my Fastest Ecommerce Platforms post.
Wix Video Review
How Easy is Wix to Use?
All of Wix adverts state that it is an easy platform to use and that anyone can create a professional looking website in no time, so lets see if they are telling the truth!
When I test a platform for ease of use, I look at 4 main areas:
- Getting Started
- Inventory Management
- Managing Orders
Getting Started
All of Wix adverts state that it is an easy platform to use and that anyone can create a professional looking website in no time, so lets see if they are telling the truth!
Getting started with Wix is really easy, all you need is your email address and a password. On the next page, you can decide whether you want to do all the work yourself or let the Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) do it for you.
I opted to see what the ADI was all about and it is actually a pretty good system and asks you a few questions. Once you answer these, then it will build a basic site for you, which you can then go on a tweak for yourself.
For new users, Wix do provide a lot of helpful information to get started, which is all easily accessible in the dashboard homepage, the first is the let’s set up your site section, which includes some basic prompts to help you get set up.
Further down the page is some personalised suggestions that prompt you to do some more advanced tasks on your ecommerce store, such as setting up taxes and store policies and at the bottom of the dashboard is links to more sections of your site admin, that you may not have known even existed.
When it comes to helping you set your store up, Wix do offer a lot more prompts than some other platforms that are out there.
I seem to be on my own with this one, but I don’t actually find Wix that easy to use and one of the main reasons for this is that the dashboard feels overcrowded, with options and pop ups appearing all over the place.
Navigating around Wix isn’t the easiest thing to do, mainly because it is split into two separate sections:
- Design – which can be either the ADI or Advanced Editor
- Dashboard – where you manage your content such as products, bookings or blog
While many platforms do something similar, what makes Wix a bit strange to use is that they operate in different tabs within your browser. So if you are in the edit area and click on the dashboard, it will open up in a new tab. This feels a little bit disjointed to me.
The individual design area and dashboard are both pretty simple to navigate but they have completely different layouts, which means you have two different things you need to get used to navigating. You can see the different layouts in the pictures above and below this section.
One thing I did notice was that some things seem to take a long time to load in Wix, especially when you make changes to the design.
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 have 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, send it in an email campaign, share the product on social media and edit the SEO settings.
Organising 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 that I saw was the you can’t have sub-collections, which is something that I would have liked to have seen as it does make organising 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, needs to be done on a product by product basis.
Managing Orders
Unfortunately, I was unable to test the order management system out because this can only be done when you upgrade to one of their premium plans.
Conclusion
Wix Review
Summary
Is Wix a Good Ecommerce Platform?
It’s ok and if you are just planning on a small boutique style ecommerce business, then it may be worth considering but if you are looking to build a fully fledged ecommerce store from scratch, I think that purpose built platforms such as Shopify offer a much better all around package than Wix.
But if you have an existing Wix website, then it is definitely worth considering as it saves the hassle of building a completely new site on another platform.
The Good:
Theme selection
ADI theme customisation
Set up guides
Pricing
The Not so Good:
Hidden support contact details
Performance
Not that easy to use
Admin dashboard slow/freezing
Lack of sub-categories
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