Want to learn what Ecwid is and why you should use it for your WordPress store? You’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ll walk you through a comprehensive guide on what Ecwid is and why it is a great option for your WordPress store.
We’ll cover:
- What Ecwid is and how it works.
- The key features that make it suitable for a WordPress website.
- The reasons why you should choose it for your WordPress store.
- How it stacks up against other WordPress ecommerce solutions.
- Its downsides.
Let’s start by understanding what Ecwid is and how it works.
What is Ecwid?
Ecwid by Lightspeed is a lightweight ecommerce platform that allows you to quickly create a storefront for selling your products and integrate it across different platforms. Ecwid is not a new platform. In fact, it’s been around for over a decade and a half, but it’s not as big of a name as WooCommerce, Wix, or Shopify.
Ecwid started allowing users to create an ecommerce widget they can place on other websites and turn them into an online store. This is where its name comes from (Ecwid – Ecommerce Widget).
Recently, Ecwid added an Instant Sites feature that you can use to create complete, one-page ecommerce websites, making a case for it as an ecommerce platform.
Now, you can create an ecommerce website using Ecwid and integrate it with your website on WordPress, Wix, Shopify, and even social media platforms and start selling there.
How Ecwid works
Ecwid allows you to create an ecommerce store quickly and easily by signing up on ecwid.com for free. Once you complete the initial setup, Ecwid will lead you to its dashboard, where you can create your own store.
From this dashboard, you can:
- Add your products. This includes simple products such as T-shirts or variable product options. You can create your products, one after the other, or import them if your product catalog is on a CSV file.
- Set up your shipping options. You can set up shipping within your country or internationally, as well as local deliveries or pickup options. Ecwid allows you to define delivery service providers, such as FedEx, and shipping rates.
- Add your payment options. Ecwid enables you to add your payment options to ensure you get paid when customers purchase items. You can add different payment gateways so that customers can choose what they prefer to pay with.
After setting this up, you can customize your online store to make it appealing to your customers. Much like Shopify’s App Store, it has an App Market from which you can install apps such as Zapier, Mailchimp, etc., to extend your store’s functionality.
Who is Ecwid best for?
Ecwid is ideal if you’re a small to medium business owner looking for a cost-effective ecommerce platform to set up your online store. Especially if you have an existing website and you want to start selling via that website. Let’s say you have a WordPress blog website and want to start selling on it.
What if you don’t have a website? You could also be advertising your products on social media or elsewhere, and you want to have a storefront where customers can visit, explore your catalog, and place orders.
Either way, Ecwid allows you to create an online store for both use cases. You can create one and integrate it into your existing website and start selling from your website. You could also create a standalone Ecwid store, link it to your social media, and use it as your storefront.
Ecwid is best suited for smaller businesses or entrepreneurs who are just starting out because it doesn’t charge any transaction fees. Meaning that you’ll keep all your hard-earned money.
How Ecwid integrates with WordPress
Ecwid easily integrates with WordPress via the Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart pluginA piece of software that adds specific features to WordPress.. Connecting these two is as easy as installing this plugin. It is available for both WordPress.org (self-hosted) and WordPress.com (WordPress-hosted) from the plugin library. All you have to do is search ‘Ecwid’ to find it, install it, and then activate it.
If you haven’t created an Ecwid store, you can click on Create Store. Otherwise, you’ll click on Connect your store to connect your existing Ecwid store and your WordPress website.
After installing this plugin, Ecwid will automatically add a store, category, cart, and checkout page. It will also add other ecommerce-related elements to your WordPress site.
Adding Ecwid’s pages and elements to your WordPress
Ecwid works with WordPress Gutenberg blocks. This means you can add the pages and elements mentioned above the same way you would for a WordPress page or elements.
To add them to a new page, you need to navigate to Edit Page and click the (+) plus button to add a new block.
After searching for ‘Ecwid,’ you’ll see the pages we’ve mentioned plus elements such as:
- A single product card.
- Shopping cart icon.
- Buy Now button.
- Product search box.
- Product search and filters, etc.
You can have one page as a dedicated shop page by adding the Store block to it. Alternatively, you can embed single products with a Buy Now call-to-action button on other pages, for instance, on a blog post that promotes this product.
Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to integrate Ecwid with WordPress let’s go over the key features that make it suitable for WordPress users.
Key features of Ecwid for WordPress users
Ecwid has features designed specifically to make life easier for you as you add an ecommerce functionality to your WordPress site. With these features, you can enjoy the best of both worlds: the extensibility of WordPress and Ecwid’s ease of use.
As someone who wants an ecommerce solution for WordPress, here are some of Ecwid’s features you should look forward to.
Simple store setup
If you’re well-familiar with the WordPress dashboard, you’ll feel right at home with the Ecwid dashboard. They’re quite similar in how the menus are set up and even the colors. As a result, you can customize your store from a familiar dashboard, add payment, shipping options, etc.
When customizing your online store, most of the work has already been done for you. Ecwid has tons of templates across different industries to get you started. Then, you can customize these templates using Ecwid’s user-friendly visual Instant Sites Editor to fit with your brand.
You can sell across multiple channels
According to ZoomInfo, 51% of businesses today leverage at least 8 channels to interact with customers.
If you run one such business, you’ll love Ecwid because it allows you to integrate your online store with multiple channels seamlessly.
Using this feature, you can connect your online store on WordPress to your sales channels and sell anywhere.
These channels include:
- Your socials – Instagram or TikTok.
- Marketplaces – such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay.
- Ecommerce platforms – like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify.
- Your existing point-of-sale (POS) system.
Selling across multiple channels is a great way to expand your reach. You can find customers on their preferred platforms. For example, there could be customers who prefer to search for products on Instagram while others prefer to search for them on TikTok.
When you integrate both platforms, you can tap into both customer bases.
Secure hosting and PCI compliance
Ecwid hosts the Ecwid sites themselves. Because Ecwid hosts your site, it takes strides to secure its servers. Specifically, Ecwid is PCI DSS compliant. It has been certified by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the security standard responsible for helping to secure users’ payment card information.
This is important to you because your ecommerce site will be handling your customers’ payment card data.
Since 81% of customers stop engaging with a brand after its data is breached, you’ll be more at ease knowing the servers processing this information have been secured. Plus, you won’t need to install additional security plugins.
Ecwid handles updates and maintenance for you
You don’t have to worry about staying up-to-date with the latest Ecwid software. Ecwid handles all the updates and maintenance for you. This frees you to focus on what matters to you – promoting your products and getting more sales.
Note: If you’ve installed apps from the App Market, you’ll need to update them manually.
Ecwid is SEO-friendly
What does Ecwid do to ensure your ecommerce site is SEO-friendly? After all, 33% of ecommerce site visits come from organic search.
As a result, you’ll be pleased to know that Ecwid comes with several ecommerce features, such as:
- XML sitemaps. This is a file containing a list of the pages of your site that search engines use to indexA list or database used to make searching faster. your products. This allows your products to appear in search results.
- Structured data. This helps site engines understand your site’s content and allows it to appear in rich snippets.
- Custom meta tags for products and categories. Ecwid generates page titles and meta descriptions for your products and categories. This lets you control how Google displays your products and categories in rich snippets.
- Automatic ALT tags for images. The ALT tag helps search engines understand the contents of your product images and rank them accordingly.
These features will enable your online store to perform well in search engine rankings.
Flexible payment options
Cart abandonment studies show that 13% of customers will likely abandon their carts if there aren’t enough payment options.
This is something you won’t have to worry about with Ecwid. It supports major payment providers such as PayPal, Stripe (for credit cards), Apple Pay, and Square.
You can also set up manual payment methods, such as cash on delivery, if you have not set up the mobile payment options mentioned above.
Key features meant for WordPress websites aside, let’s look at why you, who are looking to build a WordPress store, should choose Ecwid.
Why choose Ecwid for your WordPress store?
If you want to create a WordPress store, here are some good reasons to choose Ecwid as your ecommerce platform.
It easily integrates with WordPress
Ecwid has a dedicated WordPress plugin that offers an easy way to use it as your ecommerce solution on your WordPress site. All you have to do is install it and connect the plugin to your Ecwid store. You’ll manage everything right from your WordPress dashboard.
Affordable pricing
Unlike other ecommerce platforms that offer a free trial that expires after 14 days or a month, Ecwid offers a ‘free forever’ plan. Once you sign up for this free plan, it never expires.
This frees you from monthly fees, which could eat into your profits and reduce your profit margin. As a result, Ecwid’s free plan is great if you’re running a small business or just starting out.
You can still upgrade to a paid Ecwid plan to enjoy benefits such as selling on social media and marketplaces, live chat customer support, discount coupons for your customers, and so on.
It has three paid plans, Venture, Business, and Unlimited, which are all affordable compared to other ecommerce platforms.
Ecwid won’t slow down your WordPress site
Your Ecwid store will be hosted on Ecwid’s servers. This is great because it doesn’t add load to your WordPress hosting provider’s servers. These servers can focus on hosting your WordPress website and ensure it doesn’t slow down.
Having a fast-loading website is extremely important in a performance-sensitive industry such as ecommerce. According to research, 40% of online shoppers won’t wait more than 3 seconds before abandoning an ecommerce site.
Seeing as site speed is crucial in ecommerce, you can make your WordPress store even faster by converting it to a static site.
Improve your WordPress store’s speed by making it static
When you create your WordPress site and add an Ecwid store to it, it will be dynamic by default. This means that each time a user clicks to view the website, it sends a request to the server, which has to interact with the database to generate web pages on the fly.
This is why dynamic websites display different content for different users. However, this process takes time, and the time taken to load a web page increases with the complexity of the web page.
If it has a lot of elements, like a shop page, for example, it will take longer to load. This could harm your user’s experience.
Luckily, you can make your WordPress store static and significantly cut down the time it takes to load. With static sites, a prebuilt copy of your website is stored on a server, ready to be served when a user clicks to view a web page. No round trips to the database or server-side scripting is needed.
To make your WordPress store static with Ecwid, you’ll need the help of a plugin.
Make your WordPress store static with Simply Static
Simply Static is the plugin you can use to make your WordPress store static. All you have to do is click a button, and the plugin will do all the heavy lifting. It allows you to do this from a modern UIUser Interface. Part of a software application that users interact with, such as buttons, menus, and forms., meaning you don’t need any knowledge of how to work with a terminal or command-line tool.
Simply Static works fast. In just a few minutes, you’ll have static copies of your WordPress store ready for exportThe process of saving the files and data from your WordPress site to create a static site.. You can host them anywhere you like, including a CDNStands for Content Delivery Network. It’s a system of distributed servers that deliver web content quickly to users base…, which helps you boost your site’s speed further.
With Simply Static, your WordPress store will retain some dynamic functionality. It will be able to handle comments, forms, and searches.
Note: For Ecwid to work well with Simply Static, you’ll need to disable Ecwid’s SEO links.
Make your website even faster with Simply Static Pro
Ecwid has a dedicated mobile app
Ecwid has a dedicated mobile app you can use to manage and grow your online store on the go. Your desktop device isn’t always available, and you want to know which orders are coming in, which ones are in the works, and which ones are being fulfilled.
With Ecwid, you can manage your store’s activity from your mobile phone. You can even build or edit the store from your smartphone. This app is available for iOS and Android users. You can download it from the App Store or Google Play Store.
Simplified international selling
Although Ecwid is built for small to medium businesses, you might think that it limits you to selling locally.
On the contrary, it comes with several features that enable you to easily sell internationally, such as:
- Instant currency converter. Ecwid detects the customer’s location and displays prices in their native currencies. It is worth mentioning that this feature is slightly limited, but you can extend it using the Currency Converter Pro app from the App Market.
- Ecwid supports multiple languages. You can make your online store available in multiple languages so that customers in different regions can access it in their native languages. Apart from the store itself, its emails and invoices will also be in the customer’s preferred language. This provides a smooth shopping experience for international customers.
- Automatic tax calculations. Ecwid allows you to configure your store to meet the tax laws of the regions your customers reside in. Automatic taxes are available for sellers in the UK, USA, Europe, Canada, and other major countries. For other countries where automatic taxes aren’t available, you can manually configure them.
In essence, Ecwid gives you sophisticated international selling tools in a simple, easy-to-use dashboard.
Seamless inventory management across all channels
Ecwid has built-in inventory management tools to help you manage your stock. This helps to prevent overstocking or selling what you don’t have in stock. Since you’ll be selling across multiple channels, you need a solution to help you manage your inventory across these channels.
For this, you can use the SyncSpider app. This app allows you to connect all your sales channels and manage your entire inventory from a single dashboard.
Now we know the reasons for picking Ecwid as your ecommerce solution. Let’s compare it with other ecommerce solutions and see how it stacks up against them.
Ecwid vs. other WordPress ecommerce solutions
Two of the most popular ecommerce platforms are WooCommerce and Shopify. Let’s see how Ecwid stacks up against them, starting with WooCommerce.
Ecwid vs WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful ecommerce plugin for WordPress and is arguably the go-to ecommerce solution for it.
It powers over 25% of all active ecommerce stores. As Ecwid is a less popular solution, let’s see how it compares to WooCommerce.
Setup complexity
WooCommerce offers more customization options, but its setup is much more complex than that of Ecwids. After installing WooCommerce on WordPress, there’s a lot you’ll need to do to get your store up and running.
Hosting impact
We’ve covered how Ecwid hosts Ecwid stores itself and how this reduces strain on your WordPress hosting provider’s servers. This ensures Ecwid doesn’t reduce your WordPress site’s performance.
On the other hand, WooCommerce is hosted on your WordPress site’s servers. If you build a complex WooCommerce store with a large product catalog and more shoppers, this could eat into your WordPress site’s performance.
You can solve this using managed WooCommerce hosting, but these hosting plans are pretty expensive.
Maintenance and updates
WooCommerce is a complex plugin with many interconnected parts, which is probably why WooCommerce developers leave you to do manual updates. When using WooCommerce, you need to check for updates regularly and then click to update your WooCommerce version if you find a new update.
Ecwid handles updates and maintenance for you, so you don’t have to worry about staying up to date with the latest version of the software.
WooCommerce also lacks a native mobile app for managing your sales on the go and built-in selling across multiple channels.
Ecwid vs Shopify Lite (Now Shopify Starter plan)
Although not built for WordPress, if you’re thinking about setting up an ecommerce store, you’ve probably come across Shopify. Shopify Lite was Shopify’s plan for ecommerce merchants who wanted to sell online without creating an online store.
You could use this solution to sell products via a website or social media channels (like Facebook Messenger), similar to the way you can do this with Ecwid. In 2022, the Shopify Lite plan was replaced with the Starter plan, which is what we’ll be comparing with Ecwid.
These two solutions are quite similar, so what makes them different?
Free plan vs free trial
The first major difference between Ecwid and Shopify is that Ecwid’s free plan is free forever, while Shopify’s free trial expires after 3 days. After that, you have to pay $5/month, which isn’t ideal if you’re just starting out.
Transaction fees
As mentioned earlier, Ecwid doesn’t charge any fees per transaction, leaving you with more profit. With Shopify Starter, you will be charged a 5% transaction fee when you use Shopify Payments.
Access to apps
Ecwid has about 100 free and freemium apps available in the App Market. In contrast, Shopify has over 10,000, and many more are popping up each day. Which makes Shopify more extensible than Ecwid.
WooCommerce and Ecwid share only one platform (WordPress), but they are quite different. Shopify Starter is closer to Ecwid than WooCommerce. The choice between Ecwid and these stores ultimately comes down to how fast you project your business to scale and how complex you need it to be.
If you feel your business is set up to grow rapidly and requires a lot of customization, Shopify and WooCommerce would be a better fit. But, if you’re just starting out and you want to progress gradually, then Ecwid is the solution for you.
Ecwid has so many advantages, which we’ve covered up to this point. Now, it’s time to look at the drawbacks you should expect to face when you use this platform.
What are the downsides of Ecwid?
We’ve looked at several reasons for using Ecwid as your WordPress ecommerce solution. Let’s look at its downsides – which aren’t really reasons not to use it, but the challenges you could face while using it.
Limited customization options
Ecwid is designed to be simple and user-friendly, but this means fewer customization options than WooCommerce or Shopify. To be specific, the Instant Sites editor has extremely limited customization options.
For example, after picking your template, you can’t:
- Manually change the positions of the elements.
- Size or resize elements.
- Change typography, colors, etc.
This means sites created with Ecwid end up looking generic more often than not. This is a problem for you if you’re looking to build a unique store.
Over-reliance on Ecwid’s external hosting
While Ecwid hosting your site is great for performance, it might not be ideal if you want to take control of your site’s hosting environment. You are fully dependent on Ecwid’s infrastructure and uptime. If its infrastructure goes down, so does your ecommerce site.
Who does this affect? If you run a larger business and you want full control over your data and servers, you might see this as a drawback.
Costs can add up with premium features
Ecwid offers a free plan, which is quite limited. First of all, you can only create 5 products. If you want to create more products and use features like discount coupons, access the App Market, receive priority support, and set up a multilingual store, you’ll need to purchase a paid plan.
Also, to add features such as managing inventory across your sales channels, you’ll need to install apps. Most of these apps aren’t free to use. Over time, these costs add up as your business scales and make Ecwid expensive for you.
Limited plugin and app integrations
Ecwid has about 100 app integrations available in the App Market. By comparison, both WooCommerce and Shopify have tens of thousands of plugins and apps. With Ecwid, you have a limited selection of integrations.
While it covers the foundations of setting up an online store, some highly specific integrations are unavailable. For example, the ability to set up a custom delivery schedule, create custom checkout and order confirmation pages, etc.
Get started with Ecwid for your online store
Ecwid is a capable ecommerce platform built for small to medium business enterprises. It provides you with all the foundational tools you need to start selling online. You can use it to create a standalone ecommerce store or integrate this store with various platforms like your socials, marketplaces, and WordPress website.
Ecwid has a dedicated WordPress plugin that makes it easy to integrate it with WordPress and create a WordPress store. It is designed to help your store thrive with features like multi-channel selling, external hosting for better performance, and several apps to extend its features.
If you want to start selling on your WordPress website, Ecwid is a great option to look into.
