Hey all, it’s Matt from Style Factory, the go-to website for ecommerce platform reviews.
In this Shopify vs Ecwid comparison, I’m going to walk you through the key pros and
cons of these two popular ecommerce solutions.
I’m going to highlight 5 key reasons to use Shopify over Ecwid, and 5 key reasons
why Ecwid might be the better choice.
But just before I do that, it’s worth looking at a bit of the history behind the two products.
Ecwid was designed to let people sell products on an existing website by adding a snippet
of code to it.
In recent years however, the lines have become a bit blurred.
You can now embed a Shopify product catalog on an existing site — and use Ecwid to build
a standalone online store.
But which tool is best for your project?
Let’s find out, starting with a look at the 5 key reasons to use Shopify over Ecwid.
One — Shopify is much better for building a standalone online store with.
If you want to build a standalone store on a domain of your choosing, Shopify is the
better choice.
Although Ecwid technically lets you use its ‘instant site’ feature to create standalone
websites, these are very static, one-page websites.
Significantly, they don’t feature any professional blogging tools — and given the importance
of content marketing these days, this isn’t ideal.
By contrast, Shopify lets you build highly sophisticated online stores that give you
multiple pages, a blog and advanced ecommerce features.
Two — you can sell an unlimited number of products on any Shopify plan.
When it comes to product limits, Shopify is much more generous than Ecwid.
While Ecwid caps the number of products you can sell at relatively low numbers on all
but its most expensive plan, you can sell as many products as you like on any Shopify
one.
Three — Shopify is a much better choice for dropshipping.
Dropshipping is a method of selling products where you don’t store or ship your stock.
Instead, you pass orders onto a supplier for fulfillment.
If you want to sell goods in this way then Shopify is the much better choice, thanks
to a vast range of excellent dropshipping apps and integrations.
Although you can also dropship with Ecwid, the options for doing so are considerably
more limited.
Four — the multi-currency features in Shopify are much stronger.
If you want to sell products in multiple currencies, then Shopify is a better choice than Ecwid.
Thanks to its ‘Shopify Markets’ feature, which lets you define the areas you’d like
to operate in and the currencies to use when doing so, selling internationally is a breeze.
While Ecwid does let you display product prices in local currencies, it doesn’t facilitate
checkout in them — and this can have a negative effect on conversion rates.
Five — the SEO tools and features in Shopify are considerably stronger.
Although Ecwid gives you access to quite a lot of useful SEO features, there are some
notable omissions.
You don’t get full control over URL format or redirects, both of which can be very important
to SEO.
By contrast, Shopify gives you control over nearly every SEO component, making it a better
choice if you’re working in a particularly competitive niche.
So those are our key reasons why you might want to use Shopify over Ecwid.
But where is Ecwid the winner?
I’ll come to that in just a moment, but before that I want to invite you to like this
video, click the subscribe button and hit the notifications bell.
This gives you easy access to all our key ecommerce reviews and advice.
Right, so what are the 5 main reasons to use Ecwid over Shopify?
One — you can use Ecwid entirely for free.
Unlike Shopify, there’s a totally free Ecwid plan available — and it’s very usable
too.
Although it limits you to selling ten products, it gives you a way to accept payments easily
for a small product range and is a great way to try the platform out.
Two — Ecwid lets you turn any website into a fully-featured ecommerce site.
Although Shopify’s Buy Buttons let you display products easily on another site, Ecwid lets
you do this in a much more sophisticated way.
When you install Ecwid on your site, your visitors can make use of product search, multi-currency
features, category filtering, product sorting and other ecommerce features that aren’t
really available using the Shopify Buy Button.
Three — Ecwid doesn’t charge transaction fees when you use a third-party payment gateway.
With Ecwid, there are no charges for using a third-party payment gateway to process credit
card transactions.
By contrast, if you don’t use its built-in payment processor, Shopify will charge transaction
fees on any transactions made using other payment gateways.
Four — there are no product option limits to worry about with Ecwid.
With Shopify, you are limited to just 3 product options for the items your selling.
And although apps exist to remove these limits, they add extra costs and configuration time
to proceedings.
In Ecwid however, you can work with as many product options as you need.
Five — It’s easier to capture custom data for purchases in Ecwid.
With Shopify, allowing your customers to provide extra information for purchases — for example,
some text or images for an engraving — is not possible without either adding some code
to your site, or paying extra for an app.
By contrast, Ecwid lets your site visitors add this information easily during their purchase.
You simply add a text field or file upload button to your product which lets your visitors
provide you with the assets you need to deliver a product.
So that’s it: 5 key reasons to use Shopify over Ecwid, and 5 ways in which Ecwid beats
Shopify.
We hope you’ve found this Shopify vs Ecwid video helpful, but there are lots more pros
and cons of both platforms to discover — so make sure you read our full comparison on
the Style Factory website.
You’ll find a link to this in the video description along with links to free trials
for both Shopify and Ecwid.
To get more ecommerce advice from Style Factory, do like this video, subscribe to our channel,
and click the notifications bell.
And finally, if you have any questions about Shopify or Ecwid, please do leave them in
the comments section.
We read them all and will do our best to help.