Ecwid Review — Key Pros and Cons, Pricing and Alternatives

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In this Ecwid review, I discuss all the platform’s core features, strengths, weaknesses and value for money. By the end of the post, you’ll have a much clearer idea of whether Ecwid is the right ecommerce solution for your business — and what the best alternatives to consider are if not.

Let’s start with a key question…

What is Ecwid, and how does it work?

Ecwid is a tool for building your own online store. It’s a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) product, meaning that you don’t own the software, but pay a monthly fee to use it.

Founded in 2009, Ecwid was acquired by ecommerce / point-of-sale company Lightspeed in 2021 — and now powers over 897,000 online stores (source: Builtwith).

This means that the platform is a pretty safe bet when it comes to longevity — it’s unlikely that Ecwid is going to disappear any time soon.

Much like competing ecommerce platforms, Ecwid allows you to set up ‘catalogs’ of products and add photos, pricing, weight etc. for each item.

You can define shipping rates, accept credit card payments and so on – all the key things that you’d expect to be able to do using an ecommerce solution. This is all done via a web browser — there’s nothing to install on your computer.

Ecwid differs significantly from competitors like Shopify, Squarespace and BigCommerce however, in that it is not primarily designed to let you create a standalone ecommerce website. Instead, it’s designed to let you add an online store to an existing website or online presence.

(That said, in recent years Ecwid has added some new functionality, called ‘Instant Sites’, that does let you create a basic, one-page standalone offering. I discuss this in more depth later on in the review.)

Ecwid works by giving you a widget that gets placed on other sites — hence its name — it’s short for ‘Ecommerce Widget’. You get a few lines of HTML code (the widget) to add to an existing website or social media profile and your store is displayed wherever you’ve inserted this code.

But how much does this functionality cost?

Ecwid pricing

The free plan

If you’ve only got a few products to sell — up to 5 — Ecwid is entirely free. This is something of a unique selling point for Ecwid — with the exception of Big Cartel, I’ve yet to review an ecommerce platform that offers much in the way of free selling tools.

The free plan is pretty basic, with key features like discount coupons and the ability to sell digital goods being unavailable, and it only allows you to sell up to 5 products.

Significantly, you can’t use this plan to sell on key social media sites like Facebook or Instagram.

But for merchants with very simple requirements, this may actually be sufficient, and using the free plan is a good way to try the product out.

Probably the most important thing to note about the free plan is that it is not great from a search engine optimization (SEO) point of view — you need to be on a paid-for plan to ensure that your product pages talk to search engines in the best way possible.

(More on SEO shortly).

The paid-for plans

The USD pricing structure for Ecwid is as follows:

As you might expect, the more you pay, the more additional features you get – discount coupons, integrations with other stores, better support and so on.

The key differences between Ecwid plans

Some key differences in the Ecwid plans to watch out for are as follows:

Now, let’s drill down into some of Ecwid’s key features, starting with a look at payment gateways.

Payment gateways

A payment gateway is the software that lets you accept payments online, via a credit card.

With Ecwid, you can process credit card payments ‘out of the box’ using Paypal, with no extra charge other than Paypal’s commission.

There are 81 other payment gateways that you can connect to Ecwid; these include well-known options like Square, Stripe, 2Checkout, Revolut, Afterpay, Authorize.Net and many others.

(Some of these are country-specific, so the exact range available to you will depend on your location.)

Additionally, the owners of Ecwid, Lightspeed, have started rolling out a new and more ‘baked-in’ payment gateway, ‘Lightspeed Payments.’

(This is restricted to users based in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Belgium for now.)

Some other online store solutions, such as Shopify, provide a few more payment processing options, but the range of payment gateways available for use with Ecwid is extensive and definitely at the more comprehensive end of the spectrum.

Remember of course that using these payment gateways often means paying a monthly fee.

So, you may find it best to start off with Paypal and add a payment gateway down the line, if and when your volume of sales justifies it.

Product management

Product types and product options

Ecwid lets you sell both physical and digital products. Helpfully, it lets you create an unlimited number of product options for these — i.e., color, size, material etc.

Other platforms are not always as generous in this regard, especially Shopify, which forces you to buy an app if you want this sort of flexibility.

Importing products

Ecwid allows you to import and export your data into the platform using CSV format.

When importing via CSV, you can make use of 31 different columns, each representing a particular product attribute (product name, SKU, URL for product image and so on). Your import file can be delimited by comma, semi-colons or tabs.

If you need to make multiple changes to the products you’ve imported, Ecwid provides some tools — its ‘Bulk Editor’ and ‘Mass Updates’ features — to help you with this.

Exporting products

Ecwid’s export option lets you output product data, orders and customers to a CSV file; this means that if you ever need to migrate your store to another ecommerce platform, you shouldn’t have any major problems doing so.

(You should note however that exporting to CSV is only possible on paid-for Ecwid plans).

If your exporting requirements are more advanced, or you need to export to formats other than CSV, you can use the ‘Export Stash’ app (available from the Ecwid app market) to automate product or order exports to a variety of file formats and destinations.

These include XLSX, Google Sheet and FTP — but note that using this app involves a $5 monthly fee.

Selling digital products and subscriptions

When it comes to selling digital products, Ecwid caters for sales of files and digital subscriptions.

With regard to files, you can sell products that are up to 25GB in size on all Ecwid paid-for plans. This limit compares very positively with those applied by competing solutions I’ve reviewed — for example BigCommerce and Shopify, which cap digital file sizes at 512MB and 5GB respectively.

As for subscriptions, this is possible if you use Lightspeed Payments or Stripe as your payment gateway. There are lots of billing cycles available for selling subscriptions — daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, biannually or annually.

If you are using a different payment provider, Ecwid lets you add Lightspeed or Stripe to handle subscriptions and you can keep your regular gateway to sell other products.

Shipping options

Ecwid lets you offer your customers a good range of shipping options — you can charge a flat fee for shipping, calculate it by weight, offer free delivery etc.

Additionally, Ecwid has a built-in integration with the following carrier companies to automatically show their shipping rates (based on weight) for customers’ orders at checkout:

(Ecwid also caters for Sendle in Australia, DHL Express and Droppa in South Africa via app integrations).

The good news is that this real-time carrier quotation functionality is available on all paid-for Ecwid plans. This is commendable and makes Ecwid more generous in this area than many of its competitors.

However, if you want the most accurate real-time shipping rates — based not just on weight but on parcel dimensions too — you’ll need to be on a ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan to avail of these.

Dropshipping in Ecwid

Dropshipping is a sales and fulfilment approach where you don’t keep what you’re selling in stock (in fact, you may never see any stock!).

Instead, you take an order via your online store, send it to a dropshipping supplier and they deliver the goods to your client — your store becomes a middle man of sorts.

You can dropship in Ecwid by adding the Wholesale2B, Syncee, Spocket, Sup, NextsChain, Printy6 or Printful apps, which are all available in Ecwid’s app market.

The Wholesale2B, Syncee, Spocket, ScaleOrder and Sup apps allow you to add a variety of products from hundreds of dropshipping suppliers to your Ecwid store.

The Printful and Printify apps allow you to create products featuring your images or logos (you upload them to either platform, who then manufacture the products and ship them to your customers when an order is placed).

Other platforms do provide more access to dropshipping suppliers, but on the plus side, all the dropshipping apps that are available for Ecwid are from well-established providers.

As always with dropshipping, for ethical reasons you may wish to perform some due diligence on how (and where) any products you are featuring on your site are being produced. Suppliers of dropshipping goods don’t always have the best track record when it comes to working conditions in their factories.

Point-of-sale functionality

Thanks to Ecwid’s point-of-sale (POS) features, you can use your Ecwid store to sell not just online but in physical locations too – in stores, market stalls, at concerts and so on.

With this functionality, regardless of whether a customer buys a product in store, online, on their phone or via Facebook, everything stays in sync — i.e., the merchant’s catalog, inventory and customer / transaction information.

There are two main ways to use POS with Ecwid: using its ‘mobile POS’ option, or via its full POS integrations.

Let’s look at both in turn.

Mobile POS

Ecwid’s first POS option involves downloading Ecwid’s ‘Sell on the Go’ app to your mobile device and connecting it to a Paypal, Zettle or Square card reader.

(Note: the ‘Sell on the Go’ app is only available on paid-for plans. You can however try it out for 28 days if using the free Ecwid plan.).

It’s important to note however that this POS option is only available to merchants based in certain countries.

If using Square, you can accept POS payments in six countries — Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, the UK and the US.

(Technically Square can be used in eight countries — in addition to the above six, Spain and France are also supported by this payment gateway. But for some reason it appears that Ecwid doesn’t support all of these).

If using PayPal Zettle, you can accept payments in 13 countries — Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US.

Significantly however, Android users are not currently catered for — the Ecwid ‘Sell on the Go’ app is iOS only.

Full POS integrations

For a more comprehensive POS system that lets you use a wider range of hardware (full-sized card readers, receipt printers, cash drawers, tablet stands etc.), you can integrate Ecwid more deeply with a variety of third-party POS systems including Clover, Square, Hike POS, Dinex and Alice POS.

The bad news is that you will need to be on the most expensive Ecwid plan to use these platforms to power your POS — the $105 per month ‘Unlimited’ plan.

Creating multilingual stores with Ecwid

So long as you are on a ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan, Ecwid storefronts can be translated into 36 different languages — this is generous by comparison to key competitors.

Ecwid provides this functionality by detecting visitors’ language automatically based on their browser settings / IP address, and displaying a version of the store in the appropriate language.

Key components of your store — such as ‘add to bag’ buttons, social media labels etc. — are translated for you automatically; you will need to translate product descriptions yourself, however.

Competing ecommerce platforms often require you to rely on third-party apps or Google Translate to provide different language versions of your store, which is less than ideal.

So, a definite thumbs up to Ecwid on making multilingual functionality a core feature.

One thing you should note however is that if you’re considering using Ecwid for a multilingual WordPress site, you’ll also need to install a language plugin like WPML or PolyLang to present your store in multiple languages.

Multi-currency selling in Ecwid

You typically get more online sales if you sell your products in the currency used by your store visitors.

So, if you’re selling your goods in a lot of different countries, it’s a good idea to let your potential customers select their own currency — or better yet, have your store present your products in their local currency automatically.

To do this in Ecwid, you need to install a currency converter app such as the appropriately named ‘Currency Converter’ app (pictured below). This app costs $4.49 per month (and can only be added if you’re on a paid-for Ecwid plan).

The Currency Converter app makes it very easy to display prices in local currencies automatically.

My only problem with it is that the original currency gets displayed again at the final stage of the purchase, which may put some buyers off completing a purchase.

But overall, it’s fine.

Tax calculations

Ecwid is ahead of the pack when it comes to tax calculation — you can set things up so that visitors’ locations are automatically identified (based on IP address) and the relevant tax rate applied automatically.

Helpfully this applies not just to physical products but digital ones too — Ecwid caters adequately for the EU’s VAT MOSS requirements, something that can’t be said for all other competing platforms.

And, unlike some key competing platforms (notably Squarespace), this feature is not restricted simply to US users: a lot of other countries’ tax systems are covered by the tool, including the entire EU and many non-EU European countries.

The full list of countries that automatic tax calculations are catered for is as follows:

Search engine optimization (SEO) in Ecwid

Visibility in search results is vital to the success of an online store, so it’s worth paying particular attention to the SEO capabilities of an ecommerce platform before investing in it, especially:

The good stuff first: you can edit the title of your page and its meta description easily; the relevant fields are pre-populated for you automatically, but you can tweak them to suit your SEO objectives.

(Page titles and meta descriptions can be changed on translated versions of your Ecwid store too).

Changing alt text (the description of images that search engines and screen readers see) isn’t possible, though — you’re stuck with whatever Ecwid generates for you automatically.

And, significantly, you can’t manually create or change the URL of a product — you have to make do with the one that Ecwid generates for you here too. This isn’t great, because keywords in URLs are used by some search engines to categorize content during indexing. 

It seems as though you can’t create redirects in Ecwid either, which is not ideal at all because it effectively locks you into using a particular URL once you’ve created it.

However, the URLs that are automatically generated by Ecwid include the title you’ve given to your product — so if you include some keywords in your product title (not a bad idea anyway) your URL will include them too. This serves as something of a workaround, but I’d much prefer full control over URLs.

Although there’s room for improvement with regards to SEO in Ecwid, I wouldn’t necessarily view its current deficiencies in this area as a complete showstopper; it’s important to remember that keyword research, link building and having great content on your site are as important to SEO as the technical aspects of SEO (if not more important).

But all that said, there are unquestionably some SEO shortcomings in Ecwid.

Ecwid and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of Google SEO targets relating to the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a website; sites that meet them are likely to receive preferential treatment in search results.

Now, it’s always much harder to ensure full compliance with Google targets like these when you’re dealing with a cloud product like Ecwid — simply because you don’t have much control over its code.

It looks as though Ecwid is aware of the requirements and developing its product in a way that makes meeting them more likely — but you will have work to do too, by ensuring that all your images are fully optimized and use of third-party scripts and apps is kept to a minimum.

Apps and integrations

In common with a lot of other ecommerce platforms, Ecwid provides a number of apps that add more functionality to your store, or let you integrate it with other tools.

However, the number of these is fairly limited — there are currently 326 Ecwid apps available. Competing products like Shopify and BigCommerce offer a much broader range of apps (over 13,000 in Shopify’s case and 1,200 + in BigCommerce’s).

The picture is better when it comes to CMS plugins / integrations: these are available for WordPress, Wix and Joomla, and allow you to install Ecwid on one of these platforms easily.

Ecwid’s ‘Instant Sites’ feature

Although Ecwid has traditionally been a product that lets you add an online store to an existing website, it now allows you to set up a standalone store too, called an ‘Ecwid Instant Site.’

Now, while an Instant Site is limited in terms of the number of pages you can create — 1 with the Free plan, 3 with the Venture plan, 10 on the Business plan, and up to 100 with the Unlimited plan — it’s nonetheless potentially very useful. In particular, it gives merchants who are starting a business but have not yet finished developing a full website a very good ‘stopgap’ solution.

Creating an instant site simply involves choosing a template (from a range of 79) and adding some content / products to it. This can include text, images and video embeds (from YouTube, Vimeo, Tiktok etc.).

You can either host your ‘Instant Site’ on the Ecwid domain (i.e., at a mystore.ecwid.com address) or map it to your own custom domain (www.yourstorename.com).

You can blog on your Instant Site (something that is important for inbound marketing campaigns) — but when trying to do this, I discovered that it involves a really odd workaround where product categories are used to create posts.

Ultimately, based on my experience of building one, I wouldn’t view an Ecwid Instant Site as a substitute for a fully-fledged online store — but recent improvements, including the option to create multiple pages on your store, do make it a potentially useful tool for merchants. At the very least, it certainly serves as a much better landing page solution than the traditional ‘site under construction’ effort.

And, although Ecwid’s Instant Sites are rather basic in nature, they do nonetheless technically provide users with one of the cheapest ways possible to build a standalone online store — you can get one up and running from $25 per month — or even for free (more on that below).

This all compares positively with the likes of Squarespace, Wix and BigCommerce, which typically charge at least $30 to $40 per month to let you create a standalone store — but that said, the end result you’ll get from such platforms will be considerably more sophisticated than anything you’ll be able to create with an Ecwid Instant Site.

Shopify, with its ‘Starter Plan,’ gives you a similar tool at a low price point, however.

Ecwid’s ‘ShopApp’ feature

Ecwid has comes with an unusual feature, ‘ShopApp,’ that turns your online store into a mobile app (one that can be downloaded from the iOS or Google Play app stores).

ShopApp can be added for a one-off payment of $395 if you’re an ‘Unlimited’ Ecwid user, or $790 if you’re on a lower-tier plan.

This is a potentially handy piece of functionality, because it gives you another sales channel to play with, along with the opportunity to have your brand featured (as an app icon) on a shopper’s mobile device.

But that said, ShopApp is only likely to be useful to particular types of merchants: those who have a well-known brand and an existing popular store, or those with an established set of customers that make repeat purchases and who would find an app useful to do so.

Interface and ease of use

When we tested Ecwid’s interface, we didn’t encounter much of a learning curve: it is very easy to use.

Like many similar online store builders, you get a vertical menu on the left that allows you to access key functionality, with the area on the right being used to display or edit products, site content and reports.

As with any ecommerce tool, you’ll need to spend a bit of time familiarizing yourself with creating catalogs and product variants, setting up shipping rates and so on — but as ecommerce interfaces go, there’s nothing too challenging to worry about here.

Matters are helped by an ‘onboarding’ to-do list that is provided to you when you log in for the first time (pictured below).

If you get stuck however, you can always get in touch with Ecwid’s support team – more on which later — or, if you’re on a ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan, you can take advantage of a bundled customization service (you get two hours and six hours customization time from Ecwid on these plans respectively).

Ecwid and GDPR compliance

Please note: I am not a lawyer, so the below observations should not be interpreted as legal advice.

There are several legal steps that the GDPR requires business owners to take to ensure compliance — and fairly serious penalties for not doing so.

The key ones for Ecwid users are probably as follows:

Meeting the first three requirements with most online store builders is pretty easy, but the fourth one can pose challenges. 

Whenever you use non-essential third party cookies on a website — for example a Facebook pixel or a Google Analytics script — you are legally obliged to give EU visitors to your website the option to switch these off before they continue to browse your store (even if your site is based outside the EU).

The good news is that Ecwid gives you a built-in cookie consent tool that allows you to display a cookie notification message and allow users to either accept or decline use of cookies. These include Facebook cookies, Google cookies, Pinterest cookies and Snapchat cookies.

Many competing platforms don’t offer similar functionality, so it’s a definite thumbs-up for Ecwid here.

Customer support

The level of customer support you get from Ecwid depends on the type of plan you’re on.

If you’re on the free plan, you can avail of live chat support for the first 30 days of your subscription (you’ll have to rely on forums and help pages for answers to any questions you may have after that).

If you’re on the $25-per-month Venture plan, you can expect email / live chat support; if you’re on the $45-per-month Business plan you get phone support in addition to this; and the $105-per-month Unlimited plan gives you phone, email, live chat and ‘priority’ support.

This support comes in seven languages — English, Dutch German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian.

This is comparable with the multilingual support available from some other ecommerce platforms (for example Squarespace and BigCommerce) — but not as extensive as Shopify, which offers support in over 20 languages.

As mentioned earlier, there’s another type of support available from Ecwid in the form of ‘customization hours’. If you’re on an Ecwid ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan, you get two hours or six hours of assistance customizing your store. This service is potentially useful for users who are completely new to the whole area of ecommerce and web design.

There’s also the option to use Ecwid’s ‘Ecwid Academy’ service to enhance your knowledge of the platform. This features a wide range of educational content about the platform (and selling online in general) including courses, tutorials and webinars.

All in all, Ecwid’s support services ultimately stack up reasonably well against those of other similar products, and the inclusion of phone support on some plans gives it an edge over key competitors Shopify and Squarespace.

Ecwid review conclusion

Overall, Ecwid is a cost-effective, powerful way to add ecommerce functionality to an existing site, or to place an online store on a Facebook page or other social media presence. If you’re building a standalone site, there are better options available — I’d be inclined to go for Shopify or BigCommerce if doing that — but ultimately Ecwid does what it says on the tin: lets you add ecommerce to any website, and easily too.

Ecwid deserves particular praise for its completely free plan and its comprehensive multilingual selling features. There is, however, quite a bit of room for improvement when it comes to SEO features.

I’m going to end this Ecwid review with a full summary of the product’s pros and cons below, but as ever, our main recommendation is to always try before you buy — you can register for the free version of Ecwid here.

Pros and cons of using Ecwid

Alternatives to Ecwid

If you’re starting an online store from scratch, then you’re spoiled for choice; there are many platforms available that allow you to build a standalone online store; big hitters include Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Volusion and Squarespace (with Shopify and BigCommerce being the most fully-featured as far as ecommerce goes).

For more information about Squarespace, check out our Squarespace review or our Squarespace free trial guide.

If you’re hoping to integrate a store into an existing site, of the above platforms, both Shopify and BigCommerce will let you do this, via an embeddable ‘Buy Button’.

These Buy Buttons work in a similar way to Ecwid, in that you add a snippet of code to your site to feature products or collections on it. However, whereas Ecwid allows you to effectively put a complete, fully functioning store on an existing site, the Shopify and BigCommerce options are considerably more basic. Check out our BigCommerce review or our BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison for more details.

WordPress users may also be interested in looking at WooCommerce to add an online store to their site. (You can learn more about this option in our in-depth Shopify versus WooCommerce comparison).

Some of our other ecommerce reviews and comparisons may be useful in helping you to evaluate the alternatives to Ecwid — you’ll find links to a selection of these below: