Ecwid vs Shopify — Comparison, Key Pros and Cons

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In this Ecwid vs Shopify comparison I pit two popular — but really quite different — ecommerce apps against each other. Which one comes out on top?

First up you’ll find my quick verdict, which is then followed by my deep dive.

Let’s start the full comparison with a key question…

What are Ecwid and Shopify?

The short answer: Shopify and Ecwid are tools for selling stuff. Both platforms allow users without any coding knowledge to create an online store, upload products to it and manage inventory on an ongoing basis.

They’ve got quite different backgrounds and history, however.

Shopify was initially conceived as a tool that allowed users to create a brand new, standalone online store — i.e., a fully-functional website on a domain of their choosing — while Ecwid was designed to let people sell products on an existing site by adding a snippet of code to it.

(Hence the name ‘Ecwid’ — ‘ecommerce widget’).

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.

Of the two products, Shopify is the older site builder — it was created in 2006 — and has a bigger userbase. Internet stats company Builtwith.com estimates that around 4.9 million websites are currently powered by the platform.

Ecwid was launched in 2009, with Builtwith.com estimating that it now powers over 919,000 sites. In 2021, it was acquired by the point-of-sale solution company Lightspeed.

So that’s the history of Ecwid and Shopify — now what about their prices?

Pricing

Ecwid pricing

Ecwid offers you four plans — and the good news is, one of them is entirely free.

The USD prices for the plans are as follows:

(Pricing in other countries varies, however. In a lot of territories, Ecwid costs considerably more than in the USA. For example, the UK prices are roughly 30% higher than their US counterparts.)

The most obvious difference between the plans involves product limits — these increase in size as you go up the pricing ladder.

You are limited to 5 products on the free plan; this rises to 100 on ‘Venture’, 2,500 on ‘Business’ and, as the name suggests, an unlimited number on the ‘Unlimited’ plan.

It’s important note that on the free plan, you can’t use Ecwid to sell on key social channels (like Facebook or Instagram).

The Ecwid feature set becomes more extensive as you pay more — accessing features like abandoned cart saving, gift cards, point of sale features and more comprehensive support depends on the plan you’re on.

With all Ecwid plans, you can either embed your products on another site or create a basic standalone site, using Ecwid’s ‘Instant Site’ feature.

Note: if you’re a Wix user, you can start selling with Ecwid at a lower price — you can find out more about Wix and Ecwid pricing here.

Shopify pricing

Shopify provides five pricing plans:

All the Shopify plans allow you to sell an unlimited number of goods, using as many categories as you like; they all let you sell at point of sale too (i.e., in physical locations like retail stores, market stalls etc.).

The main differences between the Shopify plans involve:

The more you pay, the better the offering on all fronts.

Now, it’s worth dwelling on one key thing that the ‘Shopify Starter’ plan doesn’t let you do: create a fully-customizable standalone online store. The ‘Starter’ plan is — like Ecwid — more about selling products elsewhere.

It allows you to:

This is all pretty useful functionality — but if you need a standalone online store, it’s best to start off with a ‘Basic’ or higher plan.

Now, unlike Ecwid, Shopify doesn’t give you access to an entirely free plan, but a free trial of the platform lets you test the product out.

The trial itself is very short — just 3 days — but Shopify is currently testing a new system that lets you make use of the platform for an additional three months for just $1 per month. This means that you can get full access to Shopify for over 90 days at virtually no cost. This offer — which is likely to be available for a limited time only — can be accessed here.

A quick note about the ‘Shopify Plus’ plan: this is designed with ‘enterprise’ users in mind — i.e., those with very particular needs regarding security and uptime, a desire to sell in multiple POS locations, or advanced requirements when it comes to integrating Shopify with internal systems (CRM tools, databases etc.).

For most businesses however, one of the cheaper Shopify plans works fine.

And speaking of cheap…

Discounts

Both Ecwid and Shopify offer discounts if you pay upfront for a year’s service.

In the case of Ecwid, paying yearly gives you a 16% discount.

With Shopify, if you pay upfront for a year, prices are reduced by 25% for the ‘Basic,’ ‘Shopify’ and ‘Advanced plans’ — these work out at $29, $79 and $299 per month respectively when paid for on an annual basis.

Shopify changes their discount offering quite regularly however, and sometimes by location — you can see what discounts are currently available in your country by checking the pricing section of the Shopify website.

Pricing, of course, is just one part of the picture — and not necessarily the most important part! So, let’s drill down into the specific ecommerce features you get with Ecwid and Shopify.

Ecommerce features

Both Ecwid and Shopify provide the basic features and functionality that you’d expect from an online store builder.

They both give you the ability to:

However, there are some important differences that need to be flagged up. Let’s explore these.

Payment gateways and transaction fees

A payment gateway is the software that processes your customer’s transactions securely. There are lots of companies that offer payment gateway services — well-known ones include Paypal, Stripe and Worldpay.

Ecwid and Shopify work with a very wide range of payment gateways — 75 in the case of Ecwid and 105 in the case of Shopify.

Additionally, Shopify offers its own payment processing option, ‘Shopify Payments.’ This is extremely easy to set up and using it means that there are no transaction fees to worry about (so long as you’re on a ‘Basic’ plan or higher — 5% transaction fees apply to the ‘Starter’ plan regardless of whether you’re using Shopify Payments or another payment gateway).

(You will still need to factor in the usual credit card processing fees — but Shopify won’t take a cut of your sales).

However, Shopify Payments can only be used if you are selling from certain countries — these include many EU countries, major English-speaking markets, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Japan.

If your country isn’t on the list, you will have to use a third-party payment gateway, and you will be charged a percentage of sales for doing so (varying from 0.2% to 2% depending on the plan you’re on). This will be on top of any fees charged by your chosen payment gateway provider.

With Ecwid, you must use a third-party payment gateway to process transactions. On the plus side, you won’t be charged for doing so — but on the down side, you will have to factor in a little bit of time to configure your chosen payment processor.

Product limits

Shopify is considerably more generous than Ecwid when it comes to the number of products you can list on your store — you can sell an unlimited number of items, regardless of the plan you’re on.

With Ecwid however, restrictions apply. You are limited to selling five products on the free plan; 100 on its $25 per month ‘Venture’ plan; and 2,500 on its $45 per month ‘Business’ plan.

Only the $105 per month ‘Unlimited’ plan — as its name suggests — lets you upload an unrestricted number of products.

Product options

With Shopify, you are limited to using just 3 product options per product.

So, for example, if you were selling a birthday card on Shopify, you could allow users to choose card size, card colour and envelope type — but if you wanted to allow them to choose envelope colour as well, you wouldn’t be able to.

Now, this limit won’t be a showstopper for many merchants — and for those it affects, there are workarounds available. You could buy a Shopify app that removes the limitations; combine two options into one; create separate products; or do some coding to add more options.

I feel it would be better if Shopify’s product option limits were more generous in the first place, though.

Ecwid, by contrast, is much more straightforward in this regard and doesn’t limit product options at all.

Another issue with Shopify’s product options is that allowing your customers to provide bespoke information for items — for example, some text for an engraving or a gift message — is not possible without either adding some code to a product template, or investing in an app (quite a few are available from Shopify’s app store which give remove the above limitations).

Again, Ecwid works better here — so long as you’re on a paid-for plan, you can just add a simple text box or file upload button to your products to capture any additional information that you might need to fulfil an order.

For many merchants, Shopify’s 3 options restriction and its limitations around data capture won’t really pose problems. But for users who do have more complex requirements in this area, and want to create a standalone hosted ecommerce site, I’d suggest taking a look at BigCommerce, which is more flexible in this regard.

Overall though in a Shopify vs Ecwid debate, when it comes to ‘out of the box’ flexibility on product options, it’s a win for Ecwid.

But what about product categories?

Product categories

Most online stores are likely to make use of different product collections / categories — for example, in a car parts store you might expect to find collections containing tyres, exhaust pipes, batteries, headlights and so on.

Setting up collections in Shopify and Ecwid is straightforward enough, but Shopify’s approach is, in my view, considerably better — not only can you add products manually to collections with Shopify, you can create ones that are automatically populated with products based on conditions you supply. 

In other words, you can create ‘smart categories’ with Shopify (which the company refers to as ‘automated collections’).

This involves using various criteria to populate a collection — for example, product title, tags, price or weight.

So, using my car parts store example again, to populate an ‘exhausts’ collection, I could just tell Shopify to automatically add any product with the word ‘exhaust’ in its title to it.

This is particularly useful functionality to have handy if your store contains a very large number of products — but you will have to remember to use consistent naming conventions for your product titles to make it work.

Although Ecwid does let you use filters to help speed up category assignment — and lets you assign products to multiple categories at once via a ‘bulk editor’ tool — it doesn’t yet provide similar ‘smart collection’ functionality, so the winner here is definitely Shopify.

Selling digital goods

Both Ecwid and Shopify allow you to sell digital goods — eBooks, music products, videos and so on. Interestingly, Shopify also lets you sell ‘non-fungible tokens’, which some digital creators might find useful.

(Ecwid only lets you sell digital products on a paid-for plan, however).

You can sell digital products on any Shopify plan, but it involves installing a free ‘Digital Downloads’ app. Although this is not particularly complicated, it would be better — as is the case with Ecwid — if you could just sell digital goods out of the box.

Ecwid is also more generous when it comes to the limit it places on file sizes — you can sell files up to 25GB in size, while Shopify’s equivalent limit is 5GB.

You can use third-party apps in conjunction with your Shopify store to increase this limit — but you’ll usually need to pay extra for the privilege.

So, if you have a need to sell large digital files to your customers, it’s a win for Ecwid.

Dropshipping in Ecwid vs Shopify

Many users are drawn to ecommerce solutions like Ecwid and Shopify because they want to start a dropshipping business.

Dropshipping is a way of selling goods without manufacturing or stocking anything — you take an order, send it to a supplier and they fulfil the order.

The advantage of this selling model is that you don’t have to invest in lots of stock to set up your online business — instead, your money can go straight into marketing it.

The disadvantage is that dropshipping is very competitive — there are lots of people at this game — and it can be hard to find suppliers of goods that are produced ethically (as many of them are made in the Far East, where working conditions can be very poor).

Neither Shopify nor Ecwid facilitate dropshipping ‘out of the box’ but the good news is that it’s still really easy to dropship with both platforms — you just need to add an app to your store.

Dropshipping in Shopify is simply a case of adding an app like Spocket or DSers to your store (there are hundreds of others available), picking some goods you’d like to sell and putting your site live. Print on demand is also easy to facilitate with Shopify, thanks to integrations with a wide range of POD apps (including big hitters like Printify or Printful).

Similarly, you can also dropship with Ecwid using apps such as Wholesale2B, Syncee, Spocket or NextsChain.

Overall however, there are far more dropshipping options available from Shopify. While Ecwid currently offers its users just 13, I found 623 dropshipping apps in Shopify’s app store.

Similarly, the print on demand options are more limited with Ecwid too — I could only find three POD apps in its app store. On the plus side, one of the leading POD services, Printful, is catered for (you can learn more about this tool in our Printful review). A paid for app lets you connect Printify too.

Point of sale (POS)

Point of sale, or POS, lets you use your online store solution to sell in physical locations like markets, pop-up shops or even retail outlets. Both Shopify and Ecwid come with quite a few POS features, but they work in different ways.

Ecwid POS

With Ecwid, you are encouraged to use Lightspeed Retail POS as your point of sale solution (Lightspeed recently acquired Ecwid, so this isn’t surprising). This is available in a wide range of countries including all the major English-speaking countries.

(You can check out our Lightspeed POS vs Shopify POS comparison here).

You can also use third-party services in conjunction with Ecwid to gain POS functionality — supported solutions include Square, Clover, Vend and Alice.

(Note that Lightspeed now owns Vend too!).

The sort of point of sale hardware that you can use (card readers, barcode scanners and so on) varies by provider and according to which country you’re based in. But if you already use one of those services to take payments in a physical store, you may find Ecwid a nice fit.

The key thing to watch out for is cost. Although all paid-for Ecwid plans let you make use of a basic bundled mobile POS system, powered by Square or PayPal Zettle, connecting your Ecwid store to one of the other POS solutions mentioned above will require you to sign up to the most expensive ‘Unlimited’ Ecwid plan.

And the other thing to note about using either Square or PayPal Zettle as your POS option is that the number of countries it works in is limited.

Square only works in eight countries — Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. PayPal Zettle works in 13 — Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US.

(PayPal Zettle is being rolled out to more countries at the moment, however).

Shopify POS

With Shopify, POS is more ‘baked in’ and is therefore arguably a bit easier and cheaper to set up. You can order any POS hardware online directly from Shopify if you live in one of the following countries:

If you live outside these countries you can still purchase this hardware, but will need to find an authorized reseller.

The standard Shopify POS features are reasonably good and will cater adequately for most merchants — but it’s worth noting that in order to unlock all the Shopify POS features, you have to pay for a ‘Shopify POS Pro’ add-on.

This is quite expensive: $89 per location, per month (unless you’re on a Shopify Plus plan, in which case ‘POS Pro’ is bundled with your subscription).

Paying for this add-on does unlock quite a wide range of POS features however and lets you:

You can learn more about Shopify Point of Sale here.

Abandoned cart saving

Something worth paying particular attention to when it comes to ecommerce platform selection is abandoned cart recovery functionality.

This allows you to automatically email store visitors who added something to their cart but didn’t complete their purchase. (Typically, you’d include a discount code in this email to encourage recipients to go ahead with the purchase).

Abandoned cart recovery emails tend to have a success rate of around 15% to 28% — so this functionality is very important.

Both Shopify and Ecwid allow you to send abandoned cart recovery emails easily, but Shopify has an edge here. Its abandoned cart saver is more sophisticated than Ecwid’s, allowing you to send automated messages based on whether a user has:

As you can see from the below screenshot, Shopify also lets you add conditions and actions to each step of the recovery process — this gives you the option to create an extremely ‘bespoke’ customer journey.

The main thing Ecwid’s abandoned cart saver has going for it is its availability at a relatively low price point. Because it’s bundled with Ecwid’s $45 plan, this key feature is available more cheaply from Ecwid than from several of its key competitors.

(For example, Squarespace requires you to be on a $72 per month plan to access cart saving features and BigCommerce requires you to be on a $105 per month plan to do so.)

But overall, when it comes to abandoned cart saving, the winner is Shopify.

Multi-currency selling

You’ll generally get more online sales if you sell in the currency used by your store visitors.

And unlike some competing products — notably Wix and Squarespace — Shopify lets you do this out of the box (so long as you are using its built-in payment gateway, Shopify Payments). Using IP address data, Shopify shows your store visitors your product prices in their local currency, and lets them check out in it too.

Selling multiple currencies using Ecwid involves using an app — a popular choice being the appropriately named ‘Currency Converter’ app, which costs $4.49 per month.

The Currency Converter app makes it easy to display prices in up to 130 local currencies automatically — my only problem with it is that the store’s default currency gets displayed again at the final stage of the purchase, which may confuse buyers a bit. In other words, checkout doesn’t take place in a user’s own currency. That aside, this app works well.

The bottom line on multi-currency selling with Shopify and Ecwid is that it’s doable with both platforms — but because the feature’s implementation is considerably better, Shopify wins here.

Selling products in different languages

Both Shopify and Ecwid facilicate multilingual selling.

In the case of Shopify, you can create versions of your store in up to 20 different languages on the ‘Basic’ or higher plans.

You do this via the ‘Shopify Markets’ feature, which lets you define selling areas — ‘markets’ based on country or groups of countries. You can then manage currencies, languages, local domains and payment processors for these markets all in one place.

When you enable multi-language selling in Shopify, a language ‘folder’ is added to your domain. So you’ll end up with myshop.com/fr, myshop.com/de etc. You can also use an ‘international domain’ — myshop.fr, myshop.de etc. — to host foreign-language versions of your store.

Ecwid’s multilingual features work in a different way — you can switch on an automatic translation feature, which functions in up to 36 languages (you can choose which ones to work with).

This automatically detects what language a user’s browser is working in and translates key components of your site — button text, social sharing tools and other important store labels — accordingly; for other components, like product descriptions, a manual translation will be required.

However, if you’re considering using Ecwid as part of a multilingual WordPress site, you should note that you’ll also need to install a dedicated language plugin like WPML or PolyLang to present your store in multiple languages.

Automatic tax calculation tools

Ecwid and Shopify are both ahead of the pack when it comes to tax rules and calculations — you can set both platforms up so that they detect your store visitors’ locations automatically and apply the relevant tax rate at checkout.

Significantly, neither Ecwid nor Shopify restricts automatic tax calculation to US users — both platforms’ tax tools are designed to work in multiple territories (including the EU, UK, South Africa, Singapore and several other territories).

And helpfully, these tax calculations are applied not just to sales of physical products but digital ones too — meaning that both solutions cater adequately for the EU’s VAT MOSS requirements (something that can’t be said for many other online store builders).

Shipping options

Both Shopify and Ecwid give you a comprehensive set of shipping options — you can opt to add flat rates, free shipping, rates based on weight, in-person pickup etc.

When it comes to providing real-time rates from carriers to your customers, however, there are some differences to be aware of.

Ecwid has a built-in integration with the following carrier companies to automatically show their shipping rates for customers’ orders at checkout:

A few more carriers (Sendle, DHL and Droppa) are supported via third-party apps.

Shopify provides real-time shipping rates for the following carriers:

If you want to provide quotes from any other shipping carriers on a Shopify store, you’ll have to be prepared to pay extra to do so — this functionality is only available if:

However, if you do live in one of the countries that Shopify provides built-in real-time carrier quotes for, you can avail of very significant discounts in shipping costs (depending on plan). These can go as high as 88% on the higher-tier plans.

Shipping discounts are also available from Ecwid, but only via USPS and only up to 50% in value.

The more generous discounts available from Shopify mean that depending on your country of operation, there may be an advantage using Shopify over Ecwid when it comes to real-time shipping quotes.

Embedding products on other sites with Ecwid and Shopify

As discussed above, Ecwid is, first and foremost, a tool for adding ecommerce features to an existing website; and by contrast, Shopify is more geared towards building brand new, fully-fledged ecommerce websites.

But with Shopify’s “Buy Buttons,” technically you can also use Shopify to add a shopping cart to an existing website too.

(The Shopify ‘Starter’ plan is designed with this fairly exclusively in mind.)

The difference between using a Shopify Buy Button and integrating Ecwid on your site is that with Ecwid, you get all the functionality of an online store — your site visitors can make use of product search, multi-currency selling, category filtering, product sorting and other key ecommerce features.

And everything happens on your site, including checkout, which makes for a smooth buying process.

You should note however that Shopify ‘Buy Buttons’ — although useful and easy to set up — only really let you display individual products or collections. When your customers check out, they’re taken to a separate Shopify checkout page.

And Shopify Buy Buttons don’t facilitate multi-currency selling, which could be a big drawback for any merchants wishing to sell internationally.

So as things stand, I feel Ecwid is the more powerful tool for adding ecommerce to an existing site.

Creating standalone ecommerce stores in Shopify and Ecwid

While Ecwid is a better option for adding online selling features to an existing website, there’s no question that Shopify is the better option for users who want to build a brand new, fully-featured, standalone online store.

Its extensive range of templates (13 free and 210 paid-for), intuitive content management system, blogging features and extensive app store all allow you to create not just a storefront but a professional, multi-page website.

Whilst Ecwid does now boast a feature — ‘Instant Site’ — that lets you build a standalone store, it’s pretty basic, allowing you to create a one-page site featuring your products alongside information about your business.

The aesthetics are good and the results can be pretty impressive, but in my view, an Ecwid Instant Site is not a substitute for a proper website.

The main advantage of the ‘Instant Site’ feature is that it allows a beginner to put something together and sell products really quickly — it’s a really good option for starting a side hustle with.

It’s also a very useful feature for anyone needing to create a holding site or landing page during the build of a more comprehensive online store.

Additionally, the range of themes on offer for an Instant Site is generous: you can choose from 79 Ecwid templates.

But ultimately it’s not going to compete with Shopify when it comes to functionality.

So, if your main aim is to build a standalone online store, the better product of the two is definitely Shopify.

Integrations and apps

If you’d like to beef up the functionality of an Ecwid or Shopify store, or integrate another tool with either platform, you can make use of their respective app stores.

These contain a selection of apps that add particular pieces of functionality (dropshipping, reporting, popups etc.) along with integrations with other key business apps and services. A mixture of paid-for and free apps is available.

In the case of Ecwid however, you’re dealing with quite a limited selection of apps — I only found 347 of them in its ‘app market’, a number that is completely dwarfed by the 13,000+ available for Shopify.

This means that although integrations for some pretty important apps like Freshbooks, Shipstation and Printful exist for Ecwid, you’ll generally find it easier to integrate Shopify with a wider range of well-known apps.

Although the range of integrations for Ecwid is relatively small by comparison to Shopify’s, you should note that it’s possible to use Zapier to connect additional services to Ecwid. This is a popular ‘syncing app’ that allows you to create your own customized integrations between a wide range of online apps.

The problem here is that Zapier brings a set of additional fees to proceedings, plus you’ll need to spend a bit of time configuring it to work with Ecwid and whatever app you want to connect.

So overall, because its app store is better stocked and brings a greater degree of flexibility when it comes to integrating other tools with your online store, the winner in the app store department is definitely Shopify.

SEO features in Ecwid and Shopify

(Tip: if you’re new to SEO and confused by the above terms, you’ll find explanations of all of them in our introduction to increasing site visibility in search results).

Although Ecwid performs reasonably well on all these fronts too (so long as you’re on a paid plan), it’s worth singling out some areas where Shopify outperforms Ecwid in SEO terms: URL creation and meeting Core Web Vitals requirements.

URL creation

In terms of URL creation, you can create clean URLs easily with Shopify (a practice that Google recommends). You can also change these URLs as you please — and create a redirect from old URLs to new ones (this is important for keeping your content and products indexed properly in search engines).

You can also create short, SEO-friendly URLs using Ecwid. However, you don’t have total control over these — they will be based on the titles you give your products, not text you enter into a dedicated URL field.

It’s worth noting however that if you’re using Ecwid on certain platforms you will need to make some technical changes to your server configuration and Ecwid code to enable SEO-friendly URLs properly.

(This issue doesn’t affect Wix, WordPress and Instant Site users — but if you’re using a custom-built website or a different site builder, some development work may be involved to get this feature working properly.)

Most significantly, when using the ‘plugin’ version of Ecwid (rather than the ‘Instant Site’ version), there doesn’t appear to be any way to change existing product URLs or create redirects to other ones. This isn’t ideal, to be honest.

(The Instant Site version of Ecwid lets you create redirects from deleted products to new ones, in effect giving you some control over URL creation and redirection — but you still can’t create your own URLs using it).

Core Web Vitals in Ecwid and Shopify

Core Web Vitals are a set of targets relating to the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a website; and sites that meet them can sometimes receive a slight improvement in performance in Google search results.

Shopify enjoys a bit of an edge over Ecwid here, because tools are available (in the form of third-party apps and built-in reports) to help you tweak your store in ways that will help you meet Core Web Vitals standards.

With Ecwid, you may have to take more manual steps — including possibly some coding — to ensure that you’re following best practice as far as Core Web Vitals goes.

So the bottom line on SEO? Well, although it is possible to optimize an Ecwid store successfully for search engines, it’s hard not to conclude that the better option on this front is Shopify.

Staff accounts

If you want to let a lot of users access either an Ecwid or a Shopify account, you’ll need to be aware that tighter limits apply to the number of ‘seats’ you can have on Shopify.

On the ‘Basic’ Shopify plan, 1 user can access your account; on the ‘Shopify’ plan the limit is 5; and on the ‘Advanced Shopify’ plan it’s 15.

I find Shopify’s 1 user limit on its ‘Basic’ plan particularly ungenerous — it makes the entry level plan unsuitable for any business requiring multi-user access (even small businesses with only 2 or 3 staff members).

By contrast, Ecwid lets you have an unlimited number of seats on its ‘Unlimited’ plan, which may suit some merchants better (the seat limit for the other plans is 1 on the ‘Free’ and ‘Venture’ plans and 2 users on the ‘Business’ ones — so it’s a bit of a could-do-better for Ecwid here, too).

Interface and ease of use

Ecwid and Shopify have pretty similar content management systems: you use a main menu on the left which you use to access all the main features.

Any product uploading or management is done on the right hand side of the interface.

One area where Ecwid’s CMS definitely outperforms Shopify’s involves image management — in Shopify, you have to ensure that all your products share the aspect same ratio before uploading (not doing this makes for a very messy looking store). This can mean a lot of photo editing in Photoshop before you can upload all your products.

Ecwid simply allows you to apply an image ratio globally to all your product pictures — a huge time saver.

Additionally, both platforms provide you with mobile apps (for both iOS and Android) that allow you to perform key tasks on the go; you can use these apps to handle order fulfilment, inventory management, customer support etc.

The main Shopify and Ecwid apps have both been well received by iOS users, both scoring 4.6 out of 5 on the Apple store. The Android version of the Ecwid app beats the Shopify equivalent slightly — it’s rated 4.4 out of 5 while Shopify scores 4.3.

Overall, I’d say that both platforms are easy to use and anyone with modest experience of computing shouldn’t expect too much of a learning curve from either.

Reporting in Shopify vs Ecwid

Basic sales stats are available in Ecwid out of the box (visitors, orders received, total revenue etc.), but to get more detailed information on how your store is performing you’ll need to install a third-party reporting app. Several are available, but not all of these are free.

Shopify provides a more comprehensive range of reports ‘out of the box’ — you just go to the ‘Analytics’ section of your Shopify control panel to view them. If you want to create customizable reports however, you’ll need to be on one of the most expensive Shopify plan (‘Advanced’ or ‘Plus’).

The other option with both Ecwid and Shopify is to use Google Analytics to track traffic, behaviour and sales — but you will need to spend a bit of time configuring this.

Customer support

When it comes to the type of support channels you can access, Ecwid lets you access its customer service team via live chat, email and phone (with phone support being available on its $45 per month ‘Business’ plan or higher).

Most Shopify subscribers will only ever be able to access email and live chat support however, because phone support is only provided to users on a $2,300+ ‘Shopify Plus’ plan.

(And using Shopify’s live chat service entails addressing your query to an AI chatbot first. My exchanges with this were surprisingly good, but some will find this extra hoop annoying.)

It’s important to note that if you want to use the Ecwid free plan, support is limited to live chat and is only available for the first 30 days of your plan (you can, however, make use of the various online support materials and video tutorials indefinitely).

One thing you should note is that Shopify support is available in more languages than Ecwid — over 20 languages are catered for, which compares positively to Ecwid’s seven.

But Ecwid gives you something on the support front that Shopify doesn’t: ‘customization hours.’ If you subscribe to an Ecwid ‘Business’ or ‘Unlimited’ plan, you can avail of two or six hours of personalized support respectively.

I’d argue that this, combined with the easier access to phone support, means that Ecwid has the edge in the support department.

Ecwid vs Shopify conclusion

Ultimately, if you’re a small business that’s building an ecommerce site from scratch, then it’s hard to argue against Shopify — a user-friendly product that will let you build an elegant standalone online store easily. Although Ecwid, thanks to its ‘Instant Site’ feature, does now provide you with a way to build a standalone site too, the functionality provided by it is nowhere near as comprehensive as what you’ll get from Shopify.

However, if you already have a website, or are particularly wedded to using a particular platform, then Ecwid is usually the more obvious choice. It allows you to add full selling capabilities to an existing online presence with a minimum of fuss, and provides you with all the tools you need to turn any website into an online store.

(In particular, Ecwid is a particularly good fit for Wix or WordPress users, integrating neatly with both platforms).

Shopify ‘Buy Buttons,’ while allowing you to do some simple selling on existing websites, don’t really provide the full online store experience or features that Ecwid can bring to a website that’s already live.

I’ll sum up with a few more reasons why you might pick one of these tools over the other — and do feel free to leave your own thoughts about these platforms in the comments section.

Shopify vs Ecwid: pros and cons summary

Alternatives to Ecwid and Shopify

If you’re looking for a hosted solution for your online store, I’d recommend BigCommerce as a good alternative to Shopify. You can read my BigCommerce review here.

Other good hosted solutions for ecommerce include Squarespace, Big Cartel, GoDaddy and Wix.

See our Squarespace review, Squarespace pricing guide, Squarespace free trial guide and Wix review for more information on these website builders.

Our Wix vs Squarespace and Squarespace vs WordPress comparisons may help here too.

If you are running a WordPress site and want a store that ‘slots into’ your site in a similar fashion to Ecwid, then WooCommerce is definitely worth a look.

Finally, you could consider using an online marketplace like Etsy, eBay or Amazon to sell online.

Although these platforms work in quite different ways to hosted solutions like Ecwid and Shopify, you can nonetheless get a successful online store off the ground with them.

If you’re interested in finding out more about selling this way, our Shopify vs Etsy, Shopify vs eBay and Amazon vs Shopify comparisons are good starting points.

Related Shopify and Ecwid content

For more information about Shopify and Ecwid, check out: