Our researchers ranked Wix as their top ecommerce website builder for small businesses based on extensive user testing of six different platforms.
Each builder was assessed on the factors that matter most to small business owners. Those key factors were ease of use, design flexibility, help and support, sales features, value for money, and website features.
Here’s how Wix performed.
You can find our full list of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses here.
Website features
As well as its top quality sales features, Wix topped our ranking for its non-ecommerce features.
It’s difficult to identify one standout area, as it does well across the board. But it certainly earns points for giving you access to a comprehensive range of high quality, essential tools and services.
The third party apps available from the Wix App Market are generally focused around growing your online presence. Unlike with some other builders, they are available to download with no additional coding required.
Special mention should go to Wix Ascend, a recently introduced feature that allows you to connect with customers, promote your business, and automate your workflow from one centralised location.
Sales features
Products and inventory
The process of adding and managing products in the backend is very user friendly, with an automatic counter that tells you how much stock you have left.
In the frontend, products are nicely displayed in a grid formation, and it’s easy to edit the imagery, copy, and title.
Payment options
WIx offers all major payment options, except digital wallet type payments such as Apple Pay or Amazon. It imposes no transaction fees beyond that made by your payment gateway, which is usually in the region of 2.2% + 30p.
Checkout
Wix allows you to customise your checkout page with your business name and logo, and add store policies and contact information in the footer.
With the secure checkout feature, you can give customers the option of completing a purchase either as a customer or a guest. You can also set up a confirmation email that’s automatically sent to customers once they’ve made a purchase.
And with abandoned cart recovery, you can send an automatic email reminder to your customer if they leave an item behind in their shopping cart.
However, unlike ecommerce operations like Shopify, Wix doesn’t link up with Royal Mail click and drop, which means you have to manually input names and addresses if that’s the service that you want to use.
Shipping
Setting up shipping on Wix is fairly painless. If you sell internationally, you can set up shipping regions in the backend, adding different rules and costs depending on the customer’s location.
You can then add multiple shipping options and provide customers with a shipping estimate on the shopping cart page.
Currently, creating and printing shipping labels for orders placed in Wix is not supported.
Internationalisation
Selling in multiple currencies is not currently supported by Wix, but it does offer a currency converter app so that onsite users can easily convert your pricing into their local currency.
It also supports international sellers with a multilingual sites feature, which enables you to create multiple websites for different countries.
Sales analytics
Wix’s analytics capabilities have vastly improved over the last couple of years. Its store analytics function gives you access to all the data you could ever need to optimise your online shop, including site visits, revenue, top products, and average order figures.
Security features
All the essential security features you’d expect are included. SSL certificates are ingrained within all Wix sites, it’s Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliant, and is accredited as a level 1 service provider and merchant.
Design flexibility
A Wix eCommerce template
Essentially, Wix supports full website customisation without the need for you to use or understand any code.
Wix has an unrivalled 71 ecommerce-specific templates to choose from, spanning more industries than any other builder, and with tailored industry features to match.
And all of them can be endlessly tweaked and changed using its intuitive and user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, so you can create your perfect site. There are virtually no restrictions on where you can move elements on your website pages.
All templates automatically reformat to whatever device they’re viewed on, and you can see how your site will look on mobile within the desktop editor.
However, you better make sure you’re 100% certain you’ve designed exactly what you want, as there’s currently no option to change templates or reformat your website once it’s gone live.
Help and support
Wix tops our ranking for help and support. It doesn’t offer 24/7 phone support like some of its rivals, but its knowledge centre is an excellent resource, with a mix of videos, images, and text to help you achieve your desired results.
And if Wix doesn’t support a function that you’ve queried, it’ll let you know, so you don’t have to spend hours fruitlessly inputting variously phrased keywords to find what you’re looking for.
Value for money
Wix is great value – we can’t stress that enough. Considering the quality of its sales features, and the cost of its very reasonably priced plans, Wix is easily the best value ecommerce platform on the market.
Ease of use
From a user experience perspective, Wix is great. It has a simple interface with clearly identifiable icons, making it easy to manipulate different frontend elements and change fonts and colours. It’s also easy to create categories and add products, edit images and elements, and undo mistakes if necessary.
However, some testers said that they struggled to work out how to start a store using the ecommerce functionality.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by Henry Williams, Khareem Sudlow
