Wix ecommerce: full Wix online store review for small businesses

Our researchers ranked Wix as their top ecommerce website builder for small businesses based on extensive user testing of all market-leading products. Other popular products such as Shopify, Squarespace, Square Online, BigCommerce, and GoDaddy made the top six.

Each ecommerce platform was assessed and scored out of five on the factors that matter most to small business owners. Those key factors are:

• Ease of use
• Design flexibility
• Help and support
• Sales features
• Value for money
• Website features

Let’s take a deep dive into how Wix performed in each of these categories.

Website features – 4.9 out of 5

As well as its top-quality sales features, Wix tops our ranking for its website features scoring a massive 4.9 out of 5. Impressively, between 2021 and 2022, Wix upkept a perfect 5 out of 5 score for SEO features and blogging which means the platform has a commitment to maintaining the quality of its website 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.

Features are built-in for each template relevant to your chosen industry. For example, if you ran a hairdresser business an appointment booking feature will already be included with your website. This is useful because it saves you the hassle of having to add essential features yourself, or even worst forgetting to add them.

We also marked it joint top for blogging, with advanced tools like an optional search function helping it to reach 8/10. This is great for businesses that want to outreach and market via blogging on their website.

The over 300 third-party apps available from the Wix App Market are generally focused on growing your online presence. Unlike with some other builders, they are available to download with no additional coding required and many of them are free, which is why Wix scores very highly in this area. Particularly as other ecommerce platforms like GoDaddy don’t offer even half as many apps and integrations as Wix does.

Wix has also extended its ecommerce offering by introducing a number of neat new products and services.

Special mention should go to Wix Ascend, an all-in-one CRM and marketing product suite that allows you to connect with consumers and turn them into paying customers through lead capture, loyalty schemes and return visits, and build and manage your mailing lists.

And in terms of SEO, Wix has a partnership with SEO giant Semrush. The partnership expands Wix’s SEO offering for its users by allowing them to access Semrush’s SEO keyword data directly through the Wix dashboard. This will make it easier than ever to find the best keyword to target and to climb the Google rankings for terms that are relevant to your business and audience.

Velo by Wix, a “comprehensive web development” platform, is another great feature that allows you to build professional web applications using the product’s front-end design tool. Velo supplies hundreds of UI elements that you can use and modify to build apps quickly, all while retaining the flexibility of your own code.

This is an incredibly useful feature for any small businesses that want to fully customise their website, and that have experience in web development and coding.

Sales features – 4.4

Wix came second in this area of investigation and was only narrowly beaten by Shopify, with just 0.1 in it. This is incredibly impressive, considering Shopify was specifically built as an ecommerce platform, whilst Wix is first and foremost a web builder.

Products and inventory

There’s no inventory tools or functions lacking with Wix, and 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.

This ensures efficient inventory management and customer experience, as you’ll know to replenish stock of any popular products that are at risk of being unavailable.

In the front end, products are nicely displayed in a grid formation, and it’s easy to edit the imagery, copy, and title. This allows you to fully customise product pages, making them even more enticing for potential customers.

Payment options

Wix offers most of the major payment options, including digital wallet-type payments such as Apple Pay. It imposes no transaction fees beyond that made by your payment gateway, which is usually in the region of 2.2% + 30p.

Wix is also fully integrated with Avalara, an automated tax solution that provides you with the most current tax rates for every transaction you could possibly make. This ensures you stay compliant with regional tax regulations and saves you a lot of hassle. Handy!

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.

These are all great features that help to improve the post-purchase customer experience, and ensure consumers keep returning to your store.

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.

You also can’t fully customise your checkout in the way you can with open source platforms like Woocommerce. Your checkout will always look slightly uniform when compared with other Wix websites.

Shipping and order fulfilment

Wix ecommerce’s shipping functions is another area that was given a shiny new upgrade during our latest round of research. Following a recent update by the platform, it’s now easier than ever to organise, refund, and track orders in the dashboard.

You can print and pay for shipping labels, and arrange unique tracking numbers for your customers through your online store. Any suppliers or manufacturers can be added to your system so that they automatically receive a fulfilment request every time you receive an order.

This makes order fulfilment a stress-free process, and trust us, it can be stressful if your ecommerce platform doesn’t get it right.

You also want to make sure you partner up with an efficient order fulfillment service, to find out more read our review of the top 10 order fulfilment services in the UK.

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. In fact, along with Shopify, Wix is the only platform that offered all 8 of the functions we reviewed making it joint top of our list and scoring a full-featured 5 out of 5 in the shopping area of investigation.

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. This saves you the pain of having to change ecommerce platforms if you should decide to begin operating internationally.

Unfortunately for Wix, Shopify does offer multiple currencies with its more advanced plans, which is one of the reasons it pips Wix to the post.

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.

This will help you make calculated decisions about your products. Which ones aren’t selling and should be discontinued? Which product is your best seller and should be marketed? Analytics help you answer these important questions.

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 – 4.4 out of 5

Essentially, Wix is a closed source platform, meaning it supports 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 industry-tailored features to match.

This is in stark contrast to a platform like BigCommerce, which only offers only 10 free ecommerce-specific templates for its users. All others must be paid for, which does not leave customers with a lot of options to choose from.

Whilst with Wix, all its templates 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.

This is great for users that want customisation, but want it to be as easy as possible. It also isn’t as basic as platforms like GoDaddy, which offer bare-bone templates that haven’t got many capabilities of being altered.

All Wix 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. The best part is that Wix has kept up a very solid 4 out of 5 score in its mobile editor in our independent research. The score hasn’t changed between 2021 and 2022.

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 – 4.8 out of 5

Wix’s scores an impressive 4.8 out of for help and support. Wix’s knowledge centre was the highest-performing resource on our list, with a mix of videos, images, and text to help you achieve your desired results. Plus, if Wix doesn’t support a function that you’ve queried, it’ll let you know so that you don’t have to spend hours fruitlessly inputting variously phrased keywords to find what you’re looking for.

You can also access the Wix ecommerce School – a portal that gives users access to live and on-demand sessions from other successful Wix merchants, agencies, and experts.

Based on our first-hand user testing, Wix’s knowledge centre has gotten better over time. Between 2021 and 2022, the score we gave it’s knowledge centre went up from 4 out of 5 to a perfect 5 out of 5. This tells you Wix wants to make sure users have all the help they can get when trying to design their website.

Value for money – 3.4 out of 5

Wix’s ecommerce price plans fall slightly short for when it comes to offering value, taking home an acceptable 3.5 out of 5 in this category. While it’s not the most affordable option for SMEs, considering the quality of its website features, and the cost of its very reasonably priced plans, Wix is easily the best ecommerce builder if you want to focus on your online shop as much as your sales tools.

Also compared with the likes of Shopify and Bigcommerce,  which will set you back anywhere between £20 – £200+ per month, Wix is actually very good value for money, with its cheapest ecommerce plan starting at just £15 per month.

Ease of use – 4.4 out of 5

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.

70% of users reported they were likely to recommend Wix to a friend. However, some testers said that they struggled to work out how to start a store using the ecommerce functionality.

This is because, unlike rivals Shopify, Wix doesn’t preempt what a user will need next when they are setting up their store.