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It doesn’t pay to ignore online shoppers, and Wix Stores ensures your products or services are in front of as many potential customers as possible. The e-commerce platform combines a website builder with site creation tools that let you build a professional online store without coding knowledge. You’ll pay a little more money than for a standard Wix site, but chances are you’ll find the results are worth it. Accordingly, Wix Stores earns our Editors’ Choice award alongside Shopify for ecommerce services aimed at beginners and small businesses looking to sell digital and physical goods.
What are Wix Stores?
Wix Stores is the e-commerce division of Wix, and there are two ways you can set up an account. One method is to visit Wix.com and sign up for at least the Core hosting plan (you can’t accept payments with the entry-level Light). The three Wix business plans (Core, Business, and Business Elite) also offer ecommerce tools. There is also a tailor-made Enterprise plan.
The second method is for people who created a site with a traditional Wix website builder: the free Wix Stores add-on app. You can find the app in the Wix App Market and add it to your website with just a few clicks. Whichever method you choose, you get essentially the same service. Due to Wix Stores’ proprietary technology, you cannot use the app with other web hosts.
Wix Stores: plans and pricing
Wix offers more affordable plans that don’t include e-commerce elements, but for the sake of this review we’ll focus on the site builder plans that offer retail options.
Core ($27 per month, with discounts for annual subscriptions) offers a free domain for a year, 50 GB of storage, 50,000 products, dropshipping, gift cards, and the ability to sell products through social channels. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; Wix Stores is packed with potential money-making features.
The $39 per month Business plan (with discounts for annual subscriptions) builds on Core by including 100 GB of storage, subscriptions and recurring payments, USPS shipping discounts, user reviews, and the ability to sell on online marketplaces. Business Elite ($149 per month, with discounts for long-term subscriptions) has a loyalty program, custom reports, priority customer service, and unlimited storage.
The top-of-the-line Enterprise plan (contact Wix for a custom quote) adds many advanced features, including enterprise-level security and VIP-level customer support. Wix charges 2.9% and 30 cents for transaction fees across the board.
By comparison, Shopify offers three plans as part of its standard offering: Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. They include 10 fulfillment locations, shipping discounts, and the POS Lite software system for brick-and-mortar businesses. Unlike Wix Stores, Shopify has different transaction fees. It also includes unlimited bandwidth and storage, which is useful for companies with large inventories that expect high traffic volumes.
Building a Wix store
Like PinnacleCart, Wix Stores is not only a capable and customizable site builder, but also extremely easy to use. When you start your account, the software site creation wizard will ask what type of store you want to create. We created an online store, but we were presented with other types of sites, such as a blog or an appointment booker.
From there, we followed the seven steps of setting up your site. Using the tool, purchasing a URL, setting up shipping regions, and making the site Google-friendly by adding keywords, favicons, and other SEO-friendly elements was a piece of cake. The draw is the product database, which is easy to build and maintain. It allows you to upload photos (from your own collection or from Wix’s massive stock photo library), add descriptive text, and record the number of items.
For existing businesses, Wix Stores asks you to enter your website name, address, and phone number. The tool searches the Internet for your data. It can find and integrate your social media accounts and images, and pull the content into your site editor. The design wizard allows you to add a gallery, donation page, blog, chat window, or anything else relevant to your business. In short, Wix Stores is quite flexible.
Like Squarespace, Wix doesn’t let you switch templates once you’ve chosen one. That’s a major objection to the service, as you’ll need to create a separate site and transfer your files to the new pages to give your online destination a fresh look. For more information on how the services compare, check out Wix vs Squarespace.
Once your site is up and running, you can use the Promote tab to create social media posts on Facebook and Instagram (you can add others) and do basic email marketing.
Payments and add-ons
Wix Stores accepts payments via credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Square, and Stripe. It also accepts point-of-sale (POS) transactions. With any account above the Core level, Wix Stores offers automated shipping and tax rates. Otherwise, you’ll need to set a default price for both figures and manually adjust taxes and shipping costs.
Like Shopify, Wix Stores lacks a free trial period. On the plus side, Wix Stores supports the application programming interface (API) for developers, so you can create third-party integrations outside of the Wix App Market, if you know JavaScript. If you don’t want to do that, the Wix App Market contains hundreds of add-ons.
Customer service and uptime
Wix Stores offers 24/7 phone and chat-based support if emailing isn’t enough. We found it easy to get someone on chat even in the early morning hours, and the phone support agent helped answer our questions about the different options available in each plan.
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, customers or clients won’t be able to find you or access your products or services. Wix has a 99.9% uptime, and you can track the service’s uptime via the company’s status page.
Verdict: A beginner-friendly ecommerce platform
If your goal is to create a beautiful ecommerce site that’s easy to edit, Wix Stores is an excellent option. The wide range of features and wide range of stock media are plus points, allowing you to create and customize a site that is uniquely yours. Whether you’re an ecommerce wizard or a website building novice, Wix Stores makes it easy to sell products or services online, earning it our Editors’ Choice award along with Shopify.
Mike Williams and Jeffrey L. Wilson contributed to this review.