Wix eCommerce Solutions - Is It for You?

Wix has built a strong brand image as being one of, if not the best drag-and-drop, do-it-yourself website builders that anyone can pick up and build a beautiful site with. Hell, when my friends ask me to build them a website, I kindly tell them to do it themselves and always point them in the direction of Wix as a preferred service solution for this. That being said, it was clearly built for creating brochure style websites and not for eCommerce.

Of course, they would have been fools to not take what they had and upgrade it to be able to provide store capabilities considering the meteoric rise of eCommerce in the last few years.

This is why they created Wix Stores, the simple to use store builder. This is definitely designed for the less tech-savvy, aspiring online seller. More competition for Shopify than an enterprise level platform like NopCommerce.

So how does it hold up?

Why you should use Wix for eCommerce

First and foremost, ease of use. This is a platform designed for people with very little technical know-how to get their product range displayed on a professional looking, branded store of their own. Being a cloud based service means that you don’t have to stress about organising hosting and all the maintenance that is involved with that - they take care of all updates, backups, security and more. This means you can spend more time making sure your site looks just how you like it, get your products organized and looking well and most importantly, finding customers to traffic through your sales process.

Design is simple, based on templates that all come with a lot of customization options, so you won’t find yourself rocking a store that looks identical to someone else's. Cookie cutter doesn’t impress customers.

If you are already running a brick and mortar store and are looking for an option that can extend your business on to the world wide web then the point-of-sale system that Wix Stores offers means you can keep your instore and online purchases synced. On top of that, Wix doesn't charge transaction fees like the other similar services. Perfect!

Why you shouldn’t use Wix for eCommerce

Super simple and easy to use always comes at the cost of customization. Though there is a reasonably sized library of apps you can implement within your store, you are prohibited by their limitations. The closed source nature of the service means you can’t have a developer dig around in the code and get things exactly how you want them. The low storage offered by Wix also means that catalogs are severely prohibited, something to consider if you are running a large product range with variations. If that is the case, you may be better off looking at something like WooCommerce.

Should you use Wix for eCommerce?

If you find initialisms like HTML, CSS, PHP & SQL bewildering then quite possibly yes. Creative types with little technical know how will love how simple and fun the builder is to use. It’s also a very quick way to get your idea up and running and to do product testing without spending a lot of money. Anyone looking at building something more complex, with more control and a wide selection of offerings should probably go down a more professional route.

If Wix Stores does sound like the sort of thing you are looking for then you can give it a go for free. Unfortunately you won’t be able to sell anything until you subscribe to a package, but this does allow you to feel out their offering before committing.

At the same time, if you are now considering Wix for eCommerce, you might want to look at similar alternatives like Squarespace and the built-for-eComm option that is Shopify.