Wix for E-Commerce: First Hand Review

 

It’s been already almost two years since I’ve been using Wix for hosting my online shop. It’s been a long journey during which this company has changed and has improved a lot.
However there are still certain downsides which made me think whether I want to stay with them further or not. Finally after long hesitations (it took me so much effort to create my shop!) I decided to quit it and in this post I will explain you why. I would like to give a detailed review from a user’s perspective, which I hope will help you to make the right choice and decide whether Wix is good for you or not (and, perhaps to avoid mistakes, unnecessary costs and waste of time which I had).

I will start with the PROS first.

1) USER-FRIENDLINESS

WIX is amazing platform for creating very simple and easy-to-construct websites. The beauty of it that any, I will stress ANY person would be able to create a website using this builder. It is extremely straightforward as it is based on “pull and drag”system: you just choose the template you like and then change it according to your needs.

2) IT IS FREE

Wix is free, buuuut…. As it always happens there is no such thing as free lunch. I will explain. From one side, it is true that you can create a free website with Wix, but it will be the most basic “lite” version, plus with a wix.com ending and their advertisement on all pages. Yes it is cool to have a free website, but at the same time, if you want to be perceived as a serious company, would you like to have an announcement on your site that it was built using the free websitebuilder? And voila comes the first expense – purchasing a domain name, which I need to mention is much more expensive than in other places. Want a bit more advanced site? purchase a premium package. Want to have an online shop? buy an e-commerce upgrade, which is again priced here way higher than of its competitors. For example, I bought it for 85 USD yearly and this was with Thanksgiving discount – the usual price is twice higher.

3) GOOD SUPPORT

Here I have nothing to add – the support at WIX is really good – all issues that I ever had with my site were responded quickly and professionally. Plus their online tutorial are really cool and helpful: all the process of building a site is explained in details and in a very easy language.

4) CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT AND NEW FEATURES

It is amazing how many new features Wix releases almost each month. They really try to address all the issues and problems mentioned in the forums or their Help Desk. For example, when I just opened my shop, there was no Zoom option available and everybody was asking for it. Two or three months later this feature was added. I have a big suspicion though that this way try to compensate their biggest failure (see the first con).

5) BEAUTIFUL DESIGN

Wix has some really beautiful themes and it is so easy to create an attractive and catchy website. If you are a photographer, a designer, an artist or have an online shop, like me, you can display your portfolio or products in a very stylish and engaging way:

CONS

1) SEO PROBLEMS

The biggest issue Wix had, has and I believe will have is SEO. Whatever Wix says about it, the truth remains the same – Google doesn’t like flash-based websites and Wix websites are flash based. Despite the content is crawlable, it remains very very difficult to push Wix website on the first page. I am not really good in explaining, why it happens, but as far as I understand the biggest issue is with meta titles and descriptions. Analysing my Google statistics I can see that majority of visitors to my shop come through my blog or mentions on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.

2) ABSENCE OF SOME IMPORTANT FEATURES

Despite, as I mentioned, Wix tries really hard to satisfy all their customers’ needs, it still lacks some important features. For me such was the Skype button (it might be really helpful for communicating with my buyers), search button and ability to accept credit cards (I can use only Paypal). I believe other Wix users can add something else to this list, depending on what kind of website they have.

3) SLOW AND BUGS

My Wix website remains very slow to load. I addressed this problem to Wix team, but all what they suggested me to do was to try to use PNG format for images (I did that from the beginning), so I suppose the problem is not in the photos format. Plus, when I was making my shop, for some reason it would close at the most inappropriate time, leaving all my data unsaved. This happened quite often so at some point I was looking like this:

This was my experience with Wix, and as I mentioned in the beginning of this post I decided to quit Wix and to transfer my shop to my WordPress site (this blog) using free WooCommerce feature. I will update you how it goes and pretty soon will present  L’Essenziale redesigned and updated.

Have you tried Wix? What was your experience? Please share it in the comments section below.