Ecwid Review (2025): Features, Pros And Cons

I admit to being a fan of Ecwid for some use cases, specifically low-budget shops and shops needing custom coding. Even with the March 2025 pricing and feature changes, it’s extremely flexible for the price point and offers a quick way for new shops with low budgets to get online. New to e-commerce sellers will especially appreciate the well-thought-out product management, although the initial shop setup is fractured.

For shops needing large amounts of custom coding, Ecwid offers in-house coding and design services, including custom third-party integrations. Those deep customization options mean expanding and larger companies can get exactly what they want out of their e-commerce platform at a much lower price point than most e-commerce platforms.

Hit and Miss Customization

Ecwid’s Instant Site builder offers several layout options for most elements but lacks the ability to adjust element placements manually.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the improvements in Ecwid’s website builder and templates. The templates (about four dozen) are nicely designed and fit a variety of styles. While not as many as other platforms, such as Wix, there’s a better variety of styles than some, such as Squarespace.

The builder’s functionality is pretty straightforward, and there are lots of tutorials. However, while custom design help is available for a fee, and several hours of custom work are included in the highest tier plans, the lack of drag-and-drop element placement within the builder was annoying. I found myself getting frustrated quickly when trying to make adjustments that would be quick in other website builders.

Each element offers several layout options, but you can’t fine-tune element placements such as title text that needs to be a bit higher or more to one side. I was happy to see that there are multiple layout options under mobile optimization, though.

Great Product Management Organization

Ecwid’s product management is managed with tabs to make the process smoother.

I hate having to jump out of what I’m doing to go find another menu on my dashboard when uploading products. I’m also not fond of doomscrolling through never-ending single-page product addition screens.

I love how Ecwid’s product management is impeccably arranged, with well-thought-out tabs at the top of the product management screen. It helps prevent pointless scrolling, makes it faster to access specific tasks and assists in reminding users what tasks still need to be completed.

Jumbled Store Management

Ecwid’s store management isn’t intuitively organized.

As much as I love how the product management screens are set up, I hate the way most of the behind-the-scenes work, such as checkout fields and options, taxes, legal notices and customer groups tossed into a generic settings menu. Figuring out what checkout fields you can use requires almost randomly clicking through many dashboard categories under settings.

It’s almost like the coding team got bored at the end and just threw everything left in a doom basket, leaving users jumping back and forth between dashboards to complete simple tasks. For example, the toggle to require customers to agree to terms and conditions at checkout is under settings>legal instead of being part of settings>general>cart & checkout.

Ecwid stands out from most e-commerce platforms by offering shop embedding into social media and other websites, along with low-cost hosting. While many platforms allow embedding of some sort, it often feels like an afterthought, and the platforms seem designed to keep you within that ecosystem instead.

Ecwid’s price points are generally much lower than its competition as well, especially on the higher tiers. However, as of March 17, 2025, Ecwid has discontinued its free option, instead adding a $5 monthly price tag to it and naming it the Starter plan. Overall prices rose slightly for every plan, and some features were eliminated or reduced. It’s still a good price range for most, but it is far from the outstanding deal it once was.

While most often compared with WooCommerce, Ecwid includes store hosting instead of relying on an outside host for your product information and checkout functionality.

Flexibility to sell across channels with store embedding is at the core of Ecwid and most other key features build from that premise. Easy product import and export, flexibility to sell physical or digital products, dropshipping integrations, custom third-party tool integration builds, dozens of payment processor choices and even POS options all give Ecwid amazing flexibility compared with some other platforms.

However, it’s not perfect, and that flexibility does come at a cost in some situations, such as a lack of depth to SEO tools.

Embed Your Online Store Anywhere (Almost)

To embed an Ecwid online store, copy the code from Ecwid, paste the code in a custom code field on your website and then adjust the sizing to fit.

A big point in Ecwid’s favor is its portability. Instead of needing to upgrade to expensive e-commerce packages with your web host, you can embed your Ecwid store into your existing website as long as it allows custom code (even free Google Sites) by copying and pasting a code widget—no need to actually code anything from scratch.

Embedding an Ecwid store into an existing website also means you don’t have to buy a more expensive e-commerce hosting plan. Even the best web hosts usually charge more for e-commerce hosting because of the extra storage and bandwidth needed. Since Ecwid’s store hosting is already handling all of that, you can usually stick with a cheaper hosting plan from your main website host.

E-Commerce Product Exports

Being stuck with one platform because of the difficulty in exporting products from some platforms is a big concern. Ecwid doesn’t gatekeep your products and makes import and export fairly straightforward using CSV-formatted (a fancy way of saying it is saved in a way that a database program can read it) spreadsheets that most spreadsheet programs, such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, can handle.

SEO Tools

Ecwid SEO tools are rather limited.

Getting your online store seen is vital for e-commerce. Ecwid offers decent SEO tools, but there are some significant gaps. For example, you can’t add alt text and titles to images, only your product pages.

Ecwid does a great job of letting you add multiple product images and videos to product listings, but not being able to adjust metadata for each image can be problematic, especially for shoppers using accessibility devices such as screen readers.

For those embedding Ecwid into other websites, the product image metadata will still be an issue, but you can offset other concerns to some degree with the SEO tools available through your primary website. Stores focusing on local customers can also effectively jump the SERP line by using a Google Business Profile that will show in Google searches based on location instead of the quality of your website’s SEO practices.

Integrations

Ecwid’s app market features dozens of integrations for third-party tools.

While Ecwid doesn’t have as many e-commerce integrations as platforms such as Wix, it has a sizeable stable of e-commerce-specific integrations. That said, there are a few notable holes in the offerings, such as QuickBooks Online only being available with a Zapier connector.

Because of those odd gaps, I highly recommend checking the app market for your favorite integrations before signing up with Ecwid. Alternatively, you can get a quote from Ecwid on the cost of creating a custom integration to the third-party tool you need. If you are signing up for one of the top two plans, several hours of shop customization are included if you pay annually instead of monthly.

Payment Processor Freedom

Ecwid integrates with numerous payment processors.

All the standard big names you’d expect to see for payment processing, such as Stripe, PayPal and Square, are available to use with Ecwid. However, Ecwid offers around 30 other payment processors for U.S. shops, including Clover and Amazon Payments. Lightspeed, the parent company of Ecwid, has also developed Lightspeed Payments as an in-house processor option.

Unlike Shopify, Ecwid does not charge any transaction fees or processing fees on top of your payment provider costs.

Dropshipping

Ecwid includes about a dozen dropshipping integrations and can custom create others.

Ecwid’s app market (available on paid plans) includes about a dozen dropshipping apps. Some are single-source or print-on-demand suppliers, such as Printful, and others, such as Syncee, are clearing houses for multiple suppliers.

If the dropshipper you prefer isn’t already on the integrations list, you can manually import a product list to your Ecwid store and handle the communications with your dropshipper yourself, or get a quote from Ecwid for a custom-built automated integration.

Point of Sale (POS)

Ecwid offers a scaled-down mobile POS option plus integration with full POS systems.

Ecwid offers a few POS options: mobile POS through the Ecwid app, which works with limited payment options, Lightspeed’s Retail program and third-party POS integration for Square, Clover and Alice. All options require one of the higher-tier paid plans. Ecwid only offers POS hardware through Lightspeed.

However, even without a free plan and considering recent price increases, Ecwid is cheap compared to most other e-commerce platforms, and the $55 monthly cost ($45 per month if you can pay for a year upfront) for the Business plan that includes mobile POS is within a few dollars of most platforms’ entry-level plans. If you need third-party POS, you’ll need to upgrade to the Unlimited plan at a more significant $130 monthly ($105 per month if you pay in an annual lump sum).

It’s also worth noting that Ecwid is currently developing an add-on mobile app called ShopApp that could be a workaround for POS, but a release date hasn’t been announced yet.

	Standard	Venture	Business	Unlimited
Monthly Price	$5	$30	$55	$130
Website Builder	Single page	Three pages	10 pages	100 pages
Products	Five	100	2,500	Unlimited
Custom Domain Pointing	No, free subdomain only	Yes	Yes	Yes
Product Filters and Variations	No	No	Yes	Yes
App Market Access	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Storage and Bandwidth Limits	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Ecwid Mobile POS	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Third-Party POS	No	No	No	Yes
Automated Tax Calculations	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Social Media and Marketplace Selling	Linkup	Linkup, Facebook and Instagram	Linkup, Facebook, Instagram and Marketplaces	Linkup, Facebook, Instagram and Marketplaces
Advertising	Google, Pinterest and Snapchat	Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok	Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok	Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok
Inventory Tracking	No	Products only	All types/variations	All types/variations
Free Customization Services	No	No	Two hours (annual billing plans only)	Six hours (annual billing plans only)

See More See Less

Compared to other e-commerce platform pricing, Ecwid’s pricing is simple. Each plan has differences in features that make sense, and it provides a detailed comparison of plans so you know exactly what you are getting. That’s a stark comparison to e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, where much of the differences revolve around transaction fee rates or what industry you’re in.

The included website builder, branded Instant Site, and rather powerful hosting combine with embedding capabilities to make Ecwid a great value for simpler shops.

For shops with more needs, the higher-tier plans include free customization hours so you can get professional coding help (regularly $200 per hour) for shop design, custom checkout functions or even custom integrations with your favorite business tools. Just keep in mind that complex requests might need more than the included free hours.

Unfortunately, the latest feature changes make Ecwid less of a bargain for custom domains. While previous annual plans included a custom domain name for the life of your plan, there is no free custom domain name option as of March 2025. Now, domains can be purchased directly from Ecwid or pointed from an external domain registrar on all but the Starter plan. It’s also important to know the domains purchased from Ecwid can’t be used for custom email.

Ecwid isn’t the biggest e-commerce platform, but it powers over 200,000 online stores. Its flexibility and willingness to provide custom coding solutions (for a fee) make it a great choice for small stores and stores with unique needs. However, the lack of flexibility in online store design within the website builder continues to be a concern for DIYers, who could face steep coding costs to make changes easily managed by other systems.

We recommend Ecwid for:

• Shops selling through social media
• Online stores with only a handful of products
• Businesses needing to add e-commerce to an existing website

We do not recommend Ecwid for:

• In-person sales. Other POS systems, such as Square, offer a lower entry-level price point and more flexibility in working with multiple e-commerce platforms.
• Those with limited technical skills. While Ecwid has a fairly level learning curve, some features, including embedding, could require some troubleshooting.
• Companies needing server control. Ecwid’s included hosting is outstanding in its price range. However, there are no options for dedicated or bare metal servers, and you can’t upgrade or downgrade resources as needed.

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