Big Cartel vs. Shopify vs. Wix

It's well suited for simple e-commerce and basic inventory management needs.

Incentivized

Shopify has low barriers to entry so it's a great store for new businesses and small to medium size businesses who have a limited product amount and are interested in building a site from scratch that is centered around the buying experience. However, if you're a larger to enterprise company and want to incorporate an e-commerce element to your site, then they are still a possible solution but be prepared to hire a firm to help you implement and connect to your site in a seamless way because without a developer, it's near impossible.

Incentivized

The fact of Wix moving away from their ADI web-building tool in favour of Editor, in my opinion, makes a huge mess of everything. I feel a lot of the ease and automation of designing my website has gone to such an extent that I now "recommend" Wix only for professional developers. Worse is that I have to redesign a big part of my website as items are now linked to each other in a different way than used to be the case. In my opinion, A big ZERO for Wix, who clearly should do their homework again.

• It's very easy to use and does not require a lot of configuration or setup.
• It has been extremely reliable. Clients never have issues with purchasing from it and it has always has been up for us.
• It's very fast. It loads quick both on the consumer/front end and also admin/backend.
• Pricing model is flat, not percentage of transactions.

Incentivized

• Managing products and Sales using a very user friendly platform.
• Apps that make marketing really easy and effective.
• Directly linking platforms like Instagram and Titkok and managing content that is posted on the sites.
• Fast customer service.
• Customer Analytics, allows me to see what type of products should I sell more.

• Easy to create and duplicate website, and web pages for similar products, services and campaigns, so you do not have to start from scratch
• Find features such as video, image and button, and templates to customise your website's feel and look. For example, recently, I was able to add a countdown timer for the sale of tickets to our online conference.
• Creating website Anchors - making it easy for you to take a visitor to a particular part of a page so that they do not need to scroll through the entire webpage making it more user-friendly.
• The SEO part of Wix makes it easy for you to set up meta data, create fully functional social media shares that are on brand and looks professional in the Google search engine..

Incentivized

• For our needs I really can't think of anything!

Incentivized

• The main drawback that I am facing in Shopify for a long time is that their sales analytics system is not up to mark. As I am using Shopify to run different stores for my organization it does not get updated after-sales and does not provide the right analytics about the product strength and number of sales.
• Secondly, Shopify has different apps which are best to run the store on max strength but they are very much costly like inventory management, generating multiple discount codes, and more robust customizable editing.

Incentivized

• One place where Wix falls short of other CMS's is with insights and analytics. On other platforms, I can instantly see how many page views I received, what time the pages were viewed, location, etc. But seeing this information on Wix requires a Google Analytics integration that is not automatically included when you make an account. You have to first go to Google Analytics to make an account, then come back to Wix to activate the integration, it's a little time-consuming for a feature that most CMS's come with instantly.

Incentivized

Nothing we have used in the past or have seen thus far even comes close to offering what we get with Shopify Plus, especially for the price. You cannot even come close to getting what we are getting at the price we pay. We are beyond thrilled and Shopify Plus meets and exceeds all of our needs and expectations. We love it!

Incentivized

We will definitely renew Wix. The ability to completely control our website has been invaluable to us. We will maintain this service as long as we are an incorporated organization, we've tried several other software options and this has been the best solution by far for all of our needs.

Incentivized

I think most people are able to suer Shopify that have used a computer. There are some features that take a bit longer to learn. If you are not a creative person it may be a bit more difficult to learn the website customization, but with a help guide or tutorial it will only take a few tries to understand how to work the interface

Incentivized

Great customization, but a pain to backtrack. They recently added the ability to set fonts etc as headings, title, body etc, but if you did not begin your build with these presets you are screwed if you ever try to change font/ colors/layout etc.

Incentivized

I never had an outage issue per say. I would say it was very reliable of a website building platform and as a marketing source there was never any issues connecting it to the server. I don’t recall there being any editing tools or hosting issues. Nothing went down when using it.

Incentivized

Not complex at all. It teaches you how to use their platform in a dynamic way. Each tutorial offers an explanation that can be reviewed later on. The connection speed of a web page has been smooth so far, with no major problems regarding this subject. Overall, Wix can manage 10+ pages with great connection speed.

Incentivized

In terms of support I give Shopify a 9 out of 10 because they're always very friendly and thorough, and they personally can't solve my problem for me they always point me in the proper direction with the proper information I need to move forward

Incentivized

As stated before I didn’t use the support as I did not have the feature and did not often enough need the help. I was able to figure it out mostly on my own by exploring the site. I’ve found exploring and playing on it told me how to do most things.

Incentivized

Just start now and make the switch, the sooner the better. You will love it and it is really a simple process

Incentivized

Like I said I was a beginner so it was fun to navigate and teach myself how to implement the features when building and maintaining my site. It was a fairly easy place to host my domain, and creat something simple.

Incentivized

The old platform that I used could not help us to meet our requirements. It was not helping us properly, then I got to know about Shopify and started using it. After 1 month [of] usage of Shopify we could understand that this is the best platform [for E-commerce] to make better sales and goodwill. Shopify helped us to get a proper idea of the analytics of the website. Shopify [supports] most of the [applications] and helps us to make better results.

Wix is a great starting platform for anyone looking to create a website. It definitely holds its own against any other all in one website creation platform. The one thing I would say is if your main focus is solely on eCommerce you may be better off using something like Squarespace which is specifically designed for that market.

Incentivized

I give this rating to Wix because it's a great content creator. It has a great platform and also offers great customer service. If you encounter any technical issues, with Wix you will find a solution. For premium members or domain holders, this is the same as for Trial members or non-domain holders.

Incentivized

• The basic plan at $10/month easily saves us that in time from having to manage our own e-commerce system on our own site.

Incentivized

• It got the store up quickly so the client could start selling. She was previously selling products on Etsy and Facebook and wanted to consolidate everything onto one website, so the main thing Shopify solved was to reduce the store owner's time in managing all her products on multiple sites. Also, we had previously built a website on Wix with all the custom functionality and branding she needed - a truly great, high-end website - but it performed so slowly that it was unusable. So the speed at which Shopify can be set up and then works on the page is appreciable.
• The website was manageable by the client - she could figure the system out herself after a while so she saved money on costs for hiring developers. She did have to hire developers to customize some of the plug-ins but costs are all relative; it wasn't a high investment compared to building a full e-commerce website. With the complexity and size of her product base and the functionality and branding she wanted to have in a website, and the potential of her business, she would have needed to invest well over $10,000 to get to where she really needs to be. In the end she kept the budget under $5000.00.
• Costs kept climbing with plug-ins having to be added with everything. My client became more involved in building the website and began to try multiple plugins, and she did not have the skill base to evaluate the plugins functionalities so she chose plugins that did not do everything she needed, and then ended up paying the plugin developers to customize the plugins. So on one hand, it's pretty amazing to be able to bring up an e-commerce website as quickly as a week or so, but on the other hand if you need anything customized or deeper functionality in regards to product searching and filtering on the web page, and management on the backend, it quickly goes beyond the skills of the average person to manage, and above their expected budget as well. In the end my client really did not get anything close to the functionality for the website we had originally envisioned.
• Shopify was the easiest way we could find to bring the client's products to a global market. We evaluated several other platforms and the functionality simple did not seem to be adequate, so Shopify seemed like the only solution that could do enough of what we needed and still stay within this client's budget. Really the problem in this project was not platform per se but that the budget wasn't large enough. Shopify managed to provide a solution for an ecommerce store with thousands of products on a tiny budget, so in the sense of pure functionality it provided the best value of all the platforms we evaluated. The solution still isn't big enough for this client's business though so, without having insights into this client's post-build sales results, my guess is that because her new website did not make her products easier to sort through, and she likely didn't have much more budget left to invest in SEO and other marketing of the website, her sales probably didn't increase substantially as a result of having built the website. So I think this project all in all did not likely have a high ROI.

Incentivized

• The data-driven, dynamic pages will eliminate an entire part of our event launch process. Multiplied across 60 events, over several years, that will save us a ton of time but also vastly increase the quality of our presentation.
• The data-driven pages will also give us the ability to archive past events and radio shows in an easily searchable manner. This will be helpful for us when it comes to booking new events as well. (It has been no small feat for me to figure out the code to get this all working, though!)
• This new site will reflect our brand and organization vastly better than our old site. It will make our organization appear much more professional and legitimate.

Incentivized