Likelihood to Recommend I believe CommerceV3 (CV3) is best suited for small to mid-level catalog companies. You would want to make sure to integrate CV3 with your back end system or you'll be doing a lot of manual entries or manipulating data for table uploads. You can easily manage the templates in CV3 with a basic knowledge of HTML and work up from there
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros CV3 provides us a plethora of marketing tools to customize offers and campaigns to our customers. I've used BigCommerce and Shopify and neither comes close to the capability of fine tuning sales, offers, and discounts by product, category, customer and more. The purpose of partnering with any e-commerce platform is to provide a secure site and stable checkout process for our customers. CV3 has been amazing at keeping our site up and running through peak traffic and attempted hacks. The checkout process has been rock solid and also integrates seamlessly with PayPal. I've used Amazon Payments in the past without incident, but decided to end that option due to Amazon's policies. CV3's architecture on the back-end is designed to be plain and simple which provides an easy-to-use interface to streamline our work. The template driven structure to manage the front-end will become a favorite for most programmers in no time at all. In fact, I'm not a programmer, but do customization and design changes almost on a daily basis with ease. Any changes made to a template may be viewed on a staging server before pushing live. Templates, as well as other data may be downloaded any time for backups. Exports and imports of product data is simple and powerful allowing me to change massive amounts of data easily. Customer support is always a contentious issue with most providers, however, CV3 has by far been the best I've encountered in over 30+ years of experience with software vendors. They are very responsive and escalate the issue to the proper person without having the redundancy you experience with so many other companies. They understand the issue the first time, and tell you the truth. Any e-commerce business is about shipping. CV3 has the most powerful tools to control shipping. It will challenge the most creative minds on how to best merchandise products based on weight, dollar amount, global geographical location, dimensions, category, exception rules, by carrier, all the way down to the sku level which can have it's own set of rules. It gets complicated, but it works great and ties in with the promotional features as well. Read full review 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.. Read full review Cons An area I'd like to see enhanced is the sku level pricing calendar. You can set specials prices to start and stop at certain dates and times, but it's fixed to certain years. You can't have your chosen items go to seasonal pricing every year at the same time, you have to change the years each year. There are multiple product setups: basic, parent with children, and sub-products. Each type exports on the same datasheet all intermingled and this can be tedious isolating the different types for editing and re-import. Vendor and Brand are data points on each item, but they are not controlled by a table. We end up with the same vendor or brand misspelled multiple times. There is no FTP capability (PCI issue?) and no blog site with the parent domain. These have to be handled using a separate sub-domain. The shipping calculator for customers should be available anywhere there is a shipping option presented during checkout. Faster live times. Currently, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to see template/product changes pushed to the live cdn. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered In my view, CV3 meets our needs better by allowing us a much easier way to manage the front end the way the templates are structured.
BigCommerce recommended using an FTP tool to download, modify, then upload.
Shopify has some very sophisticated templates, which, in my mind, required a senior level programmer or lots of outsourcing for even minor changes. Neither of the other systems come close to CV3's marketing capabilities through their promotional tool without any add-ons.
Shopify , for example, is stripped down and if you want a certain feature you have to find one of their approved partners, sign-up, integrate the feature and hope it works. To purchase all the features we're currently using in CV3 you'd have quite a list (and expense) of partners. Examples would be enhanced shipping capabilities or the ability to customize a product purchase. CV3 has features specifically geared for a catalog company, like request forms and capturing key codes. Plus, built-in rewards program, wishlist, gift certificates, bulk email, and data feeds for Google Shopper, Channel Advisor and SingleFeed.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment One positive impact has been the use of product reviews. This feature has helped us weed out bad products and promote good ones while allowing customers to share their experience. It's a fixed fee user agreement which favors increasing sales. The stability of the checkout process has helped conversions and lowered support. Having integrated inventory with our back end has helped meet customer expectations. The promotional capabilities of CV3 has allowed us to provide new and different offers keeping customers engaged. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots