Wix Review (2024): Pros & Cons, Features & More

A easy-to-use website builder with solid eCommerce functionality.

Considerations

Wix powers over 8 million websites.

That’s… a lot.

In this review, we’re going to go over:

• Pricing and how much it will cost you. Spoiler: it’s actually not super expensive.
• How it handles payments and point-of-sale (POS). Here you’ll find out exactly how much it will cost you to get up and running and what it will cost per transaction.
• Website building functionality. This is really their strong suit, we’ll go over the features we love that will really help you.
• A lot more.

Let’s dive into it.

Sign up for Wix and you’ll be prompted to “Bring your ideas to life with AI.”

From there you will answer a variety of questions. about your prospective website/eCommerce store. I’ve made up a company and a brand called HydraMoisture.

In answering these questions, the AI completes 2 of the 8 first steps (Identifying your store type and adding your first product).

If you go to the products section, you’ll see what it’s done.

In this case, Luxury Skincare Sets.

Overall, this was a neat way to start a new website; however, I don’t feel like it’s gotten me all that far ahead.

We’ll circle back to products shortly.

Let’s talk about pricing first and how much it costs to use the WIX platform.

WIX Pricing

WIX offers a couple different plans. For starting your entrepreneurial or ecommerce business, you’ll likely be looking at the Core plan.

By default you start out with a Wix subdomain, but you can – and should – connect your own domain (e.g. yourdomain.com).

Custom Domain (Building Your Brand)

The next step after the AI has prepopulated the store is to connect your domain.

If you already own one, that’s great you can follow the steps to connect it here.

If you don’t own a domain you’ve got two choices:

1. Upgrade to a paid plan (all paid plans include a free domain for 1 year)
2. Purchase the domain through Wix (they charge $17.35 per year for a .com, which is on par with other domain registrars)

The next stage you’ll want to set up is payments.

Wix Payments

You have several payment options to choose from for your customers to purchase. If you open the payments section the main ones presented are Wix and Paypal.

There are secondary options you can choose from that allow your customers to pay via cryptocurrency or pay in installments (e.g. Afterpay or Affirm).

Processing fees in the United States are 2.9% + $0.30 for credit/debit card transactions (excluding American Express).

This same rate is used for Apple Pay and Google Pay as well (same no AMEX rule applies).

Wix Payments Point of Sale (POS) is a flat 2.6% with no additional fee.

If you plan on selling in person, you’ll need to purchase their POS hardware. There’s a couple options if you’re going to do this:

1. Mobile card reader – $80.00
2. Dashboard Card Reader – $385.00
3. Your Retail Essentials (inc. terminal, POS software and card reader)- $1325
4. The Complete Retail POS Package (inc. essentials + receipt printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanner) – $1,595.00

Attention! Two critical things you need to know:

1. If there is a chargeback on your account, it will cost you $15
2. If there is a refund requested, you will still pay the processing fees (i.e. 2.9% + $0.30 on the transaction)

Most Common Reasons for Chargebacks

1. Fraudulent transactions (Cyber fraud, affiliate fraud, friendly fraud)
2. Credit card not present
3. Item not received
4. Item delivered is not as described
5. Duplicate or incorrect charges
6. Customer dissatisfaction (recurring transactions)

Chargebacks and refunds can still happen, but being customer centric, having good communication and delivering products on time and as described will help dramatically reduce the risk of chargebacks.

Next up we’ll look at shipping and delivery.

Shipping and Delivery

From the shipping section you can determine the regions you want to ship to along with all the shipping parameters one might expect.

Firstly, you can choose how you want shipping calculated. You can offer:

• Free shipping
• Flat rate
• Rate by weight
• Rate by price
• Rate by product

On top of that you can also add a local delivery for your surrounding region if you choose or even select the option to let customers pickup their orders in person.

Extra options such as offering free shipping when a customer buys over a certain amount as well as adding handling fees to each order are also available.

Pro Tip: Try the Shippo app. It’s one of the highest rated, most reviewed shipping apps in the Wix marketplace. It provides real-time shipping rates, tracking & returns, and discounted rates. It’s free for 30 labels per month – if you do more than that they’ve got a Professional plan for $19/mo.

Taxes

You need to do a little homework on tax collection. I recommend speaking with an accountant or tax professional to help you so you know how to collect taxes properly.

Here’s some general information that will be useful though.

When you’re selling in the US, there’s something called a Nexus. This means a connection to a given state requiring you to pay sales tax once a threshold has been met (annual sales revenue and/or transaction quantity).

Different states have different requirements or thresholds and there are a couple different triggers for collecting and remitting sales taxes: economic, physical presence, marketplace facilitator, click-through and affiliate.

From the platform standpoint, Wix offers access to Avalara to automatically get real-time tax calculations for sales transactions.

This is recommended as it will help ensure you met your legal obligations. To dive down this rabbit hole some more, check out this guide from Avalara.

I apologize for dragging you down that tax-hole. You need to be aware of it – $100,000 or 200 transactions can happen fairly quickly!

Now, on to creating our website.

Creating a Website with Wix

Wix gives you the capability to start designing off a template or to use their Site Generator.

The templates they show align with my the business information I put in at the beginning when I signed up using the HydraMoisture brand.

This is actually one of Wix selling points, and they state it clearly on their pricing page:

If you don’t pre-select a template, and you choose to go with the Site Generator, you’ll be prompted to walk through a couple steps:

1. Add your key information about your business
2. Select a theme that includes fonts and colors that best if your business and target audience
3. Pick your homepage design
4. Add pages to your site

Once you input this information, Wix builds the site (this took me ~2 minutes for it to process).

What it gave us is an aesthetically appealing website that looks great on both desktop and mobile devices.

Web Design Elements

The origin of Wix is rooted in website design.

If we checkout the Wayback Machine, and go back a little way, say to 2014, you’ll see a WIX website that solely focuses on building websites – not eCommerce.

This is a company that has deep roots in no-code website building. They’re design tools are fantastic and they help you to build out a website that algins with your brand and looks fantastic.

The potential downside here is that their eCommerce functionality is an add-on, not a native part of the platform like Shopify for example.

Now, let’s jump back to the design elements that I love.

Their standard elements include 22 different options from galleries to social to payments. There are TONS of options and you will be able to find something you like.

Within the element section there is embed code.

This gives you the ability to embed HTML or add a custom element which is additional code (plus CSS) that you can add if you want to do something that WIX doesn’t offer out-of-the-box.

The marketing tools section has a number of elements such as analytics and tag tracking.

You can also easily build out different kinds of pages: store pages, blog pages or dynamic pages.

Overall its an intuitive website building experience that will make creating a great looking website hassle free.

Once you build your website, it’s time to optimize and promote it.

Marketing and SEO – How to Drive Traffic to your WIX eCommerce Website

Marketing your eCommerce site is critically important – no traffic – no sales.

It’s that simple.

So how does Wix help you in this endeavour?

A couple ways.

First, it gives you control of your SEO Settings for all aspects of your website.

You can build out default settings or individual pages/posts.

This means you control how the search engines see your website and you can optimize it for it.

In the above image you have the key elements in search: the URL slug, the title tag and the meta description.

Secondly, it’s extremely well optimized for speed, which is critical.

One of the tools that is commonly used to measure speed and website responsiveness is GTMetrix.

Running my test site through GTMetrix I get a near perfect score.

Inside the Wix dashboard under Site & Mobile App there is a Site Speed section. This pulls data from Google PageSpeed tool.

Above you can see an a great example of a Google business profile with all the key details: hours, website, services, areas served along with an average of 4.9 stars over 62 reviews.

Once you claim your business listing you can optimize it and make sure it’s up to date with current information.

Pro Tip: Manage your Google reviews, respond to positive and negative reviews professionally. Potential customers weight your rating (number of stars) very highly when considering whether they should buy from you or not.

Integrated Ads (Google / Facebook / Instagram)

Google is estimated to have 8.5 billion searches a day.

Facebook has more than 2 billion people using it per day.

Instagram has over 2 billion monthly active users.

And Wix provides a space inside the dashboard to support running ads for these channels – pretty cool.

The main things that stand out here in the advertising space for Wix is its AI integration for Facebook and Instagram.

The AI can help you:

• Build and optimize your campaign
• Run A/B testing
• Retargeting
• Analysis and monitoring

These features are awesome and can dramatically help you improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Discounts

Wix gives you an easy way to create and control discounts which is super helpful.

You can create coupons based on: dollars, percentage discounts, free shipping, specific sales and buy X get Y free.

You have granular control and can select specific dates, number of coupon uses and more.

Now, in addition to these, coupons you can set up automatic discounts.

Say you’re running a promotion, instead of giving a coupon code to enter, you can automatically apply it to the website and in the cart, making your customers life easier – fantastic!

Pro Tip: Offer discount codes to buyers in exchange for them opting in to your email list. You can then send abandoned cart emails through Wix automations which will dramatically increase your sales.

Something to keep in mind is Wix automations are tied to their integrated email solution.

Wix Email Marketing Plan

Wix offers integrated email marketing.

You start off with a limited free plan that gives you 200 emails per month. This also has Wix branding integrated that you can’t remove unless you upgrade the plan.

They’ve got three plans you can choose from:

Wix App Market

The Wix App Market has a variety of Apps; however, the market is nowhere near as robust as Shopify.

Attention! If you’re considering an app, make sure to read the reviews. Good companies will often respond to user reviews (positive and negative).

If you check out the Klaviyo app, you can see that the team is responsive. This is a good sign.

Third-party app support is important, but so is native platform support.

Wix Support

There’s a couple ways Wix tries to support you:

1. Through its Help Center. Having reviewed a number of their help center articles and guides, I would say they’re well written, detailed and very useful.
2. Providing phone support. Just a note on this, you don’t just get a phone number. You have to first go through their AI/WixBot. It tries to solve your problems first and if you’re unsuccessful it will route you to a call with an Expert.
3. The top of your WIX dashboard has the Hire a Professional This will give you some questions on how a hired professional can help you (e.g. design a website, customize some code, promote your website, etc.). This is a Wix approved professional so you’ll end up with someone that can help you accomplish what you need to do.

FAQs

Conclusion

Should you consider Wix for your eCommerce website?

Wix’s core business is being a website builder. They’ve added eCommerce functionality but it’s not a native eCommerce platform like Shopify for example.

Their platform is an excellent choice for small businesses who want a nice website and a simple platform to work from.

The App Marketplace is a bit limited but it still has a decent selection of tools.

Integrating the help of automated sales tax tool Avalara can save a bunch of time and headaches.

Overall, it’s Wix is a solid choice.