EKM vs Wix (2024) – Which one is better for your Ecommerce Website?

If you are planning on starting an ecommerce website, then EKM and Wix will probably have come to your attention. But which one is the better option?

EKM vs Wix – Quick Summary

EKM vs Shopify – which one is the best? Wix does just edge it for a couple of reasons:

1. Price – Wix is a lot cheaper, especially for new and small stores
2. Website Builder – while not perfect, Wix offers a lot more in terms of customisation
3. Ease-of-use – overall, Wix is easier to use in a number of areas

Yes, EKM scores higher but that is mainly down to Wix’s below average performance when it comes to website speed but as an overall package, especially for small and new stores, Wix is the better option for the reason mentioned above.

There are areas where EKM is better, such as support as it is UK-based and highly rated plus they offer their evolution mode which can be helpful but the high price and not being the easiest to use does go against it.

4/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try EKM

3.6/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Wix

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Pricing

When it comes to pricing, EKM and Wix are very different:

• Evolve: £300/m

Try EKM

• Core: £14/m
• Business: £20/m
• Business Elite: £119/m
• Enterprise: Custom

Try Wix

As you can see, Wix is quite clearly cheaper than EKM but there are additional things to consider when it comes to pricing as EKM’s plan includes a turnover limit of £300k per year, with each additional £100k in revenue costing another £100/m.

Wix pricing structure is also very simple as the only restrictions that they apply are the amount of storage, which ranges from 50gb on the core and 100gb on the business package. There are no restrictions on the amount of products you can sell or any kind of turnover limit.

Free Trial

EKM offer a standard 14 day free trial but if you go through any of the links in this post, you will get a 28 day free trial instead.

Wix do offer a free plan for life and while you can install the Wix Stores app, you can’t use it on a live site. If you want to test the Wix Stores app properly, they do offer a 14 day free trial.

Features

One of the main selling points of any ecommerce platform is the features that they offer for their users, so what do these two platforms offer?

EKM

As EKM was designed as an ecommerce platform from scratch, all of the features of the platform are designed to help you build and grow your business so that you start generating sales. Some of these features are built in to the platform, while others can be installed in a very similar way to how you would install an app.

All of the features of the EKM platform are made in house by the EKM team and this means that they integrate and work perfectly. There is also a selection of features that allow you to integrate with third-party software such as Royal Mail Click and Drop and Linnworks.

EKM Evolution Mode

One of the best features of the EKM platform is their Evolution Mode. With this, you get a review of your site by EKM’s specialist Evolution team, who will give you advice on how you can improve your site from design to functionality. The best thing about evolution mode is that if you agree to the changes, the team will implement the for free on your behalf.

Wix

Wix was originally a website builder and the ability to sell on the platform was added at a later date. To add the ecommerce functionality to your Wix website, you will need to install the Wix stores app, once you do this, you will get the following features.

Outside of the core features of the Wix platform and Wix stores app, there are quite a few different additions you can make with other Wix apps such as subscription, membership and booking sites. There are also plenty of other ecommerce related apps within the Wix App Market.

While the majority of these apps will have some form of free plan, to get all of the features of the third-party developed apps, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan on top of your existing hosting.

Website Builder

EKM

In recent years, EKM’s website builder has got a lot better and gives you more control over customisation, including being able to:

• Add, remove and reorganise the sections on your homepage
• Edit the content of these sections within the editor
• Change font type and theme colours
• Preview the changes on Desktop, Tablet and Mobile before publishing

This does give you a lot of control over how your site looks but it is still limited in some areas such as not being able to create your own navigation menus.

Wix

As Wix was designed as a website builder first, it is understandable that this is an area where Wix performs very well.

Wix has one of the largest selections of free themes, with over 100 available for online stores but you need to choose the theme you want to use when you are setting up your store with Wix as they don’t offer the ability to switch themes.

Instead, if you want to change the theme, you need to create a new site and then transfer your plan to that site, which is far from optimal!

When it comes to customization, Wix has a complete site editor, which allows you to customize all different page types on your site and the editor gives you complete control over the layout of your site by allowing you to:

• Add, remove and rearrange sections
• Make changes to the layout by dragging and dropping elements
• Customize different page types
• Change the colors and font

There are also additional options for customizing your mobile site as well, which is a nice touch but there is almost too much you can do as it allows you to make such minor changes, such as dragging an element slightly to the right or left that will have no impact on user experience.

With Wix, you can create custom pages for your site using the sections that are available in the page builder and they also include a blog, which has a lot of formatting options and can be used to build visually engaging posts. They also include a range of basic SEO tools that let’s you set URL and metadata.

Support

One of the reasons why people choose a hosted platform such as EKM or Wix is that they get help and support to run their website. But how good is either platforms offering?

EKM

The quality of the support is one of the things that really makes EKM stand out from the crowd. Unlike many platforms, EKM gives all new users an introductory phone call to not only welcome them to the platform but also take users through the set up process and answer questions they may have about the platform.

Once you are using the platform, it is very easy to contact the EKM team as they have a live chat icon in the admin dashboard. If you would like to speak to EKM over the phone, then they very helpfully leave their contact phone number and support pin on the dashboard homepage.

Wix

Wix now offers 24/7 support to all users, with VIP customers also getting access to priority support and while this sounds great, contacting Wix support isn’t the easiest thing to do as their help centre will more than likely refer you to a help article, rather than providing you with Wix’s contact info. This can make it a little frustrating to start with, especially if you need to sort something out ASAP!

Hosting & Performance

EKM and Wix take a very different approach when it comes advertising their hosting information. EKM are very upfront and provide the following information:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• PCI Compliant Servers
• Free SSL Certificate
• 99.9% Uptime
• 24/7 Server Monitoring
• Fast Servers

Wix on the other hand only say that they include a free SSL certificate, have 99.9% uptime and 50gb storage.

This doesn’t stop me putting both platforms to the test! And to do this, I took three of their customer example sites and ran them through Pingdom’s speed tool using their London, UK server and Googles Page Speed Insight once a day for five days to get a nice spread of data, so how did they do?

Pingdom: 1.12 Seconds
Google Mobile: 55/100
Google Desktop: 83/100

Pingdom: 3.93 Seconds
Google Mobile: 13/100
Google Desktop: 42/100

As you can see, there is a massive difference in performance, EKM performed well in every test with a very impressive average load time of 1.12 seconds.

Wix on the other hand had what can only be described as shocking performance and this is also noticeable when the example sites loaded as you would see individual page elements load in. Not only is this not great from a user experience perspective but page load time is also a ranking factor for search engines.

If you want to see how these two platforms compare to their competition, then check out my fastest ecommerce platforms post.

Ease of Use

Now I do know that ease of use is subjective to the person using the site so the following is just my opinion and should only be used as a guide.

Getting Started

EKM

Signing up to EKM is very simple and only takes a couple of minutes. It only requires some basic business info, an email address and to create a password and you are good to go.

Once you have completed the sign up process, you will be taken through to the admin dashboard and will be greeted by a short by concise set up guide, you also get a 30 minute welcome call from one of the the team to help you get started and also answer any questions you may have about the platform.

The dashboard is quite uniquely styled when compared to their competition as EKM have opted for a top navigation menu as opposed to the traditional sidebar. In the top menu are seven headings:

1. Dashboard
2. Shop
3. Orders
4. Analytics
5. Design
6. Features
7. Settings

It is very easy to navigate between the sections and doesn’t take long to figure out where everything is within the dashboard, the only section that doesn’t really work is the Shop section, which we cover more when looking at inventory management.

Wix

There are two ways you can try out the Wix Premium plans. This first is to sign up to a free Wix account and then go into the premium subscription section of the settings and upgrade your account. Alternatively, you can go to the pricing section of Wix and select which plan you want and sign up through there.

Whichever sign up process you decide to use, on the first sign in, you can go through the Wix ADI (Advanced Design Intelligence) set up and this will take some basic information from you and build out the foundations of your site.

When you have completed the ADI set up, you will be taken to your dashboard for the first time and will be greeted by one of the most comprehensive set up guides that I have come across and goes beyond what most platforms offer. The amount of steps in the set up guide will depend on which apps you chose to be installed when you went through the ADI.

I don’t find the Wix dashboard the easiest to use as it feels quite cramped and there are lots of pop ups that appear when navigation around, which is a little distracting and even thought the main navigation menu is well labelled it can soon become clogged with headings, especially if you start installing apps made by Wix.

It is also the only platform where I find myself consulting the help section or googling how to do things as some options aren’t easily accessible.

Adding and Managing Stock

Being able to manage your stock efficiently and effectively is a hugely important part of running an online store and for me there are three main areas to this and they are:

• Adding products
• Organising your Products
• Managing your inventory

EKM

Adding new products and categories in EKM is really simple. On the shop or products page, you simply click the add product or category button at the top of the page and a pop up will appear (as can be seen in the image below). The tabbed sidebar in the pop up makes the flow of adding a new product really nice and it is easy to navigate between the section.

Adding a new category is very similar to adding a new product, only with less sections that you need to fill out. With EKM, you can add parent and sub-categories, which makes creating a category hierarchy to organise your products very easy. This is helpful for both user experience and SEO.

When it comes to managing your inventory, EKM isn’t great as standard because the Shop or Products section (depending which theme you have installed) is a live preview of the front end of your site and to edit a product listing, you will need to navigate around your site and find the product in order to be able to edit it.

Fortunately, EKM does have a very useful installable feature called the Advanced Inventory Manager and this makes managing your inventory significantly easier it lists all your products and categories, making it much easier to find products and edit your products. It also allows you to create new products and categories within the feature.

Really, the Advanced Inventory Manager feature should be the default Products section as it would improve the workflow of EKM a lot!

Wix

Wix have opted for a single page layout for their add new product page but before you can get started adding a new product, you first need to select whether it is a digital or physical product as the two pages are slightly different but both are equally as easy to use.

The amount of options on the Wix page is less than you get with the EKM set up but it still has all the sections you need in order to properly set up your products. From the product creation page, you can start promoting the product straight away by creating a promo video from your images or sending out a marketing email.

Organising your products in Wix isn’t the best, they call their categories, collections but they work in the same way. The only issue is that you can only create parent collections and this could be problematic if you have a large product inventory.

Managing your inventory in Wix has to be done on a product by product basis, which once again could be problematic if you have a large inventory.

Managing Orders

EKM – EKM has a very good order management process that allows you to manage your orders directly from the order overview menu. You can update order statuses and print of invoices either in bulk or individually. If you want to export your orders, you can do by installing the Import/Export feature.

If you need to manage or update an individual order, you can do this from the overview page or by going into the order.

Wix – Unfortunately, I was unable to test the Wix order management system out as it wouldn’t allow me to create a test order. If I do get to try this out, obviously I will come back and update this post.

Summary

Conclusion

EKM vs Wix: Which One is Best Ecommerce Platform for UK Businesses?

Even though it has a lower score, Wix does come out on top for a couple of reasons:

1. It has a better website builder than EKM, including theme selection and customisation
2. It is easier to use, especially if you are new to building websites
3. It is a lot cheaper

EKM isn’t bad and does beat Wix in a few areas including support as EKM’s support is highly rated by customers and the Evolution Mode is a great way to help you grow your business.

But when looking at these as complete packages, Wix just seems to offer more and for a lower price, which makes it the better option for new and small ecommerce stores.

But we highly recommend trying both platforms out for yourself so that you can find the right platform for your business.

4/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try EKM

3.6/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Wix

Other EKM Comparisons

Paul Haywood

+ posts

Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!

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