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Shopify takes a cut of every order and sells you a smaller cut for a larger monthly fee. Wix prices the website rather than the shop, and its cheapest paid tier cannot take a payment at all. Squarespace sorts you by the kind of thing you sell. Ecwid counts how many products you list, and the entry plan stops at ten. Four platforms, four meters, and no two of them are measuring the same thing about you.
While you are still choosing, and before a single product moves
All four will put a product on a page, take a card and send a receipt, and all four do it competently. Where they separate is the number they multiply against. One watches your revenue, one watches your website, one watches what sort of thing you sell, and one watches how long your product list is. Three questions are worth settling before you pick one.
1
Shopify charges a percentage of every order, from 2.9 percent plus thirty cents on Basic down to 2.25 percent on Plus, so a larger subscription is literally how you buy a smaller rate. Take payment through anyone other than Shopify Payments and two percent goes on top. Wix prices the site, one plan per website, and its cheapest paid tier cannot accept a payment at all. Squarespace splits its plans by what you are selling, physical goods against digital goods against booked time. Ecwid counts products, ten on Starter, a hundred on Venture, two and a half thousand on Business. Your revenue, your site count, your product mix and your catalogue length are four unrelated numbers, and each vendor picked one of them to bill you against.
2
There is no single threshold to look up, because each vendor moved it. On Shopify the crossover is monthly card volume: the step from Basic at twenty nine dollars to Grow at seventy nine buys you two tenths of a percent off the rate, so it starts paying for itself somewhere north of twenty five thousand dollars a month in sales and not before. On Wix it is how many separate shopfronts you run, since every site carries its own plan. On Ecwid it is a straight count of products, and the steps are sharp, ten then a hundred then two and a half thousand. On Squarespace it is what you sell rather than how much of it. Run that arithmetic on your own figures before you read anybody else's comparison table, this one included.
3
Every platform here is competent and all four will carry an order from browse to receipt. The question that decides the outcome is whether anybody owns the shape of the shop: whether the product data still matches what you actually stock, whether the shipping rules have been touched since the day somebody first typed them in, whether the tax settings survived the last time you sold into a new state. A storefront runs the configuration it was handed. Nothing inside it will ever mention that the configuration stopped describing the business two years ago.
Shopify, Wix and Ecwid all print rates you can check against their own pages, so we quote them and you can hold us to it. Squarespace renders its plan prices in the browser rather than in the page and we have failed to read them twice, so this hub states no Squarespace figure and invents nothing to fill the hole. What remains to compare is the shape of each meter, what the entry tier quietly withholds, and who is looking after the arrangement six months later. None of the four has an answer to that last one.
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A Percentage Of Every Order
The Rate Falls As The Fee Rises
Two Percent More Off Platform
Shopify is the most complete commerce platform on this hub and for a business whose whole life is selling online it is a strong answer, which this page is not going to talk you out of. Basic is twenty nine dollars a month paid yearly, thirty nine paid monthly. The number that actually decides your bill is the card rate sitting behind it: 2.9 percent plus thirty cents on Basic, 2.7 on Grow at seventy nine, 2.5 on Advanced at two hundred and ninety nine, 2.25 on Plus from two thousand three hundred. What the subscription really buys you is a discount on your own turnover. Route payments through anyone but Shopify Payments and a further two percent applies, and POS Pro is eighty nine dollars a month per location on top of all of it.
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VS
The Meter Is The Website
The Cheapest Paid Plan Cannot Sell
Collaborators Capped By Tier
Wix is the only vendor here that is not really pricing a shop at all. It prices a website, one plan per site, and selling is a capability that switches on partway up the ladder rather than something every paid tier can do. Light, the cheapest paid plan, carries no payment acceptance whatsoever, so the first tier that can take money from a customer is Core. Ecommerce then arrives in three grades, basic on Core, standard on Business and advanced on Business Elite, alongside storage of two, fifty, one hundred gigabytes and unlimited, and site collaborators capped at two, five, ten and a hundred. Wix states on its own pricing page that prices vary by location, so read yours in your own currency rather than ours. Run two shops and you are buying two plans.
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VS
Sorted By What You Sell
No Plan Price We Could Read
Design First, Commerce Second
Squarespace is the best looking option on this hub by a clear margin, and where the storefront is a brand exercise as much as a shop that is a real advantage rather than a soft one. Its meter is the kind of sale rather than the size of it: physical goods, digital downloads and booked appointments sit on different footings, so what you sell decides your tier before how much of it you sell does. We have now tried twice to read its plan prices and failed both times, because the figures are drawn in the browser rather than served in the page. This hub therefore quotes no Squarespace price and will not estimate one. Open their pricing page yourself and read it there. That is a limit on what we can honestly state, not a criticism of the product.
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VS
Ten Products On The Entry Plan
No Transaction Fee On Any Tier
Bolts Onto A Site You Already Own
Ecwid is the cheapest thing on this hub by roughly twenty to one, and the only one that does not want to own your website. It attaches to a site you already have, whether that is WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla or a static build, and a single account can serve several sites plus Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. It takes no percentage of any order on any plan, stated in its own pricing table and again in its own FAQ. What it counts instead is your catalogue: ten products on Starter at five dollars, a hundred on Venture at thirty five, two and a half thousand on Business at sixty five, unlimited at a hundred and forty nine, with roughly sixteen percent off for paying yearly. Staff accounts do not appear until Business, and there are two of them.
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What the flat seven hundred buys, and what it deliberately leaves out
Seven hundred dollars a month, per organization, to go through what you are actually selling and give you a straight opinion on it, build the product catalogue and the variant structure so it survives contact with real inventory, set the shipping zones and rate rules against what fulfilment genuinely costs you rather than a guess made on launch day, configure tax by the states you actually ship into, wire the storefront to your accounting so nobody is rekeying orders, and read the conversion and abandonment numbers on a fixed cycle so the whole arrangement keeps pace with the business rather than lagging a year behind it. Your Zoho Commerce subscription stays in your name and you buy it from Zoho directly. We do not resell it and we do not mark it up.
Here is the part that loses us business. If you list a dozen products and pack them yourself, Ecwid Starter is five dollars a month and it will run your shop properly, and seven hundred against five is not an argument anybody could win. Our fee also sits on top of a Zoho Commerce licence you buy separately. If somebody in your building already owns the catalogue, the shipping rules and the tax settings, and revisits them without being asked, stay where you are and keep the money. What we sell is the judgement and the upkeep, not the software.
A catalogue that grew one product at a time is a hundred small choices that were never once weighed against each other. Variants that should have been options, options that should have been separate products, and forty listings sharing one photograph. We start from what you actually stock and how it actually ships, reduce that to the leanest structure that still describes it honestly, and retire the listings surviving only because nobody ever deleted them.
Each platform above picks one of your numbers and multiplies it, or refuses to name the number at all, which means a strong month arrives with a larger bill attached to it. Ours does not move. Seven hundred a month covers the work whether you ship forty orders or four thousand, and the licence itself goes to Zoho, not to us.
An online shop decays without ever erroring. Pages still load, checkout still takes cards, and meanwhile a shipping rule written two years ago quietly overcharges half your orders while a tax setting silently misses a state you started selling into last spring. We read the conversion and abandonment numbers every cycle, check the shipping rules against what fulfilment actually costs, and say plainly when a product line no longer earns its place.
How do you compare four ecommerce platforms that are all measuring different things?
You stop hunting for a winner and work out which meter is pointed at you. Shopify prices your turnover, Wix prices the website, Squarespace prices the kind of thing you sell, and Ecwid prices the length of your product list. So before you open anybody else's comparison table, write down four numbers of your own: monthly card volume, how many separate shopfronts you need, how many distinct products you list, and whether what you sell is physical, digital or booked time. Those four decide which meter treats you kindly. Not one vendor page will run those figures on your behalf, because for three of the four the honest answer costs them the sale.
How does an ecommerce platform decision actually go wrong?
Almost never on the software. Almost always on ownership. The platform gets chosen with care, launched well, and then belongs to nobody in particular. Two years later the shipping table still carries the carrier rates somebody entered on day one, four listings describe the same item under different names, a discount code from a Christmas promotion is quietly still live, and the tax settings have never been revisited despite two new states appearing in the shipping data. Nothing broke. It stopped being somebody's responsibility.
Who holds the account and the licence after you have built this?
You do, entirely. The Zoho Commerce subscription is bought by you, in your name, and paid to Zoho directly. We operate inside it as administrators and never place ourselves between you and your own account. Cancel us tomorrow and every product, every order, every customer record and the whole sales history stay precisely where they are. Zoho Assist is the one service on our list on which the licence is held by us rather than by you.
Would we be better off just running one of these ourselves?
A great many businesses would be, and it is better you read that here than discover it after signing. If you list a few dozen products and pack them yourself, Ecwid at five dollars a month is the right answer and we are not. If you are already doing serious volume with a merchandiser and an operations person on the payroll, Shopify plus your own people will beat any retainer. The moment this becomes worth paying for is when nobody in the building can tell you who last looked at the shipping rules.
Which of these four works out cheapest for us?
It turns entirely on which of your numbers is the large one, and I would rather hand you the method than a winner. Short catalogue and healthy turnover: Ecwid is very hard to beat, and the Shopify percentage alone will cost you more in a month than the whole Ecwid subscription. Long catalogue and modest turnover: that inverts, because Ecwid steps you up to sixty five dollars at two and a half thousand products while Shopify does not care how many you list. Several separate shopfronts: Wix bills per site and Ecwid does not. Selling booked time rather than boxes: Squarespace is shaped for that in a way the others are not. And against one small shop, Ecwid beats us on price by well over a hundred to one, and we are not going to pretend otherwise once you have us on the phone.
What actually happens when nobody looks at the shop after launch?
Nobody gets alerted, and that is the whole of the difficulty, because a drifting shop throws no errors at all. No support tier covers it either. Ecwid puts email support on every plan, chat from Venture upward and phone from Business upward. Shopify runs support around the clock across its plans. Every bit of that helps your people operate the tool, which is a wholly separate matter from anyone warning you that the tool no longer matches the business it was set up for. Here, reading the conversion and abandonment figures every cycle is part of the fee, so the noticing is ours instead of yours.
Do we have to move the whole catalogue at once?
No, and the shops that phase it land better than the ones that go all at once. The usual order is the products that pay the bills, then anything tied to a season or a campaign already in flight, then the long tail nobody has ordered since last year. Most of the revenue lives in the first group and nearly all the tidying lives in the last, and a decent share of that last group turns out not to need moving anywhere.
Can you take over a store somebody else set up?
Yes, though what follows is closer to a rebuild than a tidy up. We read what is configured, find the four listings describing one product under different names, identify the discount codes still live from a promotion that ended two Christmases ago, and settle which version of each price and each shipping rule wins. That last part is normally the bulk of the work. An inherited store is reliably accurate about what got sold and completely silent about why anything was ever priced or shipped the way it is.
Realistically, how long does this take?
Six weeks is typical, and longer wherever the product data lives across three spreadsheets that disagree with each other. Configuring Zoho Commerce itself is a matter of days. What eats the calendar is settling what your products actually are, rebuilding a catalogue structure that reflects what you stock now rather than what somebody typed in at the start, and the first month of live orders, which has to be watched through a full cycle before anyone declares it done.
Somebody here already owns this. What would you actually add?
Very possibly nothing, and reaching that conclusion on a first call suits us perfectly well. Somebody who genuinely owns this will beat any retainer, because they are in it daily and they know which products matter. The only real question is whether it is truly on their list. Auditing the shipping table in a quarter where every order went out and nobody complained is exactly the sort of work that will still look reasonable to leave until the next quarter, forever.
When would you tell us not to bother with you?
There are two, and both come up often enough that we have a stock answer ready. If you are one person shipping a short catalogue and the whole operation genuinely fits in your own head, Ecwid will do the job and the money belongs in stock or advertising instead. And if you are already running real volume with merchandising and operations people on the payroll, Shopify and your own team will beat us, and you will hear that from us early rather than after a contract exists.
What if the platform turns out not to be the problem?
We tell you that before an invoice exists, because the fit review is built to surface exactly this. Often the real problem is that the product photography is doing the selling badly, or that the delivery promise on the page and the one in the warehouse have never once agreed, or that nobody is willing to say out loud that an entire product line stopped being profitable. All three are worth sorting out before anything else, and no amount of storefront configuration touches any of them.
What does this cost through you, in plain figures?
Seven hundred dollars a month, per organization. Order volume does not change it. Neither does revenue, and neither does the size of your catalogue. The number appears on the Managed Zoho Commerce service page. You hold the Zoho Commerce licence yourself, purchased from Zoho under your own account.
What happens if we want to stop?
Give us thirty days and it ends, with everything left precisely where it sits, because the subscription was yours throughout. The administrator seat goes back to you, we write up what the catalogue structure is for and why the shipping and tax rules are set the way they are so whoever picks it up is not reverse engineering it, and we set out what we would have changed next.
What do you need from us to start?
A product list with what you charge and what each item costs you to fulfil, your current platform bill and which of your numbers it is attached to, and an honest account of which lines make money rather than which ones simply move. Both lists always arrive half finished, and that is fine. They give us the outline of the problem, and the fit review turns up whatever is missing.
