Wix was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2006 by developers Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan. The company was founded to address the need for a no-code ecommerce platform with easy drag-and-drop functionality for the average consumer.
What is Wix?
Wix is a website builder that allows you to create online stores, blogs, restaurant websites, portfolio sites, and schedule appointments. Website creators can choose from over 2,000 website templates to design a completely customized website for their brand. You can also use AI to create your website by giving Wix a prompt that describes your business, which will autopopulate both images and text to create a complete website with minimal work on your end.
How does Wix work?
Wix enables the average person to create a website. You can either use AI to create your website or build it yourself using a template. Website builders let you drag and drop elements, such as text, images, and videos, onto a web page to create the design you want. The AI website builder creates a custom site with a single prompt. You’ll be able to change themes, fonts, colors, layouts, and content.
What you need to know about selling on Wix
While you can build multiple types of websites, Wix doesn’t specialize in creating a platform for digital product creators, course creators, or membership site owners. The lack of functionality for these types of businesses limits the number of e-commerce-type businesses they can actually serve.
Wix’s AI website creator also needs significant work. When building a website, there will be branded elements you’d want to do yourself, such as your own photography or copy. An AI website creator won’t be personalized to your brand. There will still be little and big details you’ll need to go in and change to truly make it your own. Overall, even with AI, building your website on Wix can be difficult, time-consuming, or confusing for beginners.
The Wix editor isn’t responsive. The editor lets you make some modifications for mobile, but it will not change all elements to match the screen type. Considering that most websites need to be mobile-responsive, this is a huge drawback.
Wix allows you to build your website for free. However, to start selling, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. Their Light plan doesn’t accept payments, so you’ll need to choose a pricing tier higher than Light to sell items online. There are Wix alternatives that let you sell products on their free plans. Their pricing plans can be rather expensive, particularly if you haven’t been making sales on your site. A free plan that allows you to accept payments would be ideal, but unfortunately, that’s not possible.
Wix also feature gates their pricing plans. For example, the level of capabilities you’ll have for an ecommerce site will either be basic, standard, or advanced, depending on which pricing plan you pick. You also need to pick the highest plan for unlimited storage.
Wix is also known for slow loading times, as some of its sites are very bulky in design. Slower loading times often negatively impact sales conversions, which could mean less money made from your products.
Is Wix the best platform to sell products?
No, Wix isn’t the best platform to sell products; sellers should use Payhip instead. Payhip offers a free plan with a 5% transaction fee per sale and no monthly subscription. Plus, all features are available across all plans, including the free one. There’s no feature gating on the platform. In addition, you’ll be able to quickly build your site in only a few minutes. This platform also allows you to sell multiple digital products with unique features tailored to those product types, such as a course player for online courses. To start selling products online, sign up now.