Wix: Providing Businesses with the Professional Tools & Services They Need to Thrive Online – From Search to Checkout (Liat Karpel Gurwicz, Head of Ecommerce Marketing)
The constantly evolving ecommerce landscape requires businesses to remain agile and ready to adjust. Now more than ever, it’s absolutely crucial to stay up to date with the latest trends for anyone running an online business and act on that information in order to thrive.
Each week, Graham Broughton, co-founder and Managing Director of Storesome (a turnkey marketplace solution and part of the We Are Pentagon Group) interviews thought leaders in ecommerce to shed some light on the latest developments including payments, logistics and the newest technologies.
In the sixth episode of the new season focused on search, Graham was joined by Liat Karpel Gurwicz, Head of Ecommerce Marketing at Wix. Founded 15 years ago, Wix is a cloud-based web development and creation platform, best known for their website building tool with over 200 million users worldwide.
During this conversation, Liat gave us a deeper insight into Wix. Firstly, what is Wix? What changes have been seen over the past 12-18 months, particularly in terms of client engagement? Which value propositions do Wix cover and how do clients utilise the solution? Finally, what is on the horizon for Wix in terms of future plans?
This is a summary of a live podcast episode on July 6, 2021. You can listen to the full 24-minute episode here: https://bit.ly/3AqZx0a.
What is Wix?
As mentioned, Wix is perhaps best known for their website building platform, with over 200 million users worldwide and being active in 190 different countries. However, that’s not all. As Liat shares, “we offer a full ecommerce platform; we have over 700,000 active stores worldwide”. Therefore, Wix certainly has a lot more going on than what most people are probably aware of.
Indeed, Wix actually offers management of multiple different tools, including “product catalogue, inventory, sales and over 50 payment provider integrations”. This includes Wix payments, their own native payment solution. In addition, Wix offers an omnichannel solution with integrations of sales channels such as Facebook shop, Amazon and eBay.
Furthermore, according to Liat, Wix also offers “native analytics for traffic, sales, customer data and of course shipping and fulfilment, all from your dashboard”. Finally, Wix also has a native CRM solution that offers all of the tools for customer engagement, such as email marketing, live chat, invoices and automations to name a few. Overall, it’s clear that Wix offers a very comprehensive tool set that extends far beyond the website building platform that they are best known for. In Liat’s words, “ultimately we try to provide a platform that allows our users to manage their business end-to-end online”.
COVID-19: Changes over the past 12-18 months
Another topic that Graham raised which has often been at the forefront of recent discussions is that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidently, this has had an impact on consumer behaviour as well as the way in which businesses operate. In any situation like the one we’ve seen in recent times, there are ultimately going to be winners and losers: those who benefit from the circumstances and those who take a hit. So, what do these changes look like from Wix’s perspective?
According to Liat, “we’re now at the point where that future is here to stay and shoppers and consumers now expect brands to meet them where they are, and often that is online”. In the last year, this has resulted in Wix taking a role in facilitating this global shift online – Liat says they have seen businesses with online commerce capabilities built on Wix growing by more than 45% between March 2020 and March 2021.
Additionally, last year alone, Wix users processed over $5.4bn on the platform – a massive amount of ecommerce. In Liat’s opinion, “if I think of 2020 as the year of the ecommerce pivot, then 2021 is really the year of ecommerce strategy”. As a result, we are seeing more brands than ever before adapting a direct to consumer approach as they shift their focus to online sales. With this comes advantages, one of which is being able to take ownership over the relationship with the customer, which can ultimately be leveraged for better engagement.
The final important point that Liat had to make is that we are very used to talking about these topics within the space of ecommerce. However, what is really shifting this year is that it’s becoming a conversation for businesses in general: “every business needs to think about these things as they start to merge their brick-and-mortar business with their ecommerce business”.
Costs
Another important question that Graham put to Liat was for retailers who are considering working with Wix: what does the cost structure look like? Liat mentioned that with regards to the website and the ecommerce platform, Wix offers a premium plan: you can either pay monthly or annually. This will allow you to transact on the platform and use all of the business tools.
In addition, fees are only charged if you are using Wix’s payment provider – and this is just the standard processing fee (the same that you would pay to any other payment provider). However, Wix also allows you to integrate with any other payment provider of your choice, so in that case the fees would be dependent on your choice of third party.
Support
Graham also delved into a topic that a lot of businesses who are considering working with Wix might want to find out more about: does Wix offer support and advice post-launch? As Liat simply puts, “Yes, we do. First of all, we have 24-hour customer support and customer care that we offer via phone call or also via live chat throughout our platform”. To continue, Wix also offers various levels and tiers of account management, ranging from launch managers who help users do the initial setup all the way through to personal account managers who accompany growing ecommerce businesses, supporting them on a day to day basis.
The Future of Wix
To round off the discussion, what is on the horizon for Wix in terms of future plans? According to Liat: “this year the focus is very much on expanding that omnichannel functionality”. In these conversations, often the focus is on search and how you can improve in that area, but there are a lot of other ways to drive growth for your business. Liat mentions that Wix wants to ensure that aside from search, businesses can sell on the marketplaces and social media that they want and be able to manage all of that from the platform.
Furthermore, Wix is thinking a lot about payment methods and payment providers, wanting to offer their users all of the options and methods so that in turn they can offer this to their customers. In Liat’s opinion, “the worst thing for an ecommerce business is to lose a customer or a sale because they functionally can’t pay you”. Therefore, this – among many others – is just one of the areas that Wix would like to go deeper into, making sure that they’re offering their users all of the tools that they need, as well as allowing their customers to get all of the functionality that they are looking for.
If you’d like to know more about Wix, you can learn more on their website: www.wix.com/
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