Ecwid by Lightspeed

No, not any more. Ecwid offered a permanently free 5-product plan until 2026, when it was discontinued in favour of a paid Starter tier (£5/mo (Starter, 10 products), 10 products). Paid plans are gated by product count: Venture (£29/mo (Venture)) and Unlimited (£119/mo (Unlimited)) raise or remove the cap and add multi-channel selling.

Ecwid (owned by Lightspeed) shows a £ symbol on its pricing page, but there is no dedicated UK pricing page and the same numeric figure appears under every currency symbol the site shows, so treat the £ price as a symbol, not evidence of an independently set UK rate card. Its paid plans are priced by how many products you list rather than by sales volume.

No. Ecwid charges 0% platform transaction fees on any plan. You pay only the processing fee of your chosen gateway, with no extra Ecwid surcharge on each sale.

Yes, that is its main purpose. You embed the Ecwid store via a plugin for WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace, or by pasting a code snippet into your site. Ecwid adds shopping functionality to a site you already have rather than replacing your existing design.

Yes. Ecwid includes a native AI store builder and AI product description tools. Its AI-agent connection is currently via third-party tools (for example a Zapier MCP connection) rather than a native storefront MCP, so it is best thought of as a convenience layer rather than a deep AI shopping-agent integration.

Ecwid is built to add e-commerce to an existing site and costs less at every tier, though neither has a free plan any more. Shopify is a standalone all-in-one platform with a much larger app ecosystem and deeper tools. Shopify is the stronger choice when you want to build your whole presence around a dedicated e-commerce platform.