What is EKM?
EKM is the UK’s largest fully hosted ecommerce platform, having helped over 80,000 businesses start selling online since they launched in 2002.
Aimed at businesses of all sizes and backed up by a team of over 80 ecommerce experts on staff who are there to help you not only start but grow your online business.
But is EKM a good ecommerce platform for UK Businesses? and are they a true UK alternative to Shopify?
Total out of 5
28-Day Free Trial, No Credit Card Required
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EKM Review: Quick Summary
Is EKM any good? EKM is ok and has many positives, including a good and constantly expanding set of features, a decent website builder and 7-day support from their highly rated UK-based support team.
The Evolution Mode is also good as having an experienced set of eyes providing a list of suggestions and improvements for your store can be very helpful and if implemented, they could help you generate more sales.
But the £300/m plan does make EKM a very expensive option for new and small stores and when combined with it not being the easiest platform to use, it does make some competitors more appealing.
EcommerceGold Score
EKM Pricing
EKM made a big change to its pricing structure in September 2024 and scrapped the range of plans in favour of a single plan, which includes all the features that EKM offers but it doesn’t come cheap…
Evolve
There are a couple of additional things that you need to know about the Evolve plan, which are:
- For turnovers above £300k, you pay an additional £100/m for each additional £100k in revenue up to £1 Million, then it goes to £100 per £1 Million in additional revenue
- If you choose not to use EKM Pay, you pay a 0.6% transaction fee on every sale
This does make EKM one of the more expensive platforms out there and the large fee isn’t going to be appealing for new or small stores.
Free Trial
As standard, EKM offers a 14-day free trial but as an EKM partner we get to offer you and extended 28-day free trial.
Customer Reviews
Before we get into the review, we thought we would take a look at what some of EKM’s existing customers thought of the platform and we looked at Trustpilot, G2 and Google.
4.5 out of 5
4.1 out of 5
4.1 out of 5
EKM Features
EKM have built their platform to offer their customers a complete platform without the need to use apps made by third party developers.
You also get to pick and choose many of the features that you have on your site as they offer a selection of 40 features that you can add to your site with a single click of a button. Many of these features are aimed at not only improving your visitors user experience but also encourage these visitors to become customers.
Ecommerce Tools
- Free 03 Business Number – create an inbound 03 business phone number to give your business a professional look
- Facebook Messenger – add live chat to your store using Facebook messenger
- Age Verification – if you sell age restricted products, this allows you to add an age verification before the visitor will be able to view your store
- Block Visitors – block individual IP’s or entire countries from being able to access your store
- Ebay Import/Export – quickly and easily import and export products to your Ebay store
- ChannelGrabber – this allows you to integrate your EKM store with your Amazon and Ebay storefronts to help you manage them all in one place.
- Related Products – shows your visitors other products that are similar to the one they are looking at.
- Promo Stickers – if you are running special offers or a sale, you can add a promo sticker directly to your product page
- Product Attributes – allows you create a list of specific information about the product such as brand, weight, product code and model number. Makes listing your products on Google Shopping much easier
- Recently View Products – a great way to allow your potential customers to easily navigate back to product they have previously looked at rather than having to try and find it on your site
- Wish Lists – let customers add products to a wish list, so that they can save them to come back any purchase them at a later date
Marketing and SEO
Getting potential customers on to your site is one of the most important aspects of running an ecommerce business and EKM have some great features to allow you to market your site but also help it to rank in search engines.
Off-site Marketing
- Email Marketing – you can create, grow and manage your email marketing directly within your EKM dashboard, so no need to invest in any third party software.
- Google Tools – use Google Shopping feed, add your Analytics tracking code and Google Ads conversion code to your EKM store.
- Classifications – allows you to classify your products, categories or your entire store, so that you can list your products on Ebay and Google Shopping
On-site Marketing
- Gift Cards – allow customers to buy gift cards for your store
- Product Urgency – show countdown timers, limited stock warnings and free delivery messages on product pages to increase conversion rates
- Loyalty Points – encourage customers to become repeat customers by giving them chance to earn loyalty points with every order.
- Discount Management – create promotions, special offers and sales within your EKM store. Also create discount codes for use with Email Marketing amongst many others.
- Social Share Buttons – lets your visitors share your products on their social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.
- Back in Stock Notifications – your visitors can request that you notify them when an out of stock product is back in stock.
SEO
- SEO Friendly URLs – automatically create SEO and visitor friendly URLs.
- Custom Meta Data – create custom meta data such as title, description and keywords
- Blog – create a blog for your ecommerce store
- 301 Redirects – helps your SEO by redirecting old product pages or info pages to new ones and avoids visitors being greeted by page not found.
- Customer Reviews – show potential customers what others have said about the product. Also includes a star rating that can help SEO.
Reporting and Analytics
EKM provides a number of tools to help you monitor your ecommerce business so that you can see how well your store is doing and also see if there are any areas that you can improve. These include:
- Order Breakdown – view your orders by day, month and device. You can also compare your current years performance to previous years.
- Best and Worst Selling Products – see which products are performing well and which ones aren’t so that you can refine your product lines or see where you can improve your marketing.
- Search Statistics – see what your customers have been typing into the search bar on your site
- Web Statistics (Premium) – a great tool to allow you to analyse your site, see where your visitors are coming from, how to optimise your shop to increase conversions, identify SEO opportunities, see which devices your customers are using and see how long they spend on your website.
- Abandoned Cart Statistics – see customer and order details for abandoned carts and how many orders EKM has re-targeted
- Back in Stock Statistics – see how many visitors have looked at out of stock products and requested notifications of when they come back into stock
EKM Payment Gateways
EKM offers a range of payment gateways, including their own EKMPay, which offers very competitive rates and is powered by ClearAccept.
- EKMPay
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Klarna
Do EKM charge transaction fees?
Yes, they charge a 0.6% transaction of payments not taken through EKMPay.
Third Party Integrations
EKM offer a good selection of integrations with third party software that you may use to help you run your ecommerce business. These include:
- Royal Mail Click and Drop
- Parcel2Go
- Linnworks
- Reviews.io
- Fulfilmentcrowd
There is also a selection of EKM chosen partners who can provide a variety of services from product sourcing to photography and video production. This is a great place to start if you are looking for a specific service for your business.
EKM Evolution Mode
One of EKM’s main features is their Evolution Mode but what is it?
Evolution Mode is where a team of ecommerce experts (called the Evolution Team), look at your website and offer suggestions for improvements for things like design, usability and user experience.
You can easily request this in your dashboard and they will show you your recommendations in a test store for you to review and approve.
This is a very good feature to have as having an external party look at your site and offer their suggestions is usually a paid for service and changes will usually be charged as well, so to have this included is definitely an advantage.
EKM Website Builder
EKM includes a range of themes for many different industries and niches that are all free to use along with a full customizer.
The customizer is a near full site customizer as you can customise your home, category and product pages but info and blog posts are based on a default template.
With the pages you can customise, there are sections that can be added, removed and editied as most have a set of unique options for the specific section along with options for that section along with general theme settings, which includes fonts and colours and the site header and footer.
And while this does give users a good amount of control over the look and feel of their site, we didn’t find it the easiest to use and would still like a little more freedom when it comes to customisation.
But one of the main issues we had with the theme customisation was not being able to create a custom navigation menu or control the filters on the category sidebar, which are important tools to help customers navigate around your site.
EKM Support
One of the areas where EKM really performs well is support and many of the customer reviews comment on the support as they offer 7 day support and multiple ways to contact them, including:
- Live Chat
- Phone
When it comes to support times, they are available 8am-6pm Monday to Friday and 9am-5.30pm Saturday and Sunday.
They also have a community Facebook group, which is a useful place to speak with other EKM merchants and as non-urgent questions.
EKM Web Hosting and Performance
In order to be a really good ecommerce platform you need to be using really good hosting so that your websites are not only fast but also reliable. EKM have the following to say about their hosting:
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Unlimited Storage
- PCI Compliant Servers
- 99.9% Uptime
- 24/7 Server Monitoring
Now this all sounds very impressive but what does this mean in the real world? Well we decided to put them to the test by:
- Taking 5 live, customer sites
- Running them through Uptrends Speed Tool (London server) on both Mobile and Desktop
- Testing once a day for three days
This helps us get a nice spread of data and the results are listed below:
Mobile: 1.28 Seconds
Desktop: 1.16 Seconds
Mobile: 55/100
Desktop: 86/100
EKM performed very well in all of the tests, with the average load time of just over 1 second across the 15 tests that were run. Google scores are also good, especially when compared to their competition, although I would like to see the mobile score be a little bit higher.
To see how EKM performed against it’s rivals in terms of speed and performance, check our annual Fastest Ecommerce Platforms post.
How Easy is EKM to Use?
Facts and figures are great but they don’t mean anything if the platform is hard to use. So for the second part of my review, I went through the process of setting up an online store and created a few test orders to see what the platform would be like to use on a day to day basis. For this, I look at 5 main areas:
- Getting Started
- Inventory Management
- Order Management
Getting Started
Signing up to EKM is very simple as all you need is an email address, create a password, select which plan you would like to try, input some basic business details such as name and address and you are good to go!
Once you have been through the sign up process, you will be taken through to the dashboard homepage and will be greeted by a short set up guide, which includes steps such as Adding a New Product, Adding Payment and Delivery Methods and setting up your Domain Name.
Outside of the set up guide, the EKM dashboard is a nice place to be and it is somewhat unique when compared to some other ecommerce platforms as they have opted for a top navigation menu, rather than the traditional sidebar and the headings are as follows:
- Dashboard – this is the homepage in your admin area and where you go to after your login
- Shop – this is a live preview of your storefront and includes options for adding and managing produces
- Orders – self explanatory, where you go to manage all of your orders
- Analytics – this is where you can see some of the reports and analytics mentioned above
- Design – contains many of the design elements including theme selection, change the layout, edit your logo and change the site’s colours
- Features – contains all of the features that you can install on your website
- Settings – one of the most important sections as in here you can set up and edit delivery methods, add payment gateways, set up business info such as name, address, tax and VAT amongst many other things.
When it comes to the usability of the dashboard, there are a couple of things that we feel could be better:
- The Shop Section – this just doesn’t work very well in it’s current format as seeing a live preview of your site doesn’t really help with managing your inventory
- Features – if you install a feature, it is only available through the featured tab and for some of the features, they would be better being integrated into other pages of the dashboard
Once you know where everything is and how it all works, the dashboard is pretty easy to use but just a couple of changes could make it much more user-friendly and intuitive to use.
Inventory Management
For me there are three area that are important when it comes to managing products and they are adding products, organising your products and managing your inventory. EKM does all of these things really well.
Add New Product
To add a new product in EKM is really easy to do. Within the Products section, click the Add Product button and a pop up will appear and you will be able to add the following:
- Basic Details – Your product title, main description, price and VAT rate
- Variants – with EKM you can add up to 4 variations to a product with up to 250 total combinations
- Images and Photos – you can upload your product images directly into the product listing or choose from ones you already have uploaded
- Attributes – add important information to your listing (requires the Product Attributes feature to be installed)
- Options – add options to your products such as gift wrapping
- Delivery Charges – If you need to set individual delivery charges for your products
- Category Management – choose which of your product categories you want the product to go into.
If you install the Custom Meta Data feature, then it will add a section to the pop up and allows you to set your meta data on a product by product basis.
Organising Your Products
EKM have opted for the tried and tested category method when it comes to organising your products. This allows you to create a nice hierarchy structure within your site, especially as you can have sub-categories and sub sub-categories.
This not only makes navigating your site easier for your visitors but it can have a positive impact on your sites SEO.
Managing Your Inventory
In its standard form, this isn’t something that EKM does particularly well as you need to navigate your site and then click on the product to edit it, which isn’t a great system.
Fortunately, they do have a feature called the Advanced Inventory Manager and this is the one feature out of all of them that you should install as it just makes life so much easier. It allows you to quickly find your products and categories all on one place and edit them quickly and easily.
Managing Orders
Unlike some platforms, EKM do give you the chance to test out the order management system and you can create a test order and take it through every step from a pending order to complete and also test how to cancel and refund orders.
Fortunately there are no issues with the order management process, you can easily manage all your orders and you can update statuses and print packing slips either individually or in bulk, which can save you a lot of time, especially when you have lots of orders.
One thing that I do like about the EKM order management system is that you get four different styles of packing slip and they are similar in layout to those used by the likes of Ebay and Amazon, which makes life easier to manage orders from different places. EKM also offer packing slips with address peel offs that you can buy directly from them.
Conclusion
EKM
Is EKM any good?
EKM is ok and they do have a lot of positives, including a good selection of features, a decent website builder and a highly-rated UK-based support team, plus the Evolution Mode is a really nice feature as having others look at your site and provide suggestions can be very helpful.
But it does fall a bit short of its competitors as being one of UK’s best fully hosted ecommerce platforms as the £300/m makes it very expensive for new and small stores and combining this with EKM not being the easiest platform to use, it does make is hard to recommend over the likes of Shopify or ShopWired.
EKM Pros:
EKM Cons:
So that is our full EKM Review, it is definitely a platform worth checking out if you are looking for a UK based Shopify alternative and if you click any of the EKM links in this post, you will get a 28-day free trial instead of the standard 14 days.
EKM Alternatives
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!