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Join for freePosted: Wed 16th Sep 2026
Your online store needs to do more than display products. It should make it easy for customers to discover, trust and buy from your business.
In this session, Crystal Carter will explain how to create a professional e-commerce website with Wix and build the foundations for selling online.
You'll learn how to shape a customer-friendly storefront, streamline key parts of the buying journey and manage your products, orders and marketing from one platform.
Crystal will also introduce practical ways to encourage repeat purchases and reach customers across more channels as your business grows.
How to create and customise a professional online storefront around your products and brand
How to improve the customer journey, from product discovery and checkout to abandoned-cart recovery
How Wix's built-in commerce, marketing and customer tools can help you manage and grow your business
Learn to build a website that is ready to sell online.
Crystal Carter is Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix and an AI, SEO and digital marketing professional with almost 20 years of experience.
She has worked with global brands including Disney, McDonald's and Tomy, and regularly hosts webinars and podcasts that make complex technology practical and actionable.
Her work has been featured by Google Search Central, Microsoft, BrightonSEO, Moz, Semrush and OMR.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn, part of Wix Wednesdays. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.
Wix Wednesdays is a free three-part webinar series from Wix and Enterprise Nation, designed to help small business owners build, sell and grow online with practical guidance on websites, e-commerce and AI.
Whether you're starting from scratch, looking to sell online or exploring how AI can save you time, each session offers practical advice and tools you can put into action straight away.
We are joined today by Crystal Carter, who is the head of AI search and SEO communications at Wix. Crystal is an AI, SEO and digital marketing professional with almost 20 years of experience.
In this session, Crystal will explain how to create a professional e-commerce website with Wix and build the foundations for selling online.
As always, please pop any questions you have for Crystal in the Q&A box as we go along, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
The session is being recorded, and we are going to send the recording along with some further resources later today.
Over to you, Crystal.
Crystal: Thank you so much for that lovely welcome, Beth.
This is my second webinar with Enterprise Nation, and I'm really pleased to be here.
Today, we're talking about e-commerce.
Before I get started, everyone joining this webinar is eligible for a coupon today. You're eligible for 50% off your first year of Wix Premium e-commerce.
If you upgrade today, you'll get 50% off for the next year. I'll be sharing this code at the end of the session as well.
As Beth said, I'm head of AI search and SEO communications at Wix. I do enterprise growth and global thought leadership, and I'm tuning in today from San Diego.
I'm also a bestselling author. I have a website, and I'm currently selling my book, called The Noodles for AI Search, on a Wix store. So I've been doing a lot of this e-commerce stuff myself, and I'll be bringing a little bit of that first-hand expertise as well.
A little bit about Wix.
Wix is a big company. We were founded in 2006, which is 20 years on the internet, which is a long time. We work with people in over 190 countries.
We have over 300 million registered users. We're supporting 22 languages, we've got 22 locations where our team is based, and we have a big team of around 4,000 people.
Everyone at Wix is working towards making using the web, creating a business online and creating a website online much easier for everyone.
That's really part of the core of what our business is.
Today, we're going to talk about creating e-commerce websites. It's something that we know a lot about.
Over 1 million e-commerce websites have been built on Wix, and we support businesses of all sizes.
Whether it's one person selling a book or high-revenue brands generating between $5 million and $30 million in revenue, Wix is supporting lots of different brands.
We also have partnerships with top payment providers, including PayPal, Stripe, Zazzle and lots of other providers, to make sure we're able to get our merchants online and selling the way they need to.
Today, we're going to cover the ways that you can grow and start a business for e-commerce.
We're going to talk about how you can build your storefront, add branding and custom design to your website, add your products to your site, choose how you get paid, optimise for SEO, and publish and manage your store.
Let's talk about creating a custom online store.
The first thing you want to do when you're working on that is think about your audience.
You want to understand who they are, what they need and how they shop. This is before you start doing anything on your website.
This is something you can do on a piece of paper.
Combine this with a clear understanding of your product range and business goals to guide you through the kinds of functionality and design that you might need on your website.
Think about your products and ask yourself: who's going to buy this?
Maybe you want to jump in the chat and discuss who you think might buy this particular product.
So this is SKAIN, and this is a little gift set for skincare. Is there anyone in particular that you think might buy this?
I'm thinking that this might be someone who is a young person, really into skincare and that sort of thing. Someone who travels a lot, because it's a travel-size product.
I would take all of those things into consideration when I'm thinking about the website.
With that, you're going to be thinking about designing to suit your audience.
Your design will directly impact your conversion rate, navigation depth and visual hierarchy.
You should have a look at what your competitors are doing, colour palettes, keyword priorities on the page and the kind of features you might need.
For instance, with something like a skincare brand, you might have something that helps people figure out what their skincare routine is.
I know some skincare brands, like Fenty, have a quiz, for instance, asking what kind of things you do to give people an idea of what kind of care products they might need.
Think about those kinds of features and what you might need so you're competitive and meeting your customers' expectations.
Once you get into that, there are two different ways that you can build a storefront on Wix.
You can think about using an e-commerce template. We have over 2,000 templates.
Not every single one is dedicated to e-commerce, but you could add e-commerce to any template on Wix.
This will give you a professionally conceived starting point to build your website and help drive high traffic on day one.
The second option is the AI website builder, Wix Harmony.
If you missed last week's webinar, we talked about Wix Harmony there.
With this, you essentially have an agent that works with you to build your site from the moment you log in, and it will help you shape it as you keep going.
My own site, Noodles for AI Search, is built on Wix Harmony, and it was a really great experience.
I get compliments on my website all the time.
It's been really good because, if you want to change something, you could literally just talk to the agent and say: "I want to add in 'shop now'", and it will help you do that.
If you go down the route of templates, there are some templates that are for Harmony and some that are for Wix Classic.
Essentially, you would go through and pick a template, then have a look at all of the different elements in it.
There are lots of different templates, and you can choose which one would work for you.
If you have a large product catalogue, you might want to pick a template that has pre-built categories, deep search and store navigation.
Have a look at templates that already have lots of products.
If you've got a small product catalogue, then you might want to choose a template that puts the products really big on the homepage, like the one I've got here.
If you've just got one product, like I've got one book, for instance, you want to pick a template that's focused on how quickly the buyer can purchase that product.
Once you get in, you can have a look at the templates, click on the button to launch it, and start editing and changing it.
From there, you would change out the products in the template and add in your own products.
You would start adding in your own copy, but you'd have the framework to get you started quickly.
The second option, if you're not using a template, is to build with the AI website builder, Harmony.
This one is a chat, so you would chat to the AI to receive a fully functional website with no template required.
Again, you could use templates for inspiration sometimes, but you can absolutely create a website from a chat.
From this conversation, you would have a finished website that includes custom images, text, potential pages and integrated apps.
For instance, it might have a shopping app or a blog app attached to it.
It might have asked for a video if you said you had a YouTube channel and were going to sell your products on your YouTube channel.
If you don't like it, you can just keep changing it until you get it the way you like it.
If it's been given a futuristic vibe and you actually want a retro vibe, you can say: "I want it more retro. Make it more retro."
Aria, the AI assistant that's built into Harmony, will adjust the website for you.
This is just a snapshot of some of the things that Harmony can do.
We launched it very recently, and it's drag-and-drop. It's got all these different features, and this is Aria.
You would ask it a question. You would click generate the website, it would plan it out, and then you can see that it would start building all of this for you.
Then you could go section by section, and it will update it as you go along.
For e-commerce, it will add in all of the different elements that you need, and you just need to go through and check everything to make sure that you're happy with it.
People go through this across the entire lifespan of the product.
With some AI tools, you will build once and then leave it alone. But with Harmony, Aria stays with you the whole time.
Every time you want to make an edit, you can use the AI to help you.
Now let's talk about branding and design.
When you're building out your store, branding and design are things that you're also going to take into consideration.
You're going to think about your navigation, mobile-first design, visual hierarchy, clean layout, accessibility, trust signals and a custom domain.
This is something that should be in the back of your mind while you're creating your website. You'll use this while you're fine-tuning your website with Aria or with the drag-and-drop builder.
For instance, when you have Aria, it will generate the site brand kit, the fonts you need and the colour scheme you need.
It will also generate pages, templates, images and so on.
You can go through this, see a snapshot of what the brand looks like and fine-tune it as you need.
The next thing you want to think about is adding your products.
You want to make product listing pages that convert.
With Wix, there are lots of AI tools to help you with copy and to update your images.
Let's say you have an image and it's maybe a small size. We have an AI tool that helps you make the image the right size.
If you have an image in portrait and need it in landscape, we have an AI tool that helps you make your image the right size.
We also have AI tools that help you upscale your images if you need to do that.
We have AI tools that help you with your language and SEO as well.
We have tools to help you make sure that your product listing pages really pop and satisfy what's required.
In the back end, we also have the CSV uploader.
You can upload lots and lots of products via CSV. If you've got a big spreadsheet, you can upload those.
Once you have a custom domain and a premium plan with a custom domain for your shop, you can also use the Wix MCP.
So if you're using Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or whichever one is your AI bestie, you can go into that using the Wix MCP and upload products like that as well.
I've done that for a few different products and a few different websites, and it works really well.
When you're thinking about your shop, you also want to think about building trust before checkout.
You want to think about showing how you are an expert in whatever product you sell.
Product suggestions are useful for that. A breadth of inventory shows that you've got lots to offer.
We find that websites with recommended products actually do really well with sales.
For instance, we see that they get 43% more transactions when they have related items on their product pages.
Product reviews are really useful, and the Wix Reviews app helps you add product reviews to your page.
Sometimes those can show up in Google Search, which is also a benefit for you.
On-site chat is super useful.
There's a Wix chat that's classic human-powered chat. There's also an AI site chat that's trained on your content, which can answer questions while you're asleep.
That's super valuable.
The other thing that's really useful is having clear returns and shipping policies and an FAQ page.
FAQ pages are particularly useful if you're working on AI visibility, and they're also useful for human interaction.
Content reviews can drive sales.
We recently did some research for the State of Websites report. We looked at lots and lots of websites across our network.
We found that websites with blogs are five times more likely to generate e-commerce sales.
So if you don't have a blog on your website, that's worth thinking about as well.
Sites with 50 blog posts or more get seven times more sessions than sites without blogs.
There's a 54% e-commerce success rate for sites that have five reviews, so that's really useful as well.
Sites with 50 or more reviews earn 40 times more than the median revenue and get 20 times more traffic than sites with fewer than 50 reviews.
Sometimes it feels like some of this effort is a lot, but it pays off. It's worth taking the effort to get content on there and getting reviews to drive sales.
Now let's talk about payment.
Wix makes it really easy to set up your store in terms of payment.
We have Wix Payments in place. Essentially, you fill out a form, say which type of payment you want, and then you're ready to roll.
We have payment for debit and credit cards, Apple Pay, and you can click which ones you want to activate.
We have PayPal and Stripe, and those are really good because PayPal and Stripe also have agentic commerce opportunities.
There's PayPal Agentic Commerce, and there's the Stripe agentic suite.
So if you're interested in AI shopping and the future of that, you can potentially tap into that if your store is eligible.
We also have buy now, pay later with Affirm, Afterpay and Sezzle, and more.
There's also a fixed point of sale.
If you want people to buy in person, that's an opportunity for you as well.
We have over 80 different payment providers that you can choose from within your settings and payments.
We also do international sales in different currencies to help you with that.
The other thing is shipping rates.
You can define your shipping rates and rules for lots of different regions and different types of things.
As I said, I'm here in San Diego at BrightonSEO, and I set shipping to zero for people who are picking up the book at the conference for me today.
In-store pickup and local delivery are also useful.
We see from our research that stores that offer in-store pickup have 10% higher revenue than stores that don't offer in-store pickup.
We also have tax settings that you can add.
You can also manage order emails.
Order emails are automated, so you get an automated confirmation, automated shipping and a refund link.
You can even print out address labels. This is super useful, and you can track it on your phone as well.
You can track your orders and see how each one moves through processing.
Abandoned carts are something that folks need to think about as well.
We have automations that help you manage your abandoned carts.
If you have an abandoned cart, you can set up an automation that automatically manages that for you.
You can even hand this off to an agent to help you with this as well, along with virtual receipts and all of that sort of stuff to help make your store really useful.
Now let's talk about SEO.
We have AI-powered SEO through Wix Party and through our other tools.
Essentially, the SEO checklist will update as we go along, and it will help you generate title tags and meta descriptions.
It will help you connect to Google Search Console and will automatically connect to IndexNow with Bing.
Basically, we have a set of SEO checklists. If you follow that SEO set of checklists, you'll be on the path to SEO success.
If you want to go further and do more, we have the Wix SEO Hub, which helps you to do more for e-commerce.
We also have a marketing assistant within the Wix back end that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
You can chat to it and say: "I want to increase the visits to this blog. What can I do?"
It will give you recommendations.
It will help you fine-tune your keywords, update keywords and all of those sorts of things as well.
Then there are channels.
With e-commerce, obviously, the more channels you're on, the better.
With Wix, you can sell on Amazon, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok Shop.
It's all in one dashboard, so you can manage your orders and see where everything came from within that one place.
Once you've done all of that, you would publish and manage your store, and you want to go live.
One of the first things we recommend is that you set up a domain.
Wix is a domain registrar, so you can register your domain through Wix.
We've got lots of classic domain extensions like .com, but we also have some of the more unusual ones like .ai, .gift, .christmas, .love and .me.
You want to think about getting your domain set up.
If you have a domain from another registrar, you could also transfer that to Wix and add it to your Wix store.
The other thing that's great about that is that once you have a custom domain, you can tap into a lot more features.
A lot of the SEO features are unlocked once you have a custom domain because that's how you're able to connect to Google Search Console and things like that.
You'll also have access to Google Analytics, and you'll be able to see all of that to see how things are progressing.
You can see it on the dashboard as soon as you log in.
The Wix app, as I said, on your phone, lets you see what people are doing on your website, what orders people have made and what questions people have asked.
You can get lots of that information there as well, which is super useful when you're on the go.
We also have tools to nurture your audience.
We have email marketing built into your website.
We have a starter pack included in your premium package. If you want to top that up, you can add more emails, but the starter package is pretty good for most small businesses.
We have loyalty programmes, so if you want to set up a loyalty programme or loyalty card, give out coupons, use voucher codes or offer subscriptions, you can do that as well.
We also have marketing agents to help you run all of that.
So what we've gone through is the process of building your storefront, adding your brand, customising your domain, adding your products, choosing how to get paid, optimising your site for SEO, and publishing and managing your store.
One of the things that's great about Wix is that there's a lot of help documentation.
If you get stuck on anything, you can jump into that.
We also have support that you can call, and support in the app as well.
There's Aria to help you along with that.
If you're interested in trying Wix e-commerce today, I highly recommend that you take advantage of the offer we have, especially for Enterprise Nation members, where you can get 50% off your first year.
If it's not something that's for you, perhaps you can share it with someone else who you think it would be great for.
Thank you very much.
We're now going to go to Q&A.
Beth: Amazing. Thanks so much, Crystal.
Let's take a look at some of the questions that we've had in.
There have been a few questions around whether Wix can be used for service-based businesses as well as product-based businesses.
Carol also wants to rent her products rather than sell them. Can she use a Wix shop for this?
Crystal: Service-based? Absolutely.
We have Wix Bookings, which helps you manage bookings and appointments.
We've got a lot of people who work in hairdressing, beauty and aesthetics, and you can absolutely do bookings, manage appointments and that sort of thing.
We also have Wix Restaurants, which helps you do bookings as well.
So if you're selling a service, that's great.
If you're selling something like HVAC or you're a handyman or tradesperson, you can do that as well.
We have a lot of people working in the service industry, and we have a lot of tools to help make that work for you.
In terms of rental, I don't know off the top of my head, but generally speaking, I would position that as a product.
Then it would just be a question of scheduling within the product. You would schedule the terms of the product.
It might be that the product expires on a certain day or has a certain time restriction or something to that effect.
You can also schedule an automation to say: "Hey, it's time to bring it back. If you don't bring it back, we're going to have to charge you extra", or something like that.
You can schedule automations.
We have lots that are built in, but you can also create your own custom automations if you need one for rental.
I can send some details to that user to see if we have one specifically, because that's a new question for me.
Beth: Great. I hope that answers your question, Carol.
Thank you.
What makes an e-commerce website feel trustworthy to a customer who has never bought from the business before?
Crystal: For me, it's making sure that the website makes sense.
I go to websites from social media. You see something on social media and think, "Oh, that's interesting."
Then you go to the website and things are broken. It doesn't make sense. You can't find the About page.
An About page, for instance, about who you are, what you do, why you're doing what you do and why you're selling what you sell is really useful.
Having your social links on your website so that people can check you across lots of different channels and see that you're a human and a business that exists in the world is super useful.
If you are a bricks-and-mortar business, connecting your website to your Google Business Profile is super valuable.
With Wix, you can update your business information, and it will connect to your Google Business Profile.
You can connect your Google Business Profile with that.
Telling your stories is also important, so tell your brand story.
If you've had an award from Enterprise Nation, let's say you won an Enterprise Nation award, then put that on your website.
If you're an accredited business, or you're a beautician who's licensed by the relevant professional body, then put that on your website.
That's something that'll be really useful.
Beth: Great, thank you.
There's one around something you touched on earlier.
How do I identify my ideal customer when I'm too early-stage to have enough data to know who they are?
Crystal: This is a great question.
If you are a brand-new business, you're going to need to be in one of two camps.
You're either going to be your version of a business that already exists, or you're going to be a completely new business that's solving a problem that you know exists.
It's one of the two.
If you are a new version of a business that already works, let's say you're opening a coffee shop in Croydon, then essentially you can look at other businesses like yours and check their reviews.
See the kinds of things that people are saying in the reviews about the business.
Maybe your business is in Croydon, but there's another business in Hilton or somewhere else.
Check the kinds of comments people are making about that business.
If it's a product-based business, let's say you're selling leather bags or something, you can go on Amazon or another website that has reviews of leather bags.
You can see the kinds of questions people are asking, the reasons somebody gave it one star and the reasons somebody gave it five stars.
That will give you an idea of the kinds of things that customer wants.
If it's completely new and you've invented something brand-new, then essentially what you want to think about is why you invented that business.
Think about the problem that you're solving.
If the problem is that, let's say, you've invented dog travel seats for planes or something, then you'll know the problem.
Find the people who have that problem.
There might be a Reddit thread, a Facebook group or something else.
Find the people you know have that problem and look for them.
See the types of questions they're asking, and then answer those questions.
Answer those questions in blogs, answer those questions in your product FAQs, and so on.
There's a reason why you start a new business, so tap into that.
Beth: That's brilliant. Thank you. I hope that answers your question, Valia.
One in from Stefan.
Stefan would like to know what analytics Wix provides for an online shop, and what additional information would I gain by connecting Google Analytics to Wix? Can that be done?
Crystal: You can connect Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is super easy. Essentially, you go to Google Analytics, get a code, pop the code into Wix, and then you're connected to Google Analytics.
Normally, you have to do lots of configuring, but Wix has worked with Google Analytics to build it. We were one of the first web builders to have it.
There are certain tags, transactions and elements that happen across Google Analytics to track trigger events, and we built them into the website.
You'll be able to see your events and conversions. You won't have to configure anything on the Google Analytics side, which is something you would have to do if you're just doing it from scratch.
In terms of analytics, Wix has bot log reports, so you can see when AI bots have gone to your website.
You can see if you're being cited by AI. You can see if Google is coming to your website, if Amazon is coming to your website and if Bing is coming to your website.
We also have it filtered by different channels, so you can see organic, social, YouTube and all the different channels.
We have lots of different reports.
In terms of sales, you can see the best time for your sales and lots of other things.
We're covering it at all angles.
You've got your analytics, and with SEO you can connect to Google Search Console.
Not only will it tell you your impressions and clicks for Google Search Console, but it will also tell you if you have any flags on Google Search Console for things like your structured data.
If there's a product page where the structured data is working, they'll tell you, for instance.
So the analytics is really robust and covers lots of different angles for your products.
Beth: That's brilliant. Thank you for that comprehensive answer.
We're running out of time, so if we could just cover one more question, that would be great.
Once an online store is up and running, what should a business focus on first? Should it be attracting more visitors, improving conversions or encouraging repeat purchases?
Crystal: It will depend on where the business is.
If you're a brand-new business, you want to be doing engagement.
You want to be publishing regular content and engaging with your closest customers.
Depending on where you are, because a lot of small businesses start with social and then move into a website, if your business is active on social, try to keep it going with social.
If you're building on a Wix website, you can connect to your Facebook Store. You can connect to your Instagram Store. You can connect to your TikTok Store.
I would do that so that you're building the bridge between those two channels, between your most engaged channels.
If you're really big on TikTok, for instance, then make sure your website is connected to TikTok.
That will support you in building your other channels as well.
Engagement is really important.
If you have engagement in the first place, it will help with search and with all of the other channels as well.
Beth: That's amazing. Thank you so much for your answers. They were super detailed.
That brings us up to time.
Thank you so much to everyone for joining us for today's Wix Wednesdays webinar.
There have been a few comments in the chat about the recording, so we will be sending that to you later today along with some further resources.
Thank you, Crystal, for sharing your expertise and practical insights with us. It's been a great session, and there are lots of thank yous in the chat.
And it's currently 5am for Crystal, everyone, so it's a very early start for her. You've done fantastically.
Crystal: Everyone's been lovely. Thank you, everyone.
Beth: Thank you so much.
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