Zyro Review: Pros and Cons

Zyro is an up-and-coming ecommerce website builder that got acquired by Hostinger, offering an impressive array of features and functionality – at a price that won’t hurt your wallet. Zyro allows you to design and build an online store within an hour, then start selling through it; so it’s an ideal way of launching your small business’s presence on the internet.

Zyro: Pros and Cons

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To help you get a quick understanding of Zyro’s strengths and weaknesses, here’s a rundown of its main pros and cons that we found during our research:

Zyro is a simple builder, and one of its main advantages is great ease of use. When you edit your website in Zyro’s drag-and-drop builder, a grid format will be available as a guide. This makes positioning different content elements (like text boxes and images) really hard to mess up, since they’ll snap right into place whenever you move them!

But what are Zyro customers themselves saying?

One user named Simona calls Zyro an “intuitive, easy-to-operate system even for beginners.” Another user, Luis, summed up his “awesome experience” with Zyro pretty succinctly:

“Great user experience, easy to navigate interface, by far the best website builder for beginners.”

Zyro also integrates with Unsplash, a stock photography website with over one million photos that you can use on your Zyro website for free. Of course, for business websites in particular, providing your own branded, personal photos is still preferable. But it’s nice to know that you’ll have plenty of other visuals available in a pinch, too.

Zyro offers two paid plans. This includes the Business plan, which is built specifically for selling online. You get a full ecommerce suite and can sell up to 500 products. If you aren’t sure whether or not you want to commit to an ecommerce-only plan, there is the simpler Website plan, which gives you the ability to make a website for only $2.99/month.

The Website plan starts at $2.99/month, and the Business plan starts at $3.99/month. But it’s important to note that these prices only apply when you purchase a plan for two years in advance. The less time you’re willing to sign up for in advance, the higher the price will be.

We should also note that these are Zyro’s introductory price. When it’s time to renew, it’ll cost you $11.99/month on the Website plan, and $14.99/month on the Business plan.

That said, Zyro does thrown in a free domain – valued at $9.99 – to sweeten the deal when you sign up, and runs regular discounts. (At the time of writing, for instance, Zyro is offering renewal prices of just $6.99 on its Website plan; see the screenshot below.)

These, then, are your options:

Heads Up: Payment Gateway Fees

If you’re selling online, you’ll also need software that can accept credit and debit card purchases from online customers. For this, Zyro offers integrations with over 70 payment gateways, including popular options like Stripe and PayPal. And although Zyro itself charges no commissions on any sales, you’ll still have to pay fees associated with the payment gateway you choose.

For example, Stripe and PayPal both take 2.9% + 30¢ of every sale you make, and these rates are pretty standard for the industry. Payment gateway fees are just one more necessary cost to factor into the budget for your online store.

Zyro doesn’t offer a free plan or a free trial. But it does provide a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of its plans, so you can try the Website or the Business plan option risk-free before committing.

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Is pricing your top concern? Our ranking of the best free ecommerce platforms can help.

How Well Designed Are Zyro's Templates?

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When testing Zyro, we found that its templates are high quality, and its level of creative freedom is getting better over time.

Zyro offers a huge range of templates – we counted 148 as of October 2023 – that you can customize with its drag-and-drop editor. 29 of them come with ecommerce-specific functionality, and you can filter them via industry or purpose: including fashion, photography, entertainment, and more.

Every template is optimized for mobile, meaning your store will look great and be responsive regardless of the device your customers are viewing it from. Mobile optimized templates are a standard feature among the top ecommerce website builders, but nonetheless very important!

Zyro’s ecommerce templates are clean and modern, so it’s hard to go too far wrong when editing your chosen template. However, that doesn’t mean you’re limited when it comes to customization.

Since we first tested it, Zyro has done away with the restrictive blocks and rigid sections that made it hard to give your website a unique spin. Now, the Smart Layout feature allows for more flexibility, using visual guides and dynamic columns to help you place your elements. Once you’re happy with your placement, your elements will snap into place, keeping everything neat and streamlined.

Although Zyro is still a long way from the heady creative heights of Squarespace Ecommerce, we like to see that it’s moving toward giving users more creative freedom. We think this makes it a much more appealing option in the long run.

One more thing to note about Zyro’s templates is that you can’t switch your template once you’ve chosen one. If you start editing a template and discover that it’s not for you, it will be too late to choose a different style. Wix is another ecommerce builder with this limitation – although it’s less of a problem on Wix, because the editor gives you more design freedom to tweak the template you’re stuck with.

What Sales Features Does Zyro Offer?

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Zyro’s ecommerce plan is a great option for those looking for a cheaper alternative for their online store. Zyro only charges a 1% transaction fee, which is a lot lower than other builders.

In addition to this standout feature, Zyro’s Business plan also offers:

• Over 70 different payment options: Including PayPal and American Express
• Complete order tracking: Manage your customers’ orders from the moment they’re placed to the moment they’re delivered
• Shipping and tax management: Track the entire shipping process on your website, and generate automatic shipping rates from carriers like UPS and FedEx (or set your own custom rates)
• Inventory management: Categorize your products and track how much stock you have left
• Gift cards and discount coupons: Give your customers incentives to keep coming back

With Zyro, you can sell physical products, digital downloads, services, and even recurring subscription boxes – what you sell is entirely up to you, and the Business plan comes packed with tools.

A really great feature that the Business plan has is product filters. You can allow customers to search products by size, color, price, or any other attribute. Neat!

So, what other additional sales features will you get by upgrading to the Advanced Store plan? For midsize stores, the extra functionality will be well worth it:

• Multichannel selling: Sync your Zyro website with Facebook Shop, Instagram Store, and/or Amazon to start managing orders across channels.
• List 2,500 products: List up to 2,500 products, as opposed to the Online Store plan, which caps at 100 products.
• Abandoned cart recovery: Encourage your almost-customers to come back
• Multiple languages: Appeal to customers in different markets, and around the world

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Need powerful sales tools? Check out our review of the best enterprise ecommerce platforms, which offer the maximum amount of scalability for growing businesses.

What Marketing and SEO Features Does Zyro Offer?

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Zyro’s marketing and SEO features aren’t as robust as its sales features. You can add a blog to your site and categorize posts, but there aren’t many standout features. You can integrate with Google Analytics on all Zyro’s plans, which is a great feature for tracking your site’s performance.

You can also integrate your site with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp live chat to make communication with customers easier, no matter which plan you choose.

Zyro and AI

When we first tested it, Zyro’s marketing features weren’t the most impressive around. However, since being acquired by Hostinger, it seems a lot more work has gone into its AI tools to help web builders optimize their sites.

Zyro is unique in offering a set of artificial intelligence, or AI, tools to help with branding specifcally. You can use an AI Writer to generate SEO-friendly copy for you, without lifting a finger to the keyboard yourself.

All you have to do is choose a category and provide some specifics, and the AI writer will churn out a few different paragraph options based on that info. (And this was before ChatGPT!)

For example, we chose “Fashion & Apparel,” then narrowed it down to “Sports Wear,” and voilà – the generator gave us seven different paragraphs to choose from.

As writers, we might be a little biased, but we don’t recommend relying completely on AI tools to create your website copy. Instead, Zyro’s AI Writer is great for providing a template if you’re ever stuck for ideas, or don’t have the budget to hire a copywriter.

Equally good in a pinch is Zyro’s AI logo maker. It can’t compare to hiring a real graphic designer, but if you need to design a quick logo for free, it’s definitely a useful tool.

The most impressive of Zyro’s AI tools is its AI heatmap, which predicts which parts of a web page your visitors will focus on the most. You can upload an image of your web page to the heatmap tool, and it will generate a map of the areas visitors are most likely to engage with.

Zyro and SEO

As Zyro’s website is quick to boast, “Zyro websites are optimized from day one”. Yet, while this sounds good, Zyro’s SEO features are relatively standard fare – and is all stuff we’d expect from any website builder worth its salt.

Zyro’s SEO-boosting features include:

• Pages that load quickly, to lower your site’s boost rate and improve rankings – as well as the overall user experience
• Access to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track your website’s performance
• Mobile-optimized pages that render well across all devices
• Making it simple to add meta titles and descriptions, and craft SEO-friendly URLs for each of your Zyro website’s pages

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Interested in website design? Take a look at our guides to choosing a website color scheme and picking the right font style.

How Secure Is Zyro?

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Security is important for any website, but even more so for online stores – after all, potential customers will want to know that their payment information is safe in your hands.

Zyro offers the basic security measures that you’d expect from an ecommerce builder – namely, a built-in SSL certificate with each plan. SSL certificates enable secure connections between your web server and a customer’s web browser. A small padlock icon and a website address beginning with https:// (both of which you’ll find at the top of your browser right now, for example) tell visitors that a website is SSL protected.

Zyro’s ecommerce tools are also all PCI DSS validated at Level 1, which is the highest standard of security in financial transactions. In other words, your Zyro website will be able to process customers’ payment information securely.

It also comes in handy that Zyro’s cloud hosting is highly secure – and extremely reliable. (Being acquired by one of the top hosting providers will do that, we guess!) This ensures your Zyro site will stay online 99.9% of the time – though Zyro isn’t super clear on its own website as to how it safeguards your business from the myriad different types of cyber attack out there.

What Is Zyro's Customer Support Like?

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Zyro offers 24/7 email and live chat support for customers, and the team is extremely professional and friendly. However, when we tested Zyro’s support system ourselves, we discovered that “24/7” is a bit of a loose term.

Basically, you can send Zyro’s team a question at any time – but you may have to wait a few hours before getting a response. That’s not always the case – we received all of our responses in under an hour – but just note that instant communication isn’t totally guaranteed.

Zyro lacks phone support, which may also put some people off. That said, its email and live chat support has impressed a lot of users. One customer summed it up pretty well:

“I had to contact [Zyro support] on an occasion, and their answer was very helpful and clear. They’re extremely familiar with their product, and are able to guide you in the right direction with ease.”

Zyro also offers a searchable knowledge base full of articles, so you can research questions on your own time if you prefer. Zyro is also quick to direct customers to a range of self-service FAQs, which address common queries like “Is it easy to build a website?” and “Should I use a website builder or hire a web developer?”

While these are certainly important questions, however, they’re top-level and not super relevant to Zyro itself – and, for that reason, seem to be more an attempt on Zyro’s part to show up for those questions in Google, rather than provide genuine value to its users.

There are also only 15 of these questions, so you won’t find the comprehensive help you’re looking for if you’re grappling with some of Zyro’s more technical features.

Summary: Is Zyro Right for You?

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Zyro is a simple, easy-to-use ecommerce builder. Its prices are very cheap, but that’s reflected in its less powerful features. We recommend Zyro for smaller online stores on a budget, who don’t need scalable marketing tools.

If you’re running a larger ecommerce store, you’ll get more bang for your buck with a more powerful builder like Shopify or BigCommerce. That said, we love Zyro’s seamless drag-and-drop editor, and its helpful customer support team. Plus, its 30-day money-back guarantee means you can test this builder out risk-free.

If you do decide to give Zyro a try, leave a comment and let us know how it goes – we’d love to hear from you!