Zyro Review: Pros and Cons

Good for hobbyist sellers and small businesses

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As website builders go, Zyro is an affordable and easy-to-use option that’s perfect for small businesses or hobbyists looking to sell on the side.

Zyro offers an excellent range of features, especially given the affordability of its monthly plans. However, we don’t recommend Zyro for large stores. Its features aren’t as scalable as you’d need them to be for rapid growth – particularly vis a vis some of the hot website builder competition Zyro faces out there.

We checked this builder out for ourselves, and in this Zyro review, we’ll cover what we found category by category. Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about Zyro: from its template designs to its customer service.

Already thinking about going with Zyro? Explore how it measures up against other website builders in our 2023 research.

How does Zyro compare to other website builders?

  1. Wix Best overall website builder
  2. Squarespace Best value for money
  3. Shopify Best for scaling your online store
  4. GoDaddy Fastest way to build a website
  5. Square Online Sell online for free
  6. Zyro Best for those on a limited budget

Zyro Is Now Owned By Hostinger

By the way, Zyro has been acquired by Hostinger. You can find their website and website-building product here.

What Is Zyro?

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

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 Pros:

✔️ Zyro makes it simple to advertise on Facebook: with Zyro, you can track your Facebook Ads via Facebook Pixel integration, and stay on top of your online marketing efforts.

✔️ Zyro is extremely easy to use: in our own testing – and our users’ – Zyro won earned acclaim for how beginner-friendly it is, and how easy it makes the process of building and designing your website.

✔️ Zyro is incredible affordable: its cheapest plan starts at $2.99/month, which is ten times cheaper than Volusion and more than five times cheaper than Wix and Squarespace.

✔️ Zyro doesn’t charge commission on the payments you take: which is a handy cost-saver. That said, you will be eligible for payment gateway fees, which will differ based on the provider you select. (Zyro integrates with 70+).

✔️ Zyro offers 29 ecommerce-specific templates: these are both customizable and optimized for mobile, and look brilliant to boot.

Zyro Cons:

❌ Zyro comes with information overload: adding relevant information when uploading products can be a confusing and time-consuming process.

❌ Zyro doesn’t offer phone support: which can be irritating if you don’t have the time, patience, or inclination for email and live chat-based service.

❌ Zyro doesn’t let you switch templates once your site is live: you can’t do much to change your website’s layout once you’ve made a decision, which can be frustrating – particularly if you’re going through a rebrand, or simply want to strip your website back to a more minimalist look and feel.

How Easy Is Zyro To Use?

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!

zyro website editor

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.”

using the zyro website builder
Zyro makes it simple to add new content elements to my site. I could choose different layouts for each element.

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.

How Much Does Zyro Cost?

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.)

Zyro pricing plans screenshot October 2023
At the time of writing, you can sign up to Zyro for $2.99/month, and benefit from a heavily discounted renewal rate of just $6.99/month.

These, then, are your options:

Two years paid in advance One year paid in advance Paid monthly
Website plan $2.99/month $3.29/month $11.99/month
Business plan $3.99/month $4.99/month $14.99/month

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 Prices vs Competitor Prices

Zyro is very affordable compared to other ecommerce website builders on the market. That said, Zyro’s cheap plans lack the more powerful features that its top competitors offer, such as dedicated app markets and in-house payment processing tools. Check out how Zyro’s prices stack up against its top competitors’:

  • Zyro: $2.99 – $14.99/month
  • Wix eCommerce: $27 – $159/month
  • Shopify: $29 – $299/month
  • BigCommerce: $29.95 – $299.95/month

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.

Find Out More

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

How Well Designed Are Zyro's Templates?

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.

Zyro tempates filter by industry October 2023 screenshot
With Zyro, I can filter templates by industry or by my website's purpose – or plug a relevant keyword straight into an intuitive search bar.

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 templates October 2023 screenshot
Zyro provides a huge range of templates – 148, to be exact – with 29 of these offering ecommerce-specific functionality.

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?

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!

adding products in zyro
Adding products can be confusing at first, because there are lots of optional fields for information. But in the end, that extra effort means a better experience for your customers.

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
organizing products in zyro store manager
In the Zyro Store Manager, you can add "root categories" (here: "menswear") and "subcategories" ("shirts") to organize your products better.

Find Out More

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?

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!)

ai content generator tool
content generator examples

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
zyro ai heatmap example
In the image we uploaded, the green areas represent parts of the page that Zyro’s heatmap tool predicts our users will engage with the most.

Find Out More

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?

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?

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.

zyro live chat service

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?

Just A Reminder: Zyro Is Now Owned By Hostinger

By the way, Zyro has been acquired by Hostinger. You can find their website and website-building product here.

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!

FAQs

Zyro is a subsidiary of Hostinger, a web hosting service that we’ve actually reviewed. Zyro sees itself as Hostinger’s younger sibling, and although both platforms perform similarly well in terms of customer service, they operate entirely independently of one another!

Yes! We’ve focused on Zyro’s ecommerce-specific plan in this review, but you can also choose its regular website building plans: Website, starting at $2.99/month.

Yes! You can use Zyro’s heatmap, logo maker, and content generator for free, independent of its website builder.

We recommend Zyro for smaller online stores, so if you’re looking for a more scalable builder, then BigCommerce is the platform to consider. But if you value Zyro’s ease of use and want more of a happy medium, then Wix eCommerce is the real star.

Written by:
I’ve written for brands and businesses all over the world – empowering everyone from solopreneurs and micro-businesses to enterprises to some of the ecommerce industry’s best-known brands: including Yahoo!, Ecwid, and Entrepreneur. My commitment for the future is to empower my audience to make better, more effective decisions: whether that’s helping you pick the right platform to build your website with, the best hosting provider for your needs, or offering recommendations as to what – and how – to sell.

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