Wix.com - Wix Ecommerce

Wix.com is a cloud-based web development platform that allows users to create HTML5 web sites and mobile sites through the use of their online drag and drop tools. Users may add functionalities such as social plug-ins, e-commerce, contact forms, e-mail marketing, and community forums to their web sites using a variety of Wix-developed and third-party applications.

Wix is built on a freemium business model, earning its revenues through premium upgrades. Users must purchase premium packages in order to connect their sites to their own domains, remove Wix ads, add e-commerce capabilities, buy extra data storage and bandwidth, and more.

History

Wix was founded in 2006 by Israelis Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan. The company, headquartered in Tel Aviv, with offices in San Francisco, New York City, Dnipropetrovsk, and Vilnius, is backed by investors Insight Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Benchmark Capital.

The company entered an open beta phase in 2007 using a platform based on Adobe Flash.

By April 2010 Wix had 3.5 million users and raised $10 million in Series C funding provided by Benchmark Capital and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners. A year later, in March 2011, Wix had 8.5 million users and raised $40 million in Series D funding, bring its total funding to that date to $61 million. In April 2014, Wix announced its acquisition of Appixia, an Israeli startup for creating native mCommerce apps.

Move to HTML5

In March 2012, Wix launched a new HTML5 site builder, replacing the Adobe Flash technology. Existing sites built in Flash continued to be supported, but all new customers were directed to the new HTML5 platform.

In February 2013, Wix reported that the move to HTML5 was highly successful, helping to attract 25 million users and generating annual revenues of $60 million in 2012.

As of August 2013, the Wix platform had more than 34 million registered users. By August 2014, more than 51 million users throughout 190 countries have used Wix with roughly 45,000 new users a day.

IPO on NASDAQ

On 5 November 2013, Wix had an initial public offering on NASDAQ, raising about $127 million for the company and some share holders. Since its NASDAQ debut, WIX has continued to spend heavily in R&D and marketing, whilst growing its user base rapidly.

Features

Wix provides customizable web site templates and a drag and a drop HTML5 web site builder that includes apps, graphics, image galleries, fonts, and other options. Users also may opt to create their web sites from scratch. In October, 2013 Wix introduced a mobile editor for users easy to adjust their sites for mobile viewing.

Wix App Market

On October 2012, Wix launched an app market for users to sell applications built with the company's automated web development technology. Wix’s software development kit lets app developers create and offer web apps to the millions of Wix users around the globe. Wix App Market offers both free and subscription-based applications, with a revenue split of 70 percent for the developer and 30 percent for Wix. One of the first Wix' projects appeared on Wix App Market was Wix Hotels - the online booking engine application.

The App Market enables customers to integrate third-party applications into their own web sites, such as photograph feeds, blogging, music playlists, online community, e-mail marketing, and file management. Various applications are offered from providers such as Google, Instagram, LiveChat, Shopify, and Ecwid.

On May 15, 2014, Wix announced "WixHive API", which allows any installed Wix app within a user web site to capture and share their visitor data (such as contact information, messages, purchases, bookings, etc.) with other installed apps within the same web site. By sharing data, this gives Wix users more actionable information about their visitor behavior and can help grow businesses.

Other services

In August 2014, Wix launched Wix Hotels, a booking system for hotels, B&Bs and vacation rentals which use Wix websites.

This was followed in 2015 by Wix Music, a platform for independent musicians to market and sell their music. and Wix Restaurants in 2016