Introduction Ecwid Change Theme
Have you ever Wondered if you are using the right ecommerce platform for selling on the internet? Do you occasionally stumble upon a new service that’s more functional and cheaper than what you’re using today? Starting a small business is all about keeping your costs low, and locating an ecommerce platform that will help you with half the battle. Unfortunately, when you operate a small business website it frequently becomes tricky once you would like to attract on a new ecommerce platform or even just modify your website at all. Read our Ecwid review to find out more about this solution. Ecwid Change Theme
Click Here to sign up to Ecwid now!
Many solutions Purposefully create a closed system, which is tedious to maneuver away from as soon as you begin. But with a platform named Ecwid, you do not need to be concerned about it. Actually, the whole aim of the company, which began in 2009, is to quickly and quickly create an online store system in your present websites.
You do not have To make a whole new website. Just implement Ecwid on any platform, CMS or social networking (in five minutes) and you’re good to go.
That raised my Attention, because I understand the struggles that come along with attempting to migrate websites, especially in regards to ecommerce. So, I needed to gather a comprehensive review of the Ecwid system to find out whether it is worth the time.
How Many Men and Women Use Ecwid?
It’s quite Remarkable what Ecwid has achieved since 2009, with over 1 million merchants getting signed up. What is even more cool is that the Ecwid merchants span over 175 distinct countries, showing that this is not just a platform for most people in the US or Europe. Even businesses in developing countries have a chance to find an internet store going, and you don’t have to squander your previous site if you have one.
The usership Continues to grow, particularly considering Ecwid is now PCI DSS Level 1 accredited. If you are not sure what that is, it’s pretty much the gold standard for security in the ecommerce world. You can rest easy knowing that you and your customers’ data is safe and protected.
Along with The overall merchant count, over 20,000 active users are using the Ecwid Shopping Cart for WordPress. The gap between that 20,000 and the 1 million is the fact you don’t require a WordPress site to implement Ecwid. So, the 20,000 simply refers to WordPress users with the plugin.
What’s Ecwid, and how does it work?
Ecwid is a hosted Solution for building an internet store. Unlike competing products such as Shopify, Bigcommerce and Volusion, which permit you to construct a fresh site with e-commerce performance, Ecwid is targeted more towards people who currently have a website and simply wish to add an online store to it.
Much like other E-commerce platforms, Ecwid lets you install’catalogs’ of goods, and add photos, pricing, weight etc. for each. You can specify shipping prices, accept credit card payments etc — all of the key stuff that you’d expect to be able to do using an e-commerce alternative.
However it differs Significantly from competing products like Shopify, Volusion, Squarespace and Bigcommerce since it isn’t actually designed to allow you to create a fully-featured, standalone e-commerce website; instead, it is designed to enable you add an internet store to an existing online presence.
(That said, Ecwid have Recently added some new functionality, called’Starter Website’, that does allow you produce a one-page standalone offering. We’ll chat through this in more depth later on in the inspection.) Ecwid Change Theme
Click Here to sign up to Ecwid today!
The Product operates by giving you a widget that gets put on other websites — hence the title Ecwid: it is short for’E-commerce Widget’. You receive a few lines of HTML code (the widget) to add to an present website or societal networking profile, and your shop is displayed wherever you have inserted this code.
Characteristics
Ecwid makes Strides in the market by catering to companies that don’t need to begin a brand new website. The main attribute is that you can take your old site and quickly incorporate the Ecwid system inside a couple of minutes.
You can also Mirror the machine onto several other sites if you anticipate selling elsewhere on the web. Manage all of these websites from one place rather than switching between multiple dashboards.
Another pleasant Feature is that the syncing between multiple devices. Sell on-the-go together with your smartphone. This means you could go to a tradeshow to make a number of sales and each one these earnings are represented onto the backend of your website.
The system is Also designed to integrate nicely with social networks, and that means you may sell your things on Facebook if desired. 1 part of Ecwid we particularly enjoy is the shipping aspect. With real-time transport integrations you always know what is going on with your requests and at which they’re being shipped to.
What other trendy Items are comprised with Ecwid?
It runs on a super quick frame
It comes with an address book for customers and clients
The system has over 43 translations for selling around the world
You receive a Lot of promotional instruments like coupons, discounts, bulk pricing and much more
Create your personalized email notifications
Use the automatic tax alternative (automatic taxation charges at checkout, tax reporting and submitting )
Point-of-sale performance
Thanks Into Ecwid’s point-of-sale (POS) performance, you may use your Ecwid store to market not just online but in bodily locations too — in stores, market stalls, at concerts and so on.
With Ecwid’s POS Functionality, irrespective of if or not a customer buys a product in shop, online, on their telephone or via Facebook, everything stays in sync – i.e., the merchant’s catalog, inventory and client / trade information.
There’s a few methods that you can take advantage of this feature: the easiest is probably to use’Paypal Here.’ This entails downloading the Ecwid iOS program from the Apple’s App store, connecting it to the Paypal Here service, then taking payments using a cell card reader (pictured above).
You’ve got two options when it comes to POS Hardware and Paypal This: you can either buy a chip and swipe reader (for $24.99) or a chip and also tap reader (for $79.99). Both may be ordered straight from Ecwid.
There is a couple of Things worth noting about the Paypal Here integration: first, it’s only available to retailers in the US and UK. Secondly, it’s not yet available on Android apparatus. (On their site, Ecwid say it will be available shortly — but they have been saying that for quite some time now). Ecwid Change Theme
If you’re located outside That the US / UK, or want to work with another mobile device kind, the good news is that Ecwid also works together with all the Vend, Clover, NCR Silver and Square POS systems. These all facilitate utilizing a larger range of hardware at a physical retail location (full-sized card readers, receipt printers, cash drawers tablet racks etc.) and are usable in more countries.
Although you could avail Of this Paypal Here POS option on most of paid-for programs, you will want to be to the priciest’Unlimited’ program if you want to avail of a Vend, Clover, NCR Silver or Square integration.
Reactive storefronts
Ecwid Storefronts are responsive, meaning they will display correctly across apparatus — desktop, tablet and mobile. In a age where smartphone internet browsing is eclipsing desktop surfing, this is important.
Free plan
Unlike many similar Products, Ecwid provides a totally free plan.
Granted, it’s a fairly Standard plan, where features such as discount coupons and support aren’t available, and it merely lets you sell up to 10 products in two classes — but this could actually be adequate for some users, and using it is a fantastic way to try the system out.
However, A vital point to note about the free program is that it isn’t great from an SEO point of view — you have to be on a paid plan to make certain that your product pages speak to search engines correctly (more on SEO below).
Language detection
Ecwid is forward of the Pack because its storefronts could be mechanically translated into nearly 50 different languages — customers can see your store in their own language, without you having to worry about creating alternate versions of it. Ecwid provides this performance by detecting visitors’ language automatically based on their browser settings / IP address.
Competing products such as Shopify And Bigcommerce are nevertheless to provide this sort of functionality — they force you to rely on third party apps, the production of multiple shops or Google Translate to provide different language versions of your shop, which can be less than perfect. Therefore a definite win for Ecwid here.
Ecwid and search engine optimization
Search engine Optimization (search engine optimization ) in Ecwid is a fairly straightforward affair. You can edit the title of your webpage and its meta description; the relevant fields are pre-populated for you automatically, but you can tweak them to suit your search engine optimization objectives.
As far as I could tell But you can not manually change the URL of a product — you have to make do with the one which Ecwid generates for you. This is not perfect because keywords in URLs are used by some search engines to categorise content through indexing.
But, The URLs which are automatically generated by Ecwid include the name you’ve given to your own product – so if you include some keywords in your product name (maybe not a bad idea anyway) that your URL will comprise them also. This serves as a tool of a workaround, but I’d prefer whole control over URLs. Ecwid Change Theme
One place where Ecwid doesn’t perform quite so Well on the search engine optimization front entails AMP — accelerated cellular pages. As its name implies, AMP pages load faster on cellular devices. This encourages people to stay longer on your page, thus increasing’live time’ –something which is believed by many search engine optimization experts consider to be rewarded by Google with preferential treatment in search results. Furthermore, Google occasionally highlights AMP pages in carousels in search results, giving AMP articles an extra little boost.
Unfortunately However — and unlike most rival products like Bigcommerce or Shopify, you can not create AMP versions of your goods using Ecwid.
Importing and exporting information
Like most competing Goods Ecwid allows you to import and export your data in CSV format.
The Export option permits you to export product data, orders and customers (in CSV format) and ensures that if you feel the need to migrate your shop to another e-commerce platform, then you shouldn’t have any major difficulties doing so.
Utilizing Ecwid with other programs
Ecwid and WordPress
WordPress doesn’t Supplied any e-commerce performance out of the box, so anyone wishing to sell on the platform will need a third-party solution like Ecwid. There is an Ecwid plugin accessible, so adding an Ecwid store to your WordPress site is very straightforward — you can get up and running with a couple clicks.
You just sign up to get an Ecwid account and then install the free plugin.
Ecwid and Squarespace
Squarespace comes with Increasingly good e-commerce attributes, but the amount of payment gateway options is very limited — you have to use Stripe or Paypal. (And using Stripe only works if you’re selling products from certain countries). Another principal issue with the built-in Squarespace marketing software is that they don’t facilitate dropshipping, and full export of products isn’t currently possible.
Integrating Ecwid with Squarespace allows you to bypass these constraints, and adding it into a Squarespace site is quite easy: it is a simple matter of including a code block to a webpage and pasting some HTML into it.
Ecwid and Wix
As With Squarespace, there’s currently no dropshipping choice for Wix users, so again Ecwid can provide a fantastic workaround. A committed app is provided by Ecwid to enable you incorporate the product on a Wix shop easily.
Programs and plugins
Ecwid provides a fairly Restricted number integrations with other apps that are well-known. Integrations do exist with services Mailchimp, Xero and Freshbooks; but to be fair the range of integrations could be extensive — competing products like Shopify offer a much broader assortment of programs. Notable omissions from the Ecwid store comprise Quickbooks and Zendesk, for example (that said, a Quickbooks integration is coming soon).
The Picture is better when it comes to CMS plugins: All these are available for WordPress, Wix and Joomla, enabling to you install Ecwid on these platforms very easily. Ecwid Change Theme
Interface and ease of use
Ecwid’s Interface is pretty easy to use. Like most similar online shop builders, you receive a vertical menu on the left that allows you to access key performance, and the area on the right is used to edit or display associated products, website reports and content.
Much like any e-commerce tool, you will have to Spend a reasonable amount of time getting your head about producing catalogues and product variants, setting up shipping rates and so on…but there isn’t anything here that should represent too a lot of a learning curve.
Matters are helped by an ‘onboarding checklist’ that’s supplied to you once you log in for the first time.
If You are stuck however, you can always get in touch with Ecwid’s support team — more on that later — or, even if you are on a’Business’ or’Unlimited’, you can take advantage of this included customization service (you get two hours and 12 hours customization time from Ecwidon these plans).
Ecwid and GDPR
I am not a Lawyer, so please note the below observations should not be interpreted as legal information, but I am going to do my best to spell out a number of the key GDPR issues facing Ecwid users under.
With the introduction of The EU’s new GDPR legislation, there are many legal measures that site owners now should take to ensure that they are adequately protecting EU clients’ and visitors’ privacy. There are serious financial penalties for doing this (to the point where it’s usually a good idea to speak with an attorney on what to do); and even if your company is not located in the EU, then you still need to obey the regulations where any site visits from the EU are concerned.
According to my Understanding of the crucial GDPR rules, the main priorities for potential Ecwid store owners are to:
· Provide sufficient privacy and cookie cutter notices
· Process and store data safely
· Get explicit permission from those registering to mailing lists that it is okay to send them e-newsletters
· Provide a way to opt in or revoke consent to use of non-essential biscuits onto a website (and to log that consent).
There does not seem to be Anything that stops you fulfilling the first few requirements readily enough with Ecwid, although you will need to spend time and potentially money generating adequate notices and crafting information capture forms so they are GDPR compliant.
Where things get Complicated with Ecwid is the fourth requirement — cookie approval. To Guarantee GDPR compliance, you need to exhibit a cookie cutter banner to your visitors which
· Allows them to choose which cookies they would like to conduct BEFORE those biscuits are run (i.e., to give’prior permission’)
· Logs their consent to run biscuits Ecwid Change Theme
· Allows them to revoke consent at a later point
So for example, if you Utilize a Facebook Ads cookie in combination with your Ecwid shop, you’ll be breaking up GDPR legislation unless you have a banner set up which does all the above.
Nowout of the box at Least there is not a means to take care of the cookie approval issue with Ecwid. Nor is there an adequate app available from the Ecwid app store (the only alternative on this front I can find, the’EU cookie banner’, doesn’t seem to provide the essential performance — despite costing $1.99 per month to utilize ).
It Appears to me that the only option available to Ecwid users would be to use a specialist product like CookiePro, which does provide all the essential performance to generate cookie approval fully GDPR compliant. Despite being a powerful product nonetheless, Cookiepro does require quite a great deal of configuration and you’ll want to put quite a great deal of time apart to set it up.
Setup and Layout
I Truly like The simple fact which you can run a website without paying for anything. This makes the setup process that much simpler, because you just have to punch in your email and create a password to go straight to the backend interface.
The machine has Wizards for every platform that you want to set your shop on. If you have a WordPress site, simply walk through three steps to get up and running. You could even click on options like Facebook and Joomla, depending on where you want to market.
The backend Design is perfect, since it walks you through every website creation and integration measure with some fine text and photos. Once you get your shop implemented on a website or societal page it looks fairly sleek.
The layout Depends somewhat on the theme you’ve got on your website, but as you can see below, it displays photos well and appears clean and simple to navigate. I especially enjoy the Shopping Bag place, which is outstanding and easy to locate for customers when they wish to market.
Although many Websites are going to be mobile friendly, its nice knowing that Ecwid involves a native shopping program for both iOS and Android. Merchants now receive a native shopping application for iOS and Android.
This means you Can mange your shop and market on the go, while also providing your clients an opportunity to get products from the mobile interface.
The closing Design thing which makes sense to mention is the language tool. Since conducting an internet store generally requires one to reach out to people from all over the world, you’re bound to stumble upon a few clients who would love to read product webpages and other content in their native tongue. Ecwid supports 45 languages, so when a user wants to translate from English into Spanish, that’s not a problem at all.
The Ecwid Program Market
Having the Opportunity to put in software is a sure fire way to scaling up your ecommerce website in a fair way. Ecwid includes a place known as the Ecwid App Market. It provides 65 software, helping retailers extend their store performance readily. Ecwid Change Theme
Some of the apps Can help you out with reviews and rating, rewards programs, automatic advertising tools, analytics, custom design themes and much more.
SEO and Marketing
Ecwid is a Third-party solution to your current site, so you’d typically have to employ additional SEO and marketing tools to really get the word out. Nevertheless, Ecwid provides quality SEO features to help merchants increase their visibility in Google searches.
Moreover, Google now indexes AJAX websites, so all Ecwid shops are indexed by Google with no extra effort. It gets better with WordPress websites, as you gain access to additional SEO plugins and also the default search engine performance on the dashboard.
Managing Your Inventory
The Ecwid Inventory system is as simple as they come, since it doesn’t appear to incorporate any of the unnecessary bells and whistles you may find on other e commerce platforms.
Each measure is Concise and clear, so you can just go in there and sort in a product name, price and image then save the product for afterwards. Obviously you could always open the Powerful Options, however they different these for if you’re ready to start ramping up your store.
As an example of the stock Rich management toolset, you obtain access to items like from stock product monitoring, mobile device stock management, barcode scanning and much more.
Customer Care
Ecwid offers A Chat With Sales attribute that is one of my favourite ways to converse to companies. Simply send them a query and you can work on something else until they respond.
The Business also Provides a potent support section with FAQs, a knowledge base, email capabilities and a forum.
Overall, the Service outlets include phone support, online chat support and email support, keeping the response time short and encourage quality .
In my eyes, the Platform has everything you might want concerning support.
Payments and Safety
It is not necessarily Easy to find an ecommerce platform which doesn’t charge transaction fees, but that is just what you get with Ecwid. They never charge any kind of trade fee with any of those plans they offer, making it desirable for any shop that is trying to keep down costs and to improve margins.
Keep in mind that Ecwid is not a payment processor, which means you’ve got to set up something such as PayPal or Stripe to process all of the transactions that come through your website. It’s pretty easy to implement one of these systems, because Ecwid integrates with over 40 international payment choices. However, each of these processors have their own transaction fees so you need to prepare for these.
It’s rather Clear that Ecwid takes safety seriously, because the provider is a PCI DSS Grade 1 accredited supplier. The business also states that each transaction that includes sensitive information is transferred via a secure HTTPS channel. Ecwid Change Theme
What if you Would like to collect both online and offline payments? Perhaps you’d prefer a point of sale integration?
Ecwid Integrates with with Square, Clover, Vend POS, iZettle and PayPal card readers, enabling Ecwid to turn your operation into both an offline and online system.
Benefits and cons of using Ecwid
Advantages
· Ecwid signifies a very easy way to add e-commerce to some existing website.
· Point-of-sale performance can be obtained, and there are quite a few strategies to implement it.
· The item is cheap by comparison to other solutions.
· It supports multi-language variations of your store.
· The store designs are responsive.
· Plugins / programs are available for major platforms (like WordPress, Drupal and Wix).
· It permits users of website building products that don’t facilitate dropshipping to start doing this (i.e., Squarespace, Jimdo, Wix etc.. )
· The’starter website’ option is a good stopgap measure for retailers who need a store quickly, but have yet to create a complete website to bring the Ecwid widget to.
· The free Ecwid plan is not time-limited, includes support, and is fairly generous in terms of attributes.
Disadvantages
· The Paypal This POS system is limited to the US and UK.
· The Paypal Here POS system is limited to iOS users.
· Phone support is only available on the more expensive programs.
· There’s a restricted number of programs / integrations available from the Ecwid Program shop.
· You can’t change product URLs, which is slightly annoying from an search engine optimization point of view.
· You can not create AMP variations of product pages using Ecwid.
· Creating Ecwid GDPR-compliant (with respect to obtaining cookie consent) sounds difficult.
· The free version doesn’t allow you to get any of the SEO tools.
Pricing
Ecwid comes With four strategies, among which is totally free. They promote the free plan like mad, and mention that many different platforms drag you into a free trial, where you may eventually need to pay.
This is where Ecwid stands outside, and you can see that the other payment plans are rather affordable.
The Free plan Allows you to sell 10 products, whereas the Venture program ups that depend to 100 products and you get items like an iPhone management program. The company program goes up to 2500 products for a wonderful price and you also get live chat support. Priority support comes alongside the Unlimited plan and you might also sell an unlimited number of products.
Ecwid is one of The most economical solutions on the marketplace. You may see that it is actually cheaper than a lot of the other platforms we have reviewed previously, so if you’re searching for value, this could be the perfect plugin for you.
Summary
In short, I am Beginning to believe that Ecwid is one of the greatest ways to sell online, provided that you implement the best ways to improve your sales online as well. Ecwid is a slick system, with superb simple implementation measures, which makes it perfect for the small business crowd. Ecwid Change Theme
Click Here to register up to Ecwid now!