Introduction Ecwid Square

Have you ever Wondered if you’re using the ideal ecommerce platform for sale online? Can you sometimes stumble upon a new service that’s more practical and cheaper than what you’re using now? Starting a small business is all about keeping your prices low, and finding an ecommerce platform to help you with half the battle. Unfortunately, when you operate a small company site it frequently becomes tricky once you would like to attract on a new ecommerce platform or perhaps just modify your site at all. Read our Ecwid review to find out more about this option. Ecwid Square

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Many solutions Purposefully make a closed system, which is tedious to maneuver away from once you get started. However, with a stage named Ecwid, you do not need to worry about it. Actually, the whole aim of the company, which started in 2009, is to quickly and inexpensively make an internet store system in your existing websites.

You do not have To create a whole new site. Just apply Ecwid on any stage, CMS or social network (in five minutes) and you’re all set.

That increased my Attention, because I know the struggles that come along with trying to migrate sites, especially in regards to ecommerce. So, I wanted to gather an in-depth review of this Ecwid system to see whether it’s worth the time.

How Many Men and Women Use Ecwid?

It’s rather Impressive what Ecwid has done since 2009, with over 1 million merchants getting signed up. What’s even more cool is that the Ecwid merchants span over 175 different countries, showing that this isn’t just a platform for most people in the united states or Europe. Even businesses in developing countries have a chance to get an online store going, and you do not even have to squander your prior site if you have one.

The usership Continues to grow, particularly considering Ecwid is now PCI DSS Level 1 accredited. If you’re not certain what this is, it is pretty much the gold standard for security in the ecommerce world. You can rest easy knowing you and your customers’ information is safe and secure.

Along with The total merchant count, over 20,000 active users are utilizing the Ecwid Shopping Cart for WordPress. The difference between that 20,000 and also the 1 million is the simple fact you don’t require a WordPress site in order to implement Ecwid. So, the 20,000 only identifies WordPress users using the plugin.

What’s Ecwid, and how does this function?

Ecwid is a hosted Alternative for building an internet shop. Unlike competing products like Shopify, Bigcommerce and Volusion, which allow you to build a new site with e-commerce functionality, Ecwid is geared more towards people who currently have a website and just want to add an internet store to it.

Much like other E-commerce platforms, Ecwid lets you set up’catalogs’ of all goods, and include photos, pricing, weight etc. for each. You can specify shipping rates, accept credit card payments etc — all the key stuff that you would expect to be able to do with an e-commerce alternative.

However it differs Significantly from competing products like Shopify, Volusion, Squarespace and Bigcommerce since it isn’t really designed to allow you to create a fully-featured, standalone e-commerce site; instead, it’s designed to allow you add an internet store to an present online presence.

(That said, Ecwid have Recently added some new functionality, known as’Starter Website’, that does let you produce a one-page standalone offering. We’ll talk via this in more detail later on in the inspection.) Ecwid Square

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The Product works by providing you a widget that gets placed on other sites — hence the name Ecwid: it’s short for’E-commerce Widget’. You get a couple lines of HTML code (the widget) to add into an existing website or social networking profile, and your shop is displayed wherever you’ve added this code.

Features

Ecwid makes Strides in the market by catering to businesses that don’t want to start 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 different sites if you anticipate selling elsewhere on the web. Manage all of these websites from 1 location instead of switching between multiple dashboards.

Another pleasant Feature is that the syncing between multiple devices. Sell on-the-go together with your smartphone. This means that you can go to a tradeshow to generate a few sales and each one of these earnings are represented onto the backend of your website.

The system is Also made to integrate nicely with social networks, so that you may sell your items on Facebook if desired. One part of Ecwid that we particularly enjoy is the shipping aspect. With real time shipping integrations you always know what’s happening with your requests and at which they’re being shipped to.

What other cool Items are comprised with Ecwid?

It runs on a super quick framework

It comes with an address book for customers and customers

The machine has over 43 translations for selling round the planet

You receive a Lot of promotional instruments like coupons, discounts, bulk pricing and more

Create your personalized email notifications

Use the automatic tax alternative (automatic tax charges at checkout, tax reporting and submitting )

Point-of-sale functionality

Thanks Into Ecwid’s point-of-sale (POS) functionality, you may use your Ecwid store to sell not only online but in physical locations too — in stores, market stalls, at concerts and so forth.

With Ecwid’s POS Performance, irrespective of if a customer buys a product in store, online, on their telephone or via Facebook, everything remains in sync – i.e., the retailer’s catalogue, inventory and customer / transaction info.

There’s a couple of methods you can take advantage of this attribute: the easiest is likely to use’Paypal Here.’ This involves downloading the Ecwid iOS app from the Apple’s App shop, connecting it to the Paypal Here service, then taking payments utilizing a mobile card reader (pictured above).

You’ve got two choices when it comes to POS Hardware and Paypal Here: you can buy a processor and swipe reader (for $24.99) or a chip and tap reader (for $79.99). Both can be ordered straight from Ecwid.

There’s a couple of Things worth noting the Paypal Here integration: it’s only available to merchants in the US and UK. Second, it is not yet available on Android apparatus. (On their website, Ecwid say it will be available soon — but they have been saying that for quite some time now). Ecwid Square

If you’re based outside That the US / UK, or need to work with another mobile device kind, the fantastic thing is that Ecwid also works together with all the Vend, Clover, NCR Silver and Square POS systems. These all facilitate utilizing a larger selection of hardware at a physical retail location (full-sized card readers, receipt printers, cash drawers pill racks etc.) and are usable in more countries.

Although you could avail Of the Paypal Here POS choice on all paid-for plans, you will need to be on the most expensive’Unlimited’ plan if you would like to avail of a Vend, Clover, NCR Silver or Square integration.

Reactive storefronts

Ecwid Storefronts are responsive, meaning they will display correctly across devices — desktopcomputer, tablet computers and cellular. In a age where smartphone web browsing is eclipsing desktop surfing, this is important.

Free plan

Unlike many similar Goods, Ecwid offers a completely free program.

Granted, it’s a pretty Basic plan, where attributes such as discount coupons and support aren’t accessible, and it merely allows you to sell up to ten products in two classes — but this could really be adequate for some customers, and using it is a good way to try the system out.

However, A key point to note about the free plan is that it is not good from an SEO point of view — you need to be on a paid program to make certain that your product pages talk to search engines correctly (more on SEO under ).

Language detection

Ecwid is ahead of the Pack because its storefronts can be automatically translated into nearly 50 distinct languages — clients can view your store in their own language, without you having to worry about producing alternate versions of this. Ecwid provides this performance by detecting visitors’ language automatically based on their browser preferences / IP address.

Competing products like Shopify And Bigcommerce are nevertheless to supply this type of performance — that they force you to rely on third party programs, the creation of numerous shops or Google Translate to provide different language versions of your store, which is less than ideal. Therefore a definite triumph for Ecwid here.

Ecwid and search engine optimisation

Search engine Optimisation (SEO) in Ecwid is a pretty straightforward affair. You can edit the name of your webpage and its own meta description; the relevant fields are pre-populated for you automatically, however you can tweak them to match your search engine optimization objectives.

As far as I could tell However, you can’t manually change the URL of a product — you need to make do with the one that Ecwid generates for you. This isn’t perfect because key words in URLs are used by some search engines to categorise content during indexing.

However, The URLs that are automatically generated by Ecwid include the name you’ve given to your product – so in the event that you include some keywords on your product title (maybe not a bad idea anyway) that your URL will include them also. This functions as something of a workaround, but I would prefer whole control over URLs. Ecwid Square

One area where Ecwid does not perform quite so Well on the SEO front entails AMP — accelerated mobile pages. As the name suggests, AMP pages load quicker on mobile devices. This encourages people to stay longer on your webpage, thus increasing’live time’ –something which is considered by many SEO experts consider to be rewarded by Google with preferential treatment in search results. Additionally, Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in carousels in search results, providing AMP articles an extra little boost.

Unfortunately However — and unlike rival products such as Bigcommerce or Shopify, you can’t create AMP variations of your products using Ecwid.

Importing and exporting information

Like many competing Products Ecwid permits you to import and export your data in CSV format.

The Export option allows you to export merchandise data, orders and customers (again, in CSV format) and means that should you feel the need to migrate your shop to another e-commerce platform, then you should not have some significant problems doing so.

Utilizing Ecwid with other programs

Ecwid and Twitter

WordPress doesn’t Supplied any e-commerce functionality out of the box, so anyone wishing to market on the stage will need a third-party alternative 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 few clicks.

You simply sign up for an Ecwid account and install the free plugin.

Ecwid and Squarespace

Squarespace includes Increasingly good e-commerce attributes, but the number of payment gateway options is very limited — you have to utilize Stripe or Paypal. (And with Stripe only functions if you are selling products from particular countries). The other main problem with the built-in Squarespace marketing tools is that they don’t facilitate dropshipping, and full export of products is not currently possible.

Integrating Ecwid with Squarespace permits you to bypass these limitations, and adding it to a Squarespace website is very easy: it’s a simple matter of including a code block to a page and pasting some HTML into it.

Ecwid and Wix

As With Squarespace, there’s currently no dropshipping option for Wix users, therefore again Ecwid can offer a good workaround. A committed program is offered by Ecwid to enable you integrate the item onto a Wix store easily.

Programs and plugins

Ecwid provides a pretty Restricted number integrations with other apps that are well-known. Integrations do exist together with key services Mailchimp, Xero and Freshbooks; but to be honest the range of integrations may be more extensive — competing products such as Shopify provide a much broader range of programs. Notable omissions from the Ecwid store include Quickbooks and Zendesk, for example (that said, a Quickbooks integration is coming shortly ).

The Image is better when it comes to CMS plugins: All these are offered for WordPress, Wix and Joomla, allowing for you to set up Ecwid on one of these platforms very easily. Ecwid Square

Interface and ease of use

Ecwid’s Interface is rather easy to use. Like most similar online store builders, you get a vertical menu on the left which allows you to access key performance, and the place on the right is used to display or edit related products, website content and reports.

As with any e-commerce tool, you’ll need to Spend a fair amount of time getting your head about producing catalogues and product variants, establishing transport rates etc…but there is nothing that should represent also much of a learning curve.

Matters are helped by an ‘onboarding checklist’ that’s provided to you once you log in for the first time.

If You are stuck nonetheless, you could always get in contact with Ecwid’s support staff — more on this later — or, if you’re on a’Business’ or’Unlimited’, you can make the most of the included customization service (you get 2 hours and 12 hours personalization period from Ecwidon these plans).

Ecwid and GDPR

I am not a Attorney, so please note the below observations should not be interpreted as legal advice, but I am going to do my best to spell out a number of the key GDPR issues facing Ecwid consumers under.

With the introduction of The EU’s new GDPR legislation, there are several legal measures that site owners now need to take to ensure that they are adequately protecting EU clients’ and visitors’ privacy. There are severe financial penalties for not doing so (to the point where it’s usually a great idea to consult an attorney about what to do); and even if your business is not located in the EU, you still will need to obey the regulations where any site visits in the EU are worried.

According to my Understanding of the crucial GDPR principles, the main priorities for prospective Ecwid shop owners are to:

· Provide adequate privacy and cookie cutter notices

· Process and store data safely

· Get explicit permission from those signing up to mailing lists it is okay to send them e-newsletters

· Provide a way to opt in or revoke permission to use of non-essential biscuits on a website (and to log that consent).

There does not seem to be Whatever stops you meeting the first three requirements readily enough with Ecwid, although you will have to devote 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 consent. To Guarantee GDPR compliance, You Have to display a cookie cutter banner to your customers which

· Allows them to select which cookies they want to conduct BEFORE those cookies are conducted (i.e., to provide’prior consent’)

· Logs their approval to run cookies Ecwid Square

· Enables them to revoke consent at a later stage

So for Instance, If you Use a Facebook Ads cookie in combination with your Ecwid shop, you will be breaking up GDPR legislation unless you have a banner set up which does all of the above.

Now, out of the box at There isn’t a way to deal with the cookie approval issue with Ecwid. Nor is there an adequate program accessible from the Ecwid app store (the only option on this front I can locate, the’EU cookie banner’, does not seem to provide the necessary functionality — even though costing $1.99 a month to utilize ).

It Seems to me that the only option available to Ecwid users would be to use a professional product such as CookiePro, which will provide all the essential performance to make cookie approval fully GDPR compliant. Despite being a strong product nonetheless, Cookiepro does require quite a lot of configuration and you’ll want to set quite a lot of time apart to set this up.

Installation and Design

I Truly like The fact that you can run a web site without paying for anything. This makes the installation process that much easier, because you simply need to punch in your email and make a password to proceed straight to the backend interface.

The system has Wizards for every platform you want to set your shop on. If you’ve got a WordPress site, simply walk through three steps to get up and running. You can also click on options like Facebook and Joomla, based on where you would like to sell.

The backend Design is perfect, because it walks you through each website creation and integration step with some nice photos and text. As soon as you get your shop implemented on a website or social page it looks fairly slick.

The design Depends somewhat on the theme you’ve got on your site, but as you can see below, it displays photos well and appears clean and easy to navigate. I especially enjoy the Shopping Bag area, which can be outstanding and easy to find for customers when they want to checkout.

Although many Websites will be mobile friendly, it;s fine knowing that Ecwid involves a native shopping application for both iOS and Android. Merchants now get a native shopping program for iOS and Android.

This means you Can mange your store and sell on the move, while also giving your customers an opportunity to get products from the mobile interface.

The closing Design thing which makes sense to mention is the language tool. Since running an online store generally requires you to attain out to individuals from throughout the world, you are bound to stumble upon a few customers who would love to read product pages and other content in their native tongue. Ecwid supports 45 languages, so when a user wants to translate from English into Spanish, that is no problem at all.

The Ecwid Program Economy

Possessing the Opportunity to put in applications is a sure fire way to scaling your ecommerce website in a fair manner. Ecwid has a place known as the Ecwid App Market. It provides 65 software, helping retailers extend their shop performance easily. Ecwid Square

A Few of the programs Will help you out with rating and reviews, rewards programs, automated advertising tools, analytics, customized layout themes and more.

SEO and Marketing

Ecwid is a Third party solution to your present site, so you’d typically have to implement additional SEO and advertising tools to truly get out the word. That said, Ecwid supplies quality SEO features to help merchants increase their visibility in Google searches.

Moreover, Google now indexes AJAX websites, therefore all Ecwid stores are indexed by Google without any extra work. It gets better with WordPress websites, since you acquire access to additional search engine optimization plugins as well as also the default search engine functionality around the dashboard.

Managing Your Inventory

The Ecwid Inventory system is as straightforward as they come, because it doesn’t seem to include any of those unnecessary bells and whistles you might find on other ecommerce platforms.

Each step is Clear and concise, so you may just go in there and sort in a product name, price and picture then save the merchandise for afterwards. Of course you can always open up the Powerful Options, but they separate these for if you’re all set to start ramping up your own store.

As an example of the stock Rich management toolset, you gain access to things like from stock merchandise tracking, mobile device inventory management, barcode scanning and much more.

Customer Support

Ecwid offers A Chat With Earnings attribute which is one of my favourite ways to converse with companies. Simply send them a query and you are able to work on something else until they respond.

The company also Provides a potent support department with FAQs, a knowledge base, email capabilities and a forum.

Overall, the Service outlets include telephone service, online chat service and email support, maintaining the response time brief and support quality high.

In my mind, the Platform has all you might want concerning support.

Payments and Safety

It’s not always Easy to locate an ecommerce platform which doesn’t charge transaction fees, but that is just what you get with Ecwid. They never control any kind of trade fee with any of the programs they offer, making it desirable for any store that’s trying to keep down costs and also to improve margins.

Remember that Ecwid is not a payment processor, which means you have to set up something such as PayPal or Stripe to process all the trades that come through your site. It’s rather simple to employ these systems, since Ecwid incorporates with over 40 international payment choices. However, each of those processors have their particular trade fees so you need to get ready for these.

It’s rather Clear that Ecwid takes security seriously, since the company is a PCI DSS Level 1 accredited supplier. The company also states that every trade that includes sensitive data is transferred via a secure HTTPS channel. Ecwid Square

Imagine if you Would love to accumulate both online and offline payments? Maybe you’d like 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.

Advantages and disadvantages of using Ecwid

Advantages

· Ecwid represents a really easy way to add e-commerce to some existing website.

· Point-of-sale performance is available, and there are quite a few strategies to apply it.

· The item is cheap by comparison to other solutions.

· It supports multi-language versions of your store.

· The shop layouts are responsive.

· Plugins / programs are available for major platforms (such as WordPress, Drupal and Wix).

· It permits users of website building products that don’t facilitate dropshipping to begin 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 develop a full site to add the Ecwid widget to.

· The free Ecwid plan isn’t time-limited, includes support, and is rather generous in terms of attributes.

Cons

· 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 limited number of programs / integrations offered from the Ecwid App shop.

· You can’t alter product URLs, which is slightly annoying from an search engine optimization point of view.

· You can’t create AMP versions of merchandise pages using Ecwid.

· Creating Ecwid GDPR-compliant (with respect to getting cookie approval ) sounds difficult.

· The free version doesn’t allow you to access any of the SEO tools.

Pricing

Ecwid comes With four strategies, one of which is totally free. They market the free plan like mad, and mention that many different platforms drag you into a free trial, even where you will eventually have to pay.

That is where Ecwid stands out, and you can see that the other payment plans are rather affordable.

The Free plan Allows you to sell 10 products, whereas the Venture plan ups that depend to 100 goods and you get things like an iPhone management program. The Business plan goes up to 2500 products for a wonderful price and you also get live chat support. Priority support comes along with the Unlimited program and you can also sell an unlimited number of merchandise.

Ecwid is one of The cheapest solutions on the market. You can see that it is actually more affordable than many of the other platforms we’ve reviewed in the past, so if you’re looking for value, this might be the right plugin for you.

Conclusion

In short, I am Beginning to believe that Ecwid is among the greatest ways to market online, provided that you implement the best ways to improve your earnings online too. Ecwid is a slick system, with superb simple implementation steps, making it ideal for the small business crowd. Ecwid Square

Click Here to register up to Ecwid now!