Introduction Opencart

Have you ever Wondered if you are using the right ecommerce platform for sale on the internet? Do you occasionally stumble upon a new service that’s more practical and more economical than what you’re using today? Starting a small business is all about keeping your costs low, and locating an ecommerce platform to assist you with half the battle. Unfortunately, when you operate a small business site it often becomes tricky when you want to bring on a new ecommerce platform or even just modify your site at all. Read our Ecwid review to discover more about this option. Opencart

Click Here to sign up to Ecwid today!

Many options Intentionally create a closed system, which can be tedious to move away from once you begin. However, with a stage called Ecwid, you do not need to worry about it. Actually, the whole aim of the business, which started in 2009, would be to quickly and quickly make an internet store system in your present websites.

You do not have To create a completely different site. Just implement Ecwid on any stage, CMS or social networking (in five minutes) and you’re good to go.

This raised my Attention, because I understand the struggles that come along with attempting to migrate websites, particularly when it comes to ecommerce. So, I wanted to put together a comprehensive review of this Ecwid system to see whether it is worth the time.

How Many Men and Women Use Ecwid?

It is rather Remarkable what Ecwid has done 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 isn’t just a platform for most people in the united states or Europe. Even businesses in developing countries have a opportunity to get an online store going, and you don’t have to trash your previous website in case you have one.

The usership Continues to grow, particularly considering Ecwid is currently PCI DSS Level 1 certified. If you are 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’ data is safe and secure.

In addition to The total 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 simple fact that you don’t need a WordPress site to implement Ecwid. So, the 20,000 simply identifies WordPress users with the plugin.

What is Ecwid, and how does it function?

Ecwid is a hosted Solution for building an internet store. Unlike competing products such as Shopify, Bigcommerce and Volusion, which allow you to construct a new site with e-commerce functionality, Ecwid is geared more towards people who already have a website and just wish to add an online store to it.

Much like other E-commerce platforms, Ecwid lets you install’catalogs’ of all goods, and add photographs, pricing, weight etc. for each. You are able to define shipping rates, accept credit card payments etc — all of the key things that you’d expect to be able to perform using an e-commerce solution.

However it differs Apart from competing products such as Shopify, Volusion, Squarespace and Bigcommerce since it is not really designed to allow you to produce a fully-featured, standalone e-commerce website; instead, it’s intended to enable 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 create a one-page standalone offering. We are going to talk via this in more detail later on in the review.) Opencart

Click Here to register up to Ecwid today!

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

Features

Ecwid makes Strides in the market by catering to companies which don’t need to begin a brand-new site. The main attribute is that you can take your old site and immediately integrate the Ecwid system inside a couple of minutes.

You can also Mirror the machine onto several different sites if you plan on selling elsewhere on the web. Handle all these websites from one location rather than switching between multiple dashboards.

Another nice Attribute is the syncing between multiple devices. Sell on-the-go with your smartphone. This usually means you could visit a tradeshow to generate a few sales and all these earnings are represented onto the back part of your website.

The system is Also made to integrate nicely with social networks, so that you can sell your items on Facebook if desired. 1 part of Ecwid that we particularly enjoy is the delivery facet. With real-time transport integrations you constantly know what is happening with your orders and at which they are being shipped to.

What other cool Things are included with Ecwid?

It runs on a super fast frame

It comes with an address book for customers and customers

The system has over 43 translations for selling round the planet

You get lots of promotional tools such as vouchers, discounts, bulk pricing and much more

Create your own customized email alerts

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

Point-of-sale performance

Thanks To Ecwid’s point-of-sale (POS) functionality, you may use your Ecwid shop to market not just online but in bodily locations too — in stores, market stalls, in concerts and so on.

Together with Ecwid’s POS Performance, regardless of if a customer purchases a product in shop, online, on their phone or via Facebook, everything stays in sync – i.e., the retailer’s catalogue, inventory and customer / transaction information.

There is a few ways that you can take advantage of this feature: the simplest is likely to use’Paypal Here.’ This involves downloading the Ecwid iOS app from the Apple’s App store, linking it to the Paypal Here service, then taking payments using a mobile card reader (pictured above).

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

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

If you are located outside That the US / UK, or need to work with another mobile device kind, the good news is that Ecwid also functions with all the Vend, Clover, NCR Silver and Square POS systems. These all facilitate using a wider range of hardware in a physical retail location (full-sized card readers, receipt printers, cash drawers pill stands etc.) and are usable in more nations.

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

Responsive storefronts

Ecwid Storefronts are responsive, meaning that they will display properly across apparatus — desktopcomputer, tablet and cellular. In an era where smartphone web browsing is eclipsing desktop surfing, this is vital.

Free plan

Unlike many similar Goods, Ecwid provides a completely free plan.

Granted, it is a fairly Basic plan, where features such as discount coupons and service aren’t available, and it only lets you sell up to ten products in 2 categories — but this could actually be adequate for some customers, and using it’s a good way to try out the system.

However, A vital point to notice about the free plan is that it is not great from an SEO standpoint — you need to be on a paid plan to make certain that your product pages talk to search engines correctly (more on SEO under ).

Speech detection

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

Competing products like Shopify And Bigcommerce are yet to provide this sort of functionality — they force you to rely on third party programs, the production of numerous shops or Google Translate to provide different language variations of your store, which is less than perfect. Therefore a definite triumph for Ecwid here.

Ecwid and search engine optimisation

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

As far as I can tell But you can’t manually change the URL of a product — you have to make do with the one which Ecwid generates for you. This is not ideal 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 title you’ve given to your product – so in the event that you include some keywords in your product name (maybe not a bad idea anyway) your URL will comprise them too. This functions as something of a workaround, but I’d prefer whole control over URLs. Opencart

1 place where Ecwid does not perform so Well on the search engine optimization front involves AMP — accelerated cellular 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 that’s believed by many SEO experts consider to be rewarded with Google with preferential treatment in search results. Furthermore, Google occasionally highlights AMP webpages in carousels in search results, giving AMP content an extra little boost.

Unfortunately However — and unlike most competing products such as Bigcommerce or Shopify, you can not create AMP versions of your products using Ecwid.

Importing and exporting information

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

The Export option allows you to export merchandise information, orders and customers (in CSV format) and ensures that should you ever feel the need to migrate your shop to a different e-commerce platform, then you shouldn’t have some significant difficulties doing so.

Using Ecwid with other programs

Ecwid and WordPress

WordPress doesn’t Provided any e-commerce performance from this box, so anybody wishing to market on the stage will require a third-party alternative like Ecwid. There’s an Ecwid plugin available, so adding an Ecwid shop to your WordPress site is very straightforward — you can get up and running with a couple clicks.

You simply sign up to get an Ecwid accounts and then install the free plugin.

Ecwid and Squarespace

Squarespace comes with Increasingly excellent e-commerce attributes, but the amount of payment gateway options is quite limited — you have to utilize Stripe or Paypal. (And using Stripe only functions if you’re selling goods from particular countries). Another main problem with the built-in Squarespace marketing tools is that they don’t facilitate dropshipping, and complete export of products is not currently possible.

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

Ecwid and Wix

As With Squarespace, there’s currently no dropshipping choice for Wix users, therefore again Ecwid can provide a good workaround. A dedicated app is provided by Ecwid to enable you incorporate the product on a Wix shop easily.

Apps and plugins

Ecwid provides a fairly Restricted number integrations with other well-known apps. Integrations do exist with services Mailchimp, Xero and Freshbooks; but to be fair the range of integrations could be more extensive — competing products such as Shopify provide a much broader range of apps. Notable omissions in the Ecwid store comprise Quickbooks and Zendesk, such as (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 for you to set up Ecwid on these platforms quite easily. Opencart

Interface and ease of use

Ecwid’s Interface is rather user friendly. Like most similar online store builders, you receive a vertical menu on the left which lets you access key functionality, and the area on the right is used to display or edit related products, website reports and content.

As with any e-commerce tool, you will have to Spend a fair amount of time getting your head around producing catalogues and product variations, establishing shipping prices and so on…but there is nothing that should represent too a lot of a learning curve.

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

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

Ecwid and GDPR

I’m not a Lawyer, so please be aware the below observations should not be interpreted as legal advice, but I’m going to do my very best to spell out a number of the major GDPR issues facing Ecwid consumers under.

With the introduction of That the EU’s new GDPR laws, there are several legal steps that website owners now should take to ensure that they are adequately protecting EU customers’ and visitors’ privacy. There are serious financial penalties for not doing this (to the point where it is typically a great idea to consult a lawyer on what to do); and even when your business isn’t based in the EU, then you still will need to comply with the regulations where any website visits in the EU are concerned.

According to my Understanding of the crucial GDPR rules, the principal priorities for potential Ecwid shop owners would be to:

· Provide adequate privacy and cookie cutter notices

· Process and store information safely

· Get explicit consent from people signing up to mailing lists it is fine to send them e-newsletters

· Provide a means to opt in or revoke consent to use of non-essential cookies on a site (and to log that approval ).

There doesn’t seem to be Anything that stops you meeting the first three requirements easily enough with Ecwid, although you will have to devote time and possibly money creating adequate notices and crafting information capture forms so they are GDPR compliant.

Where things get Complicated with Ecwid is your fourth requirement — cookie approval. To ensure GDPR compliance, you need to display a cookie cutter banner to your customers which

· Allows them to choose which cookies they want to conduct BEFORE those biscuits are run (i.e., to give’prior consent’)

· Logs their approval to run biscuits Opencart

· Allows them to revoke approval at a later point

So for example, if you Use a Facebook Advertising cookie in conjunction with your Ecwid store, you will be breaking up GDPR laws unless you’ve got a banner in place which does all of the above.

Nowout of the box at There is not a means to take care of the cookie approval issue with Ecwid. Nor is there a decent program available from the Ecwid app store (the only alternative on this front that I can locate, the’EU cookie banner’, doesn’t seem to supply 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 professional product like CookiePro, which will provide all the necessary performance to make cookie approval fully GDPR compliant. Despite being a powerful product nonetheless, Cookiepro does need quite a great deal of configuration and you’ll want to set quite a great deal of time aside to set this up.

Setup and Design

I really enjoy The fact that you’re able to run a web site without paying anything. This makes the setup process that much simpler, because you simply have to punch in your email and make a password to proceed straight to the backend interface.

The machine has Wizards for each platform you want to place your shop on. If you’ve got a WordPress site, simply walk through three steps to get up and running. You could also click on options like Facebook and Joomla, depending on the place you would like to sell.

The backend Design is perfect, since it walks you through every website creation and integration measure with a few 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 subject you’ve got on your website, however 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 prominent and easy to find for customers when they wish to checkout.

Though many Sites will be cellular friendly, its nice knowing that Ecwid includes a native shopping application for both iOS and Android. Merchants now receive a native shopping application for iOS and Android.

This means you Can mange your store and market on the move, while also providing your clients a chance to get products from the mobile interface.

The closing Design item that makes sense to mention is your language instrument. Since running an online store generally requires you to attain out to individuals from throughout the planet, you’re bound to stumble upon a few customers who would like to read product webpages and other content in their native tongue. Ecwid supports 45 languages, so if a user would like to translate from English into Spanish, that is no problem in any respect.

The Ecwid Program Economy

Possessing the Chance to install software is a sure fire way to scaling up your ecommerce website in a fair way. Ecwid includes a place called the Ecwid App Market. It provides 65 applications, helping retailers extend their shop performance easily. Opencart

A Few of the apps Can help you out with reviews and rating, rewards programs, automated advertising tools, analytics, customized layout topics and much more.

SEO and Marketing

Ecwid is a Third-party remedy to your present site, so you’d normally need to implement additional SEO and marketing 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 sites, so all Ecwid shops are indexed by Google without any excess work. It gets better with WordPress websites, since you gain access to additional SEO plugins as well as also the default search engine performance around the dashboard.

Managing Your Inventory

The Ecwid Inventory process is as simple as they come, because it doesn’t appear to include any of those unnecessary bells and whistles you might find on other e commerce platforms.

Each step is Clear and concise, so that you can just go in there and sort in a product name, price and image then save the merchandise for afterwards. Obviously you could always open the Powerful Options, but they different these for when you are ready to start ramping up your store.

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

Customer Care

Ecwid offers A Chat With Earnings feature that is one of my favourite ways to talk to companies. Only send them a query and you can work on something else until they respond.

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

Overall, the Support outlets include phone support, online chat support and email support, keeping the response time short and encourage quality .

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

Payments and Safety

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

Remember that Ecwid is not a payment processor, so you’ve got to set up something like PayPal or Stripe to process all the trades that come through your site. It is pretty easy to implement these systems, because Ecwid integrates with over 40 international payment options. However, each of those processors have their own trade fees so you need to prepare for them.

It’s rather Clear that Ecwid takes security seriously, because the provider is a PCI DSS Level 1 certified service provider. The company also claims that each trade that includes sensitive data is transferred via a secure HTTPS channel. Opencart

Imagine if you Would love to collect both offline and online payments? Maybe you’d like a point of sale integration?

Ecwid Integrates together with Square, Clover, Vend POS, iZettle and PayPal card readers, allowing Ecwid to turn your operation into both an online and offline system.

Advantages and disadvantages of utilizing Ecwid

Benefits

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

· Point-of-sale functionality is available, and there are a number of strategies to apply it.

· The item is cheap by comparison to other alternatives.

· It supports multi-language versions of your shop.

· The store designs are responsive.

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

· It allows users of website building products that don’t facilitate dropshipping to start doing this (i.e., Squarespace, Jimdo, Wix etc.. )

· The’starter site’ option is a good stopgap measure for merchants who want a shop quickly, but have yet to create a complete site to add the Ecwid widget to.

· The free Ecwid plan is not time-limited, includes service, and is fairly generous in terms of features.

Cons

· The Paypal Here POS system is Limited to the US and UK.

· The Paypal This POS process is limited to iOS users.

· Telephone support is only available on the more expensive programs.

· There is a limited number of apps / integrations available in the Ecwid Program store.

· You can not change product URLs, which is slightly annoying from an SEO point of view.

· You can not create AMP versions of product pages using Ecwid.

· Making Ecwid GDPR-compliant (with respect to obtaining cookie consent) seems hard.

· The free version doesn’t let you access any of the search engine optimization tools.

Pricing

Ecwid comes With four plans, one of which is totally free. They market the free plan like crazy, and mention that a number of different platforms drag you into a free trial, where you will finally need to pay.

This is where Ecwid stands out, and you’ll be able to 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 products and you get things like an iPhone direction app. The company program goes up to 2500 products for a wonderful price and you get live chat support. Priority support comes alongside the Unlimited program and you can also market an unlimited number of merchandise.

Ecwid is one of The most economical solutions available on the marketplace. You can see that it is actually cheaper than many of the other platforms we’ve reviewed previously, so if you’re searching for value, this could be the perfect plugin for you.

Wrap-up

In short, I am Beginning to believe that Ecwid is among the greatest ways to sell online, provided that you implement the best methods to enhance your sales online too. Ecwid is a sleek system, with super simple implementation measures, making it perfect for the small business audience. Opencart

Click Here to sign up to Ecwid today!