Key Tool: EcWid
Key tool Easywood
EcWid is an e-commerce platform that you can easily embed it into your website. Powered by Ajax, this free tool can significantly expand the functionality of your online store. If you know me well then you're probably aware that almost all of my sites are hosted by Weebly. EcWid is very easily embedded into Weebly.
Features
Nice back-end console for organizing your products. Products are highly customizable with custom options, pricing adjustments, multiple image uploads with descriptions, multiple shipping calculation techniqures, a ton of payment providers.
*Note that the free account only let you create 10 products. With the next level account they call venture you can have up to 100 products use custom coupon codes and get additional support from the EC win team.*
Advantages over Weebly
The main thing I did not like about Weebly business accounts is that it wouldn’t save a customer's orders. If you were to order from my site once, twice, or even five times you would have to keep entering your payment and shipping information every time. If you had a group of items that you really liked and always purchased you would still have to go through the store and add them to your cart every time. This may not sound like such a huge hassle, but it will cost you orders in the long run. Also, I want to make the experience as painless as intuitive as possible for my customers. The EcWid platform has a built-in simple login system where the user can see saved shipping addresses and previous orders (for secure reasons it does not store payment information).
When checking out, however, the user does not necessarily have to make an account. They can check out as a guest and just put in their card shipping information without anything being saved at all.
Another advantage of EcWid is that you can have multiple payment options and give your user lots of choices. For example, you could give customers the choice of paying with PayPal, with a simple credit card form, with a check, with money transfer, or even by calling in to give payment information.
Favorites
Another feature of EcWid that I really like is the favorites option. There's a little heart in the corner of the image for each picture, and when you click this it is added to a favorites list. At the top of the EcWid embedded window near the sign in button is a link to go to your favorites page. This is a nice feature because users can choose products they like and add them to a list without having to commit to buying them by putting them in the shopping cart.
Lacking features
After messaging the support team there are a few features that are just completely absent in EcWid. Although I definitely recommend this platform for e-commerce you should be aware of these drawbacks:
No support for additional users on an account. It would be nice to be able to create accounts for other employees so each person can have their own username and password and specified access privileges but still see a shared product catalog. This is not currently supported at this time and the EcWid support team basically told me to just give all the employees the same username password login information to a shared account.
No Amazon payment method. Although EcWid offers a number of payment options Amazon is sadly not one of them. It seems that many of the users of EcWid are angry and frequently complain about this lacking feature.