{Image by Poketo via Andrea Hubbell via Pinterest}
I have been selling online for a good few years now – and for over a year I’ve been searching for the best e-commerce solution to use on my own dot com.
All my blogs/sites are run on WordPress, so of course I began by looking for a good shopping cart plugin. I tried one… and it was okay. But it was buggy, and customers kept getting error messages. Not exactly what you want when you’re trying to make a sale!
So, I thought I’d try another – a paid one. Of course, I assumed that if I was paying for it, it would work out-of-the-box, right? Wrong. As soon as I installed it it made my WHOLE site go black. Black screen. So I contacted them and got a refund on that one.
Finally, I turned in desperation to the font of all knowledge… I asked on twitter! Lo and behold, someone had the answer for me… and that answer was Ecwid. No, I’m not an affiliate, but I am so damn happy about their service so far that you should prepare for a rant – the good kind! This is what my site looks like at the moment, with the Ecwid cart installed.
Why it is Awesome
It works.
Seriously, that is THE most important thing! It works smoothly, it allows your customers a pleasant buying experience, and it’s clear and straight-forward for both them AND you.
Ecwid works a little differently to a regular shopping cart. You actually do all your editing and product adding on the Ecwid site, in your own private dashboard.
The only change you ever make to your own website is to put in a few snippets of code, which embed the Ecwid shopping cart into your site.
One benefit of this is that it is easy to put your whole cart and products on more than one site if you want to – and you also don’t need to be very tech savvy at all! You just need to know where to cut and paste the code to – and if you have a WordPress-based-site, you can insert it right into the html editor of a page on your site.
It’s easy to set up all the options you could possibly want in your Ecwid dashboard – including shipping and payment options – and you can add as many product thumbnails as you like (to my knowledge).
So, to stop me rambling – in short, I would recommend you try this x100 if you’ve got a small online craft business. Or even a big one!
Now, lets have a quick look at how the Ecwid cart looks on my site, Epheriell.com
You can see the ‘shopping bag’ prominently in the sidebar, with an integrated search box underneath.
The products are laid out in neat categories, and the customer can choose between the type of view they’d like (list, gallery etc).
It’s clean, simple and uncluttered – perfect!
Now, here’s how the products look:
A Few Caveats
No, it’s not all sunshine and lollypops, though it’s pretty close. Ecwid makes their money by selling upgrades to paid services (even then, may I add, they’re cheaper than pretty much any alternative I’ve found with the same features, and I am *this close* to upgrading, myself). What this means for you as a free user, is:
- you can only have up to 100 products
- you can’t use coupon codes
- you can’t optimise your site for seo – it’s ajax-based and so needs a special additional program to do this… which you have to be a paid member to access
- as well as a few other bits and pieces….
But, really, it’s a brilliant tool for anyone who has a smaller inventory (I’m looking at you, fellow crafters!).
Awesome! Thank you. I love the look of your site and I will have to check it out.
Thank you so much for this post Jess.
I’ve been starting to seriously think and want to add a shopping cart to my website, and with a very limited budget think that this may well be a great solution.
I was in your shop the other day – playing with the cart. I like how you drag and drop your items to the shopping cart.
Thanks again Jess.
Cheers,
Tasha
Brilliant! I would love to add a shopping cart to my blog and maybe drop (dare I say it?) Etsy.
Found you via twitter, by the way. Your newest follower. Love all your advice on crafty business.
Thanks for the recommendation Jess. I know you are an experienced and savvy biz woman so I like taking advice from you!
Wow! Thank you for sharing this information and saving some of us a ton of time! Your on-line shop is the best small business one I’ve ever seen. (By small, I mean anything smaller than a huge US chain store. In fact, it looks better than some huge stores’ sites.) Thanks again!
AWESOME!
I’m really going to try this one out. Thanks heaps Jess. x
Oh, yes…big thumbs up for Ecwid. I’ve got their cart on my site and love it…when I’ve got something in my shop, anyway
So great to help you ladies out… seriously, I was tearing my hair out trying to find a good solution before I found this!
So excited about this. Thanks Jess!
Has anyone questioned the security factor? I’ve had people tell me that they’d rather shop on etsy because they “know it is secure”.
Amy, that’s a good point, and not to my knowledge, but that’s not something people would tend to contact you about, they’d just go elsewhere.
However, I choose to have my payments processed through paypal, so that’s pretty secure!
Hi Jess,
I am not sure if you have used ‘wix’ but I am making a small site there, to sell a few electronic goods. I am wondering how you managed to separate the ‘bag’ icon from the goods, so it updates over there on the left.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me
Thanks
Hi Caolan,
That’s just a feature of ecwid – it gives you a little bit of code to put in your sidebar that shows up the bag.
I have used Wix – I think it’s a great choice for web design beginners, but I never paid for the use of a shopping cart on there, so I can’t comment on that.
Hi I tried using ecwid today. When I click on add to bag nothing happens. Noticed that it does the same when I try on your site also. Any suggestions?
Hmm, that’s strange! I’ve never had anyone have that issue before – all I could suggest would be to try again. Thanks for the feedback!
I tried again this morning, on firefox it works, on IE it doesnt, let me check maybe some of my settings are of