Curious about how the latest Ecwid features can polish your brand and boost your sales? You’re in the right place.

This summer, we’ve launched many new features and updates to Ecwid E-commerce. Scroll down to take a tour through all the important Ecwid changes in one place.

What’s inside:

1. Sell in Your Instagram Feed With Shoppable Posts
2. Run Google Shopping Search Ads With No Effort
3. Make Changes to Your E-commerce Website Easily in the New Editor
4. Convert More Shoppers With a Streamlined Cart Page
5. Add a Floating Shopping Bag Icon: Available for All Stores
6. Process More Sales With Control Panel Updates
7. Create Coupons that Apply Only to New Customers
8. Manage Your Store on the Move With New Settings in the Ecwid Mobile App
9. Sell on Facebook in the EU With VAT Included
10. Get the Latest Version of Our Plugin for WordPress
11. Sell on Wix With a Faster and More Beautiful Store
12. Return Abandoned Customers With Zero Manual Work
13. Expand Your Store’s Features With New Apps in the Ecwid App Market
14. Developers, Here’s Ecwid API News You’ll Love

Sell in Your Instagram Feed With Shoppable Posts

Shopping on Instagram has arrived to Ecwid! Now you, too, can let your followers buy your products just with a single tap.

Tag your products in your posts (and Stories soon!) just like you tag friends. By clicking this shoppable tag, your followers will go to a product page and purchase it — all within the Instagram app.

Considering that 80% of Instagram’s 1 billion users follow a business on Instagram, selling on Instagram gets your business in front of a very big and engaged audience of potential customers.

Ecwid makes it much easier to get started. Get your Instagram store up in two steps:

1. Export your Ecwid products from your Facebook Product Catalog with a single click, and
2. connect your Instagram business page to your Facebook page.

That’s it!

Instagram will take some time to review and approve your page for selling, but this online store is one of the best ways to get your products to market fast.

For more details, please read our blog post where we outlined the whole process for you to get approved faster. Note that selling on Instagram is available to Ecwid merchants on paid plans who have exported their products to Facebook and are located in one of the supported countries.

Run Google Shopping Search Ads With No Effort

Now you can automatically advertise your products on top of Google search results page to people who are searching for your products — all from your Ecwid Control Panel.

We integrated Ecwid with Google so that the sometimes complex search advertising process is available to people without special marketing skills. Without this connection, setting up Google Shopping ads would take 15-20 major steps, as well as days of work. Setting up a Google Merchant Account, AdWords account, verifying your store, and more requires following along many steps and then testing to ensure they have been integrated correctly.

Ecwid simplifies the process by tenfold. All you need to do is:

1. pick product categories you want to advertise,
2. determine how much money you want to spend, and 
3. launch the campaign!

What’s more, you won’t have to worry about your budget. The AI-based algorithm will carefully bid for you, pausing less effective campaigns and investing into successful ones. It’s just like having your own marketing guy running ads for you. Just set it and forget it!

Automated Google Shopping Ads are available for Ecwid merchants on the Venture plan and higher (additionally, you’ll need to pay Google for ads through your ad budget). Launch your automated advertising in your Ecwid Control Panel → All Sales Channels → Google Shopping.

To explain every aspect of Google Shopping, we recorded a podcast with Ricardo Lasa from SiteWit, a company that helped us to build this awesome integration. Tune in!

Make Changes to Your E-commerce Website Easily in the New Editor

Need a website to sell on? With Ecwid E-commerce, you can create and edit a one-page e-commerce website to introduce your business on the internet. Our new website editor has live-preview which is convenient to use on any device, so you can make changes to your website on the go.

You can add or update these sections to your Ecwid website in the new editor:

• Title, logo, and hero image
• Contact details
• Business hours
• Your brand’s story
• Testimonials
• Links to social pages.

There’s no need anymore to go to the Control Panel to change store name or subdomain. You can make important changes from mobile too.

Simply go to Ecwid Control Panel → Sales Channels → Starter Site and build your one-page e-commerce website for free.

That’s not the only way to manage your business on-the-go with Ecwid, though! By downloading Ecwid mobile app, you can do more than edit your website. Your Ecwid mobile app puts your Control Panel in your pocket, allowing you to manage your storefront, set up payment options and shipping methods, add products, and process your orders.

We’re constantly updating the Ecwid E-commerce website with new functionalities. This summer, Ecwid websites also got additional protection from DDoS attacks and traffic spikes, as well as better SEO.

Ecwid can work on any website, whether it’s created with Wix, WordPress, Joomla, Squarespace, or developed from scratch. Or, you can sell without a website at all!

Convert More Shoppers With a Streamlined Cart Page

The new cart page in Ecwid is designed to speed up the checkout and increase your sales organically. It’s already enabled for all new Ecwid stores. If you can’t see the new cart page, please enable it in the "What’s New" section:

The new cart page features ensure:

• Better abandoned cart recovery: collect emails at the first checkout step, and use recovery email to remind customers of abandoned carts and capture more sales (at least 15% end up finishing the sale!)
• Modern design to match the rest of the new storefront and remain consistent with your brand.
• Mobile optimization that makes the checkout process comfortable on any device.
• Customization with CSS: if you need to hide, add, or change elements on the cart page, you can go far by creating a custom CSS theme.

We’re currently revamping the checkout steps, too. Be among the first to get the new, optimized checkout flow in your store — take part in the beta testing!

You’ll also notice a new design of legal pages (e.g. "Terms & Conditions" page). They are more beautiful and give the new Ecwid storefront a nice finished look.

Add a Floating Shopping Bag Icon: Available for All Stores

We enabled the floating shopping bag icon for all Ecwid stores, including Ecwid Starter Site, the Ecwid’s app for Wix, and Ecwid e-commerce plugin for WordPress (make sure to update to the latest version).

Here’s how to get the floating shopping bag icon:

• For Ecwid Starter Site, it’s enabled by default.
• For WordPress, go to your WordPress Dashboard → Appearance → Customize. Then click "Ecwid" in the sidebar menu → Shopping Cart Widget → Select where you want to display the icon. Read the full guide →
• For Wix, go to Wix Website Editor → the Pages menu → Select the page where your Ecwid online store is installed → Click on the store area → Settings → Add-ons → Add to Page → Add a Floating Shopping Cart Icon. Read the full guide → 
• For other websites, please copy-paste a piece of code from the instruction to your website admin on the page you want the icon.

The floating icon stays visible regardless of scrolling and provides your customers with easy access to the cart.

Choose the icon design that you like the most — there are 40+ customization options. See all the available customization options and learn how to apply them in our Help Center.

Complete More Tasks in Less Time With New Control Panel Tools

If your Ecwid store is currently open, we’re pretty sure that you log in to the Control Panel almost every day. The following updates will simplify your store management routine and help you close more sales.

• Sort products by date of creation or modification in your Control Panel → Catalog → Products to see the oldest or the latest first:

• Spend less time if you need to create an order manually. New orders get autofilled with customer address in Order Editor if there are previous orders from him/her.
• Add a new shipping method is three simple steps. We redesigned the Shipping page in your Control Panel: Ecwid still has all the powerful options for shipping and in-store pickup, but now it’s much easier to set them up (even from mobile). Just select your provider from the list, select how to calculate rates for this provider (automatic, flat, custom rates, or free shipping) and set up your rates if necessary.
• Set up payment options from any device: the Payment page is now comfortable to use on any screen size.

We also made The "Orders" and the "Catalog" pages in your Control Panel load faster — even if you have 100+ orders or tens of categories.

Create Coupons that Apply Only to New Customers

The holiday season sales are coming. That means you’ll need powerful Ecwid discount coupons soon. A new application type for discount coupons — new customers only — allows you to send out coupons that only work for new customers. With this tactic, you’ll reach out to those who have hesitated to buy from you thus far.

Set up your discount coupons in Control Panel → Discounts → Discount Coupons (available on paid Ecwid plans).

The flexible coupon system in Ecwid allows you to set up special offers of all kinds: offer free shipping, discounts, or both, activate loyal or new customers, limit your coupons in time and number of uses.

Learn more about discount coupons in Ecwid → 

Manage Your Store on the Move With New Settings in the Ecwid Mobile App

Our apps for iOS and Android move the most important Control Panel features to your the smartphone in your pocket. More handly functionalities have debuted in the apps in summer, so that very soon, it’ll be possible to run an e-commerce business completely without a computer.

New on iOS (iPhone)

The following features used to be available only on the desktop (in your Control Panel), and now it’s possible to do the same in our store management app, using nothing but your phone or tablet:

• Get full control over your payments and shipping methods:

• Edit your free e-commerce website’s content such as store info, logo, business hours and more.
• Design your storefront appearance with ready-made options or build a unique theme.
• Open or close your store for customers whenever you need it.

New on Android:

• Upload multiple product photos at once.
• Set up custom report periods on the dashboard to track your daily, weekly, monthly, or lifetime sales.
• Duplicate a product easily if you need to add a similar item to your catalog and don’t want to create it from scratch.
• Use a more advanced barcode scanner.

   

Sell on Facebook in the EU With VAT Included

Many countries use value-added taxation (VAT), for example the European Union and Australia. Within this system, the tax rate is often included in the product price.

We’ve improved the Ecwid integration with Facebook, so that merchants from countries with VAT post prices in their Facebook storefronts with the taxes in place.

There’s more you can do with your Ecwid store to fully comply with EU regulations.

Get the Latest Version of Our Plugin for WordPress

75 million websites are built on WordPress, and the Ecwid E-commerce plugin for WordPress helps to monetize those websites. The updates to our plugin arrive constantly. Some of the most noticeable summer improvements are:

• A floating cart icon that remains visible while your customer browses your store. It also looks better and provides a lot of layout customization options. You can enable it in the Customizer menu under "Ecwid" section in your WordPress admin backend (Appearance → Customize → Ecwid).
• Selector of your store’s main page. If you have your storefront on several pages on your site, you can choose the main storefront page to display menus and sidebar widgets. Get this done in Ecwid → Advanced. If you have a single online store page, you will not see this new option.

Learn more news and get the latest version of our official plugin for WordPress on WordPress.org.

Sell on Wix With a Faster and More Beautiful Store

Recently, we dramatically upgraded the design settings and performance of our store app for Wix websites:

• Now the stores load speed is much faster. You can see new stores working faster already, and soon, we’ll improve the performance of the existent stores. Contact our support team if you can’t wait to try faster Ecwid E-commerce.
• Apply the new flexible storefront settings without going to your Control Panel! Play with dozens of new design options to find the best fit for your brand. Change the layout of your product grid and product pages, size and ratio of product pictures, hide or show additional product info (for example, SKUs), add frames and more. With a real-time preview right in the Wix editor, you tweak your store appearance and see changes on the fly. This already works for all new stores, and we’re rolling the feature to all Ecwid stores on Wix very soon.

Install Ecwid in your Wix admin → Apps.

Return Abandoned Customers With Zero Manual Work

What if you were told that you can get about 15% of your lost sales back with no action required on your part? It’s totally possible with abandoned cart reminders sent via email to customers who left products in the cart. Now automated abandoned cart recovery emails are enabled by default (on Business and Unlimited plans): you have automated abandoned cart emails running as soon as you upgrade rather than manually enabling it in the Control Panel.

You can still disable the feature in Sales → Abandoned Carts, but this tactic has proven to be effective for many Ecwid stores, so we don’t recommend you do so.

Expand Your Store’s Features With New Apps in the Ecwid App Market

Ecwid apps are third-party services that can give your store more functionalities. Over 150 apps are available to try and use for Ecwid merchants on paid plans, and we regularly add more integrations. Engage with customers and boost sales with tools from feedback survey delivery to currency conversion to countdown timer integration. We recently added the following nine customer-pleasing apps:

Payments

• Accept payments from anywhere in the world: Rave is a payment gateway for merchants in South Africa. It provides transactions via cards, bank accounts, USSDs and QR-Code.
• Reward mobile customers: Zapper is a mobile payment system that engages your customers with with special offers, vouchers and loyalty programs. It is available for merchants in European Union, USA, Great Britain and South Africa.

A library of marketing tools

• Create look books and product slides: Image Slider creates high-end photo and video slideshows with call-to-action buttons to increase traffic to your popular products.
• Collect information and grow your email list: Form Builder enables you to create custom forms and choose from over 20 different form field options.
• Add tabs to your product pages: Tabs for Descriptions serves just one purpose, but does it well — adding tabs to your product descriptions will give you more room for useful product info.
• Create a media library to showcase your products: Image Gallery supports pictures, files, text, colors, videos, links, fonts and can help you demonstrate your new collection in a rich, visual gallery.
• Add a countdown timer to product and category pages: Countdown Timer creates urgency and boosts sales by alerting the user that current deal is nearly over.

Storefront

• Quickly display product details in a popup: QuickView saves your customers’ time as they don’t have to go to the product details page to buy it. Your customers will appreciate this functionality if you have a large product catalog.
• Survey your customers directly on your online store: GoFeedback will help you discover what you can improve in your store. If you’re not getting the number of sales you want and want to find out why customers are not buying from you, this is a way to go.

Developers, Here’s Ecwid API News You’ll Love

These picks are for those of you who want to build an app for Ecwid merchants or have clients with Ecwid stores:

• Get and update storefront design settings using REST API.
• Get enabled taxes and default tax rate included in the product price. This update is very helpful for stores in countries with VAT.
• Set custom discounts when calculating order details. Apply percentage or absolute discounts for the whole order depending on the order subtotal.

See the full changelog → 

Here at Ecwid, we constantly pursue the best technology to make lives of online entrepreneurs like you happier and wealthier. Which of the summer updates matter the most to you? What other features are you looking for? Let’s chat in the comments!

In 2018, Instagram began supporting businesses like never before: now you can make your posts shoppable (soon — Stories too!), and experts believe Instagram is destined to become the largest mobile e-commerce platform. Isn’t it the perfect time to dust off your Instagram store and shake it up with some new products?

Here you’ll find 10 popular visual products, that will make your Instagram store irresistible for customers. Remember, that to enable Shopping on Instagram, your store should be approved for this feature first. We decided to save your time and chose only those products that comply with Facebook’s store and product policies.

1. Wireless Phone Charger

Smartphone accessories and futuristic items will never go out of style. Wireless phone chargers are not only phone related, they seem space-age appropriate. Soon, people will be buying wireless phone chargers to use inn a car, at home or at an office. Their stylish, Apple-style minimalist design, too, will attract attention.

Minimalistic design of @aircharge looks great on Instagram

2. Smart Home Appliances

Google searches for smart home appliances have quadrupled since 2013

A smart home is no longer a fantasy associated with "Back to the Future" movies. Now you can actually integrate voice-activated and remote-controlled features in your own home.

Not everyone is ready to buy a smart fridge, but smaller appliances like smart light bulbs or baby monitors are quite affordable and satisfy the desire for something innovative. Moreover, Instagram users love videos just as much as pictures. Videos are great to show smart home products’ potential. You don’t have to limit yourself to one format: check out how Sure Petcare shows the product in use, makes cute videos and shares content made by customers.

A smart lamp and speaker from @oupio.official

3. Deshedding Pet Gloves

People love their pets, but the fur covering every surface of a house? Not so much. Pet grooming gloves make removing pet hair before it falls much easier. More, they are simple to clean, pet-pleasing and don’t cost much — sounds like a good deal for a customer. Don’t forget to add pictures of cute cats and dogs to the your website and social feeds!

@GroomingGloves post pictures with pets in their account

4. Keto Foods

We get it: yet another diet. This one seems to be maintaining its popularity, however. It helps people not only lose weight, but control blood sugar and meet other health-related goals. Merchants have started selling keto supplements like fish oil or creatine, or unique foods like shirataki noodles.

If you dive into the Keto diet, remind people that they get to eat many foods they like and can get easily. For example, cheese, coconut oil, plain yogurt, nuts, dark chocolate and cocoa powder appear in many Keto meals. If you sell foods, check if they can be eaten on a keto diet and use this info in a promotion.

"Simplicity is the way", says @valentinacresti, and she’s right: familiar foods can be presented as trendy keto foods

5. Beard Oil

Google searches for beard oil have skyrocketed since 2013

Men’s cosmetics aren’t limited about soap and shampoo anymore. on’t look past the potentially lucrative men’s market, especially if you sell cosmetics or plan to. If you like this idea, don’t limit your product range to beard oil; instead, add options like beard combs, hairstyling products, skincare or dude wipes.

Beard oil may look just as fancy as perfume — nice product photo from @awakeningboutique

6. Oil Diffusers

Google searches for oil diffusers have leapt from non-existent to robust

With most of us running to work and other activities around the clock these days, it’s no wonder the sales stress-controlling products have been on the rise.

Springboard from the stress-relieving trend to use to promote oil diffusers, small machines that use ultrasonic waves and water to  dispel natural oils into the air. Scents from these oil diffusers are said to improve mood and health. Don’t forget about their related products — essential oils.

You can sell oil diffusers for homes or cars. Many are shaped in attractive and unique styles–a benefit for promoting on image-focused instagram. Also, turning an odor-limiting device into a work of art will encourage the oil diffuser’s proud display.

@victsing_homasy shares their client’s picture they were tagged in

7. Self-Care Products

Google searches for the term "self-care" have doubled in only the last year

While this phenomenon may be limited to the first world, "self-care" has certainly become a trend. The rise of organizations like San Diego’s Center for Mindful Self-Compassion and mindfulness in general have made people aware that being kind to themselves boosts well-being.

Merchants with an altruistic bent could enjoy contributing to a movement with such potential to enrich others. The range of products is limited only by your imagination: it can be beauty care to pamper yourself, mindfulness journals, meditation accessories, and even bathtub caddies.

There are different types of mindfulness journals (photo: @jasmineharley)

8. 90s Fashion

In just 5 years, worldwide consumers have increased their Google searches for "90s Fashion" ten-fold

Believe it or not, the 90s are now considered "retro." More Instagram accounts praising the 90’s-00’s aesthetic appear every day, and there are almost 11 million posts with the hashtag #90s. The content on these accounts ranges from movies and TV show quotes and celebrity pics to make up looks and clothes or accessories. Big brands aren’t giving up on 90s fashion, and you shouldn’t either. Why? Instagram is awesome for the flippable lookbooks fashionistas crave. So if you sell apparel or plan to do so, add some retro clothes or accessories to your store.

@asos posts UGC to promote clothes with 90s aesthetics on their account

9. White Sneakers

White sneakers come roaring back

While designers initially intended lycra only for the gym, wearers fell in love with the comfort workout clothes provided. Today, a "thleisure" clothes bridge the gym / grocery store gap. The quality athleisure brands both flatter figures while providing room to move. Why white sneakers? We asked Google that question only to find white sneakers have 8 times more posts on Instagram than black ones, let alone other colors. Apparently, culture today just finds them more attractive.

One of Top 9 publications for #whitesneakers (photo: @nicoleburron)

10. Lamzac

Google searches for "lamzac" have doubled in the past year

There’s a name for those double-columned loungers you’ve been seeing in the parks and at the beach: lamzac. Made of near-parachute material, users need only open one end, scoop the air and the twist the end for a reliable seal. Compact and light-weight ,lamzacs work well for travelers, campers, festival-goers, kids and literally everyone who likes to be comfortable everywhere. Tip: make pictures of a product in different locations, just like Fatboy does:

@fatboy_original successfully sells lamzacs while promoting an idea of "escaping the daily routine with a big smile"

***

When choosing new products to sell, focus closely on trends. Make www.google.com/trends your friend and be ready to move to a new product in your niche when sales begin to slow on your current ones.

It’s not just attention to product trends that make a merchant successful. Your marketing, too, should reflect the current mood.

Know that consumers are tiring of staged images, preferring more natural, candid and authentic ones instead. The mindfulness (over consumerism) trend will drive the popularity of products that promote mental and physical health. Consumer electronics — the adult toy of the digital era — will never go out of style. So, hop on board, choose a new product to excite your customers, and don’t forget to share your vision in comments!

Are you planning to hold a concert, lecture or charity dinner anytime soon?

If so, you have a lot on your plate right now. The most important thing to make your event a success is to bring in attendees. Selling tickets online accelerates the process, but how do you make those tickets available in time?

Ecwid E-commerce has you covered: read this quick guide to starting selling tickets on your website in minutes.

1. Design Your Branded Ticket

If you aren’t a professional designer and don’t want to pay a design agency’s big fees, turn to the many online services with ready-made templates. Look at the ticket we made with Canva.com in 1 minute:

Also check out Mycreativeshop.com, pickmonkey.com and Spark.adobe (or share your favorite graphic design tool with us in comments below.)

2. Create an Ecwid Store to Sell Tickets Online

With your tickets designed, now you need a shop to sell them through. Ecwid e-commerce provides the best service to sell tickets online. With Ecwid, you can quickly add a single product or a storefront right to your website and sell tickets online (along with other digital and physical goods).

Unlike other services, Ecwid doesn’t charge any commission fees from your sales. Whether your event is  a small city tour or a stadium-sized concert, you can sell as many tickets as you need at no extra cost.

Ecwid E-commerce shopping cart is integrated with payment providers such as PayPal, Square, Stripe, etc. that make purchasing fast and easy for your customers.

Sign up for free and add a store to your website to start to sell tickets online right away.

3. Create Your Product

To add your ticket, follow these steps:

1. Go to your Ecwid Control Panel → Catalog → Products.
2. Click Add a new product.
3. Open the Files tab and upload the ticket you designed.
4. Don’t forget to uncheck the Requires a Shipping Method option.
5. Write a short description and Save the new product.

Digital products don’t require shipping, so disable it in product settings

If you have different types of tickets for one event, use Product Options with Price Modifiers. For example, you can add a "VIP" ticket, senior ticket or a cheaper option for students.

To create a new option go to  Catalog → Products → Edit product → Options. Add as many options as you want, changing price by ticket type.

To protect customers from copying tickets, ask them to keep invoices to show at the event. Each invoice has a unique code that you can use for identification. You will need to make this requirement very clear on the ticket pages so that there are no disappointments at the door.

Use barcode to identify the ticket

Learn more in the Ecwid Knowledge Base: Selling digital products

4. Set Payment Options

Ecwid provides merchants with a wide variety of payment integrations. Research has shown that the more payment options you offer the customer, the better your sales.

To set payment methods for your Ecwid store, go to Ecwid Control panel → Configuration → Payments.

If you are not sure which payment method is best for your store, please refer to the full guide to payment options at Ecwid.

5. Promote Your Event!

If no one is aware of your event, no one comes. Make sure you share information everywhere: Facebook, Instagram, partner’s media, etc. You can also offer discounts for bulk orders or give coupons for sharing the event with friends.

How to Verify Tickets During Your Event

To verify that the ticket is original, you need to find the one in the order list. Go to the Control panel → My Sales → Orders. Ecwid mobile store management app for iOS and Android makes verification easy on the go.

The mobile management app includes a Barcode Scanner that you can use to scan the invoice codes and find the order quickly and make sure it has been paid. (Yes, we HAVE thought of everything.)

Barcode scanner in the Ecwid app

Don’t miss a chance to sell more tickets on the spot! Use the Ecwid app to create an order and accept cash payments or use your own point of sales technology.

Even those who don’t already have an Ecwid store can sell their tickets for free. The Ecwid mobile app has a free 14-day trial on the free plan. Once you upgrade to our Venture plan, you can use it at no additional charge for as many events as you like.

   

Selling e-tickets doesn’t have to take a lot of time, money, or technical knowledge. If you completed the steps above, share the link to your Ecwid store here in comments to let other readers know about your event. Who knows? You might even sell it out!

Here’s the thing: lowering the CPC cost can get you more clicks, and hence more sales, within the same budget. And I bet you have wondered how to reduce your Facebook advertising costs and improve return on investment many times.

Actually, everybody asks this questions and this is what we hear at SEMgage all the time, and the only one right and exhaustive answer is "it depends on a lot of different factors". In our experience we’ve had some clients’ campaigns where we’ve reached more than 1000 people on Facebook for just 7$!

It really doesn’t matter how big your business is, you should always be looking for new optimization opportunities on how to reduce your costs and improve return on investment.

In this post, we’ll give you 5 most useful tips you need to know about how to lower your Facebook Ads CPC and how to make your advertising budget work for you.

Blow Up Your Sales With Ecwid’s New Social Selling Tools on Facebook
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1. Understand Your Relevance Score

First things first, try to understand what a Relevance Score is because it directly affect CPC (cost per click).

The Relevance Score is the magic number that varies from 1 to 10 letting you know how relevant an ad is to its target audience. If your Relevance Score equals to 1, this is very bad because it means that your ads are not relevant to your audience and in order for Facebook to continue showing it, you have to pay extra dollars. And vice versa, if your Relevance Score is 8 or higher, it means that your ad perfectly matches the audience you target.

The components of the Relevance Score are fully based on expected positive and negative feedback. The more positive interactions you expect an ad to get, the higher the score will be.

Worth to know that the Relevance Score will be assigned only after your ad has been served more than 500 times. In case you have a low budget, it make take a while before you see the score.

How to check your Relevance Score?

It’s very easy. Open your Ads Manager, select a campaign and then select an ad set. In the "Ads" tab you will see the list of ads you launched, each of which will have its own Relevance Score.

Here are a few things to consider if you want to improve your Relevance Score:

• Be very specific with your targeting, try to narrow your target audience.
• Think about how your image and message will match with your audience.
• Always refresh your ads.
• Try showing different ads to the same audience, always test everything.
• Avoid using offensive and misleading content.

2. Ensure You Are Targeting a More Specific Audience

As it was mentioned in the previous chapter, be specific with your target audience: Probably, it’s one of the most important and useful tips you have to keep in mind while creating a new Facebook ad campaign.

Running campaigns with a specific and narrow targeting gives you a recognizable advantage: you know exactly who you are targeting so you can create special offers and ads that your audience will be interested in.

Moreover, by reducing your target audience you can significantly decrease the competition from other brands that target the same people. In this bidding war with dozens of other companies you have to only bid on people you really want to reach.

3. Focus on Increasing CTR

In order to lower your CPC, start focusing on click-through-rate (CTR). Increasing CTR, you will increase the Relevance Score which as you already know highly impacts on the cost of advertising.

There are a few tips to implement in order to increase your Facebook Ads CTR:

• Use a fascinating headline in your ads. The text of Facebook Ads is one of the first things that a potential customer notices, so try to be very direct and compelling with your ad copy.
• Make your image stand out in the News Feed. Choose high-quality images of your product or associated with your business, use bright and contrast colors, include people showing positive emotions while using your product.
• Use the right call-to-action buttons. As the research shows, using a CTA button improves CTR on Facebook by over 80%, so try to select the call-to-action which correlates to what you want your viewers to do.

4. Look for Audience Overlap

A huge problem running Facebook Ads campaigns is overlapping audience issues when you promote different ad sets to the same audience. The larger overlap, the worse your campaigns will perform, and the higher CPC you will get competing with yourself.

Don’t waste your money fighting for the attention of the same audience: use Facebook Audience Overlap tool to check if audiences are overlapping significantly — and, if they are, mutually exclude those audiences to avoid bidding against yourself.

How to check if your audiences are overlapping?

1. Open the Ads Manager.
2. Click the Tools drop-down menu and chose "Audiences".
3. After that, click the "Actions" tab and choose "Show Audience Overlap".

You can select multiple audiences to compare and see the percentage of overlapping users between these audiences.

5. Don’t Neglect Conversion Tracking & Utilize Retargeting

Did you know that having Facebook conversion tracking set up accurately will help you lower the CPC of your ad campaigns?

Conversion tracking isn’t just about measuring your return on investment, in reality it helps you increase the revenue you generate from your Facebook Ads which is the primary goal of any advertiser.

And Facebook makes conversion tracking incredibly simple with Facebook Pixel. Once installed, the Facebook Pixel acts the same way that Google Analytics code does — it goes to all of your pages and helps you track anything you want in addition to being able to create any audience you want.

There are two most effective remarketing audiences you can create after installing Facebook Pixel:

• Customer File Audience: You can upload a list of your customer emails that Facebook will match to accounts for you to remarket to.
• Website Traffic Audience: You can create a remarketing audience based on previous websites visits.

Just an interesting fact for you to know — Facebook Remarketing Ads generate 3 times more engagement than regular Facebook Ads. If you have Ecwid’s Facebook Store, the new Pixel integration allows you to set up the Facebook pixel without coding and target right prospects and advertise to previous site visitors.

Conclusion

The information we shared in this post covers some useful tips you can start implementing today to see how much your Facebook Ads costs will change tomorrow.

There are a lot of factors that can affect Facebook Ads costs, including your audience targeting, bidding strategies, conversion tracking, and Relevance Score. Just knowing how to improve them, you’ll be armed with essential tools that will help to save your business a lot of dollars.

Every e-commerce operation wants the latest and greatest when it comes to online presence. But updating WordPress plugins can prompt even the yoga studio owners among us to swear at the screen.

The WooCommerce plugin for WordPress can be particularly difficult. Unlike SaaS shopping carts, the Woo update must be downloaded to the merchant’s computer and then uploaded to his or her store all manually and then hopefully it works with all the other plugins installed.

How to Update WooCommerce

1. Backup your website.
2. Update the copied version of your website. If something goes wrong, use your backup to restore it.
   IF there are no errors, your website will be switched into maintenance mode (this will prevent your customers from purchasing.)
3. Install updates to the live site.
4. Check compatibility with addons, themes, payment gateways, or other WooCommerce plugins.
5. Rinse and Repeat every time there is a new update.

With a new version arriving every month, website downtime could mean a loss of a big chunk of sales. And each of the plugins, themes and addons have their own update schedules and they may require different updates.

Extensive manual work causes issues that can take hours to fix. Some of the most common issues with WooCommerce include:

1. Security. WooCommerce itself is not PCI-DSS certified, nor does it run on HTTPS by default, so you need to install addons and purchase an SSL certificate to make your e-commerce website secure.
2. Plugin and theme conflicts. Even if you’re using a dedicated WooCommerce theme, it may not work well with all the extensions you’ve installed. In this case, you may have to deactivate each and every plugin to find out what caused the issue.
3. Hosting configuration issues. Since you have to purchase hosting for WooCommerce, there’s a chance your hosting provider is not optimized for your store. If you have a large product catalog, you may have to overpay for extra storage and bandwidth to avoid risks to the stability.

Or, You Can Simply Use Ecwid

If a 5-minute WooCommerce update has turned into 5 hours, hear us out. As a hosted solution, the Ecwid E-commerce plugin updates much more easily:

• All needed features for ecommerce come with Ecwid, so you don’t have to install another plugin, to connect a payment option, get automatic tax rates or shipping rates. That minimizes compatibility issues to zero.
• Ecwid is a cloud-based shopping cart, and most data is stored in the cloud rather than your computer. So updates are light and installing them doesn’t feel like spring-cleaning.
• Recently, we’ve rebuilt the process of updating Ecwid with a new version. Rolling out an update to Ecwid now takes 10x times less than before! That means we release features faster and can perform more updates per day.
• The Ecwid team is in charge of all the store backups, updates, and technical maintenance. Our team of professional engineers takes care of Ecwid’s 1.5 million online stores 24/7.

When updating the Ecwid plugin, you can rest assured that customer data is safe. Ecwid E-commerce has PCI-DSS certification Level 1, which is the golden security standard worldwide and all Ecwid store pages run on HTTPS so your customers’ data is encrypted and secure on our end.

Bonus: Ecwid shopping cart integrates with any website (not just WordPress!) or social media page (Facebook, Instagram) and works seamlessly with multiple storefronts simultaneously. The integration is smooth: no messing around with downloads and code. Simply sign up and follow the instructions of the onboarding wizard.

Don’t forget, too, that merchants that have questions about any Ecwid feature can contact the support team via live chat 24 hours a day on every weekday (24/5).

Ecwid is dedicated to providing time-saving advantages to merchants who need every spare minute to run their businesses. But recently, we’ve added even more!

We’ve made importing products from WooCommerce to Ecwid incredibly easy. With just a couple of clicks, you can copy all of your products, images and descriptions from your WooCommerce store to your Ecwid store. Now you can see for yourself what your WordPress site would look like with Ecwid.

Export your WooCommerce catalog as a CSV file to Ecwid

We’ve covered how to import your WooCommerce catalog to Ecwid in our Knowledge Base. Those few steps are illustrated with clear screenshots get the job done in under five minutes.

So maybe it’s time to stop wondering how to update WooCommerce and work on importing WooCommerce to Ecwid? Create your free, hosted, supported and secure online store with Ecwid and get busy growing your brand instead.

Anna makes stuffed animals in her spare time. When friends and colleagues clamor to buy them as gifts for their children, Anna decides to try selling them online.

Anna goes to a friend of hers who is a programmer, and begins to learn a lot of new terms: web hosting, domain, server, SEO, and more. A little online research reveals how long it will take and how expensive it will be to develop an effective online store. Her initial enthusiasm begins to dwindle. After a while, Anna decides that developing an online store is out of her reach, and gives up on the idea.

This scenario is sad, and all too common. It’s familiar to many who dream of creating an online store but have neither the time nor the budget to get it done.

The good news is that you do not need to create a website from scratch to sell on the Internet. Instead, you can make a store on the huge, existing websites that you’re already connected to. Once, the accepted steps for digital business started with the branded website. Then you connected to social and other websites from there.

Times have changed. The website is not necessarily central any more. Instead, businesses must go where the customers are: social media and businesses ahead of them in growth. Today, starting on social or larger websites and adding website later in your business evolution makes sense.

In this article, we’ll show you three ways Ecwid E-commerce helps you sell online without the need for a fully developed website. You can use one of these platforms or several altogether. A single Ecwid account acts as the "hub" or center store, beaming itself to as many "spokes" or platforms you choose.

Ecwid 101: How To Create An Online Store For Free In 5 Minutes

An essential eBook on setting up your Ecwid store quickly and easily.

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Sell on Social Networks

According to research from PWC, 45% of people are buying more goods from their favorite brands after looking at them in social networks.. Shop owners are using social networks to talk about products, communicate with existing customers, and attract new customers.

If you do not have a website yet, you can open a store on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media. Just this year, Instagram introduced "shoppable posts," where shoppers can buy products without ever leaving Instagram. Visitors click on the price tag placed on a product which leads them to a description page. From there they click to buy, using whatever payment gateway merchants have established. Instagram stores side-step the need for websites all together. We predict that Facebook will have similar features soon.

Selling on social media has many benefits:

• Tapping into a large and engaged audience of social media users
• An opportunity to reach more people organically (=for free)
• Building lasting relationships with customers through content.

With Ecwid, getting started with selling on social media fast takes just a few clicks. Log into your Control Panel → Sales Channels and choose where to sell your products (Facebook or Instagram accordingly; however, you’ll be surprised to discover many more ways to sell there!) and connect these sales channels.

If you would like to explore selling on social using a step-by-step guide, please go to our Knowledge Base:

• Selling on Facebook with Ecwid
• Selling on Instagram

Use a Free Ecwid E-commerce Website

Ecwid users are not limited to selling only on social networks. If you are not yet ready to build your own website, use the Ecwid E-commerce website.

This is a one-page website with an integrated Ecwid E-commerce store. Create your products, connect your payment and shipping methods and brand your Ecwid website. Upload a cover image, logo, add business info, contact details, and links to social media. Set up your own domain name (available in paid Ecwid plans) or use a free domain type "mysuperstore.ecwid.com." That’s it, we take care of the rest.

The e-commerce website is minimalistic, yet it does the job perfectly, representing your business on the web and enabling sales. But that’s not all!

Launching your business on the Ecwid website, you’ll get these benefits:

• Fast implementation: launch your website and be ready to sell in under an hour.
• No developer needed: use our comfortable editor to change and preview your site’s content
• The Ecwid website is free.

Connect and edit your Ecwid E-commerce website in your Control Panel → Sales Channels → Starter Site.

Sell on Amazon

Amazon now accounts for about 50% of all e-commerce in the US, and many people receive orders from there every day. You probably already know how big this behemoth is. What you may not know is that many small businesses sell through Amazon. In fact, this past July’s Prime Day (special pricing for Prime members), $1 billion of revenues went to small businesses, skipping Amazon all together. (Yes, 1 billion, not million).

Selling on this marketplace has some other advantages besides its size:

• If you’re reading this article, most likely you’re just starting out with your business. In that case, an affiliation with Amazon works because customers are more likely to trust a new business on Amazon than some unknown online store.
• When you sell on a marketplace, you only have to worry about selling. The audience is there, the promotional tools are there, and with services like FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon), you can even avoid messing around with your parcels and, instead, let Amazon do the fulfillment for you.
• Besides the inventory itself, the cost to sell on Amazon is comparatively low: remember, you don’t have to build a website.

One of Amazon’s massive fulfillment centers

Though Amazon has its own downsides such as high competition, commission fees, limitations, and lack of control, optimizing your Amazon listing is easier than optimizing your website for search engines. We broke that process down in one of the episodes of the Ecwid E-commerce Show.

If you sign up for Ecwid, it’s easy to import your products to Amazon (and other marketplaces, too!) Just go to the Control Panel → Sales Channels → Amazon and follow the instructions.

Creating an online shop is much easier than it seems. There’s no need to wait for a lucky day when you get enough money, time, or skills to build an e-commerce website.

Implement your ideas fast (before competitors jump on it), and grow your web presence as your business grows. And please, share this article with those who are still saving up to create their own web store.

Just last week, Instagram announced that people have been tapping its Shopping tags at the rate of 90 million each month. This stunning response comes after product tags became available to most merchants only a few months ago.

In case you haven’t heard, recently, Instagram gave store owners the ability to tag their products in posts. When a user clicks on that product, they land on a product details page. From there, they can choose to buy.

Until this tags era, Instagram’s primary benefit for brands was providing product ideas to shoppers. Now the final sale can actually take place on Instagram after the shopper has gotten the initial idea on Instagram. This ability to buy through a seamless click path upends the social selling game.

After confirming that users are interested in buying on its platform, Instagram has now announced it is adding similar product tags to its Stories feature and its Explore section. The feature was limited to a few select businesses in the US, but product stickers in Instagram Stories are now available in 46 different countries.

Given the popularity of both features, merchants should consider exploring how product tagging there can drive sales and profits. The biggest reason? Tagging on these features is still FREE to merchants.

A product sticker in Instagram Stories

As you explore the ways Instagram can boost your sales, know that on Stories, "tags" (the name for prices placed on posts) are renamed "stickers." Another difference is that stickers lead shoppers back to the merchant websites, where shoppers clicking on tags from a post in a feed can complete the sale right on Instagram. Sales are closed either way!

Potential for Selling on Instagram Stories

Before considering putting stickers on your products in Stories, you should understand how the Stories experience differs from the feed experience.

Photos and videos placed in the Stories feature disappear within 24 hours, much the way rival Snapchat operates. Even with their short life-span, Stories did well for the 20 brands Instagram partnered with to test it.

Instagram’s users have topped 1 billion, and 400 million of them use Instagram Stories every day, according to the channel. An Instagram press release reports that their Stories users are busy "finding new products from brands they love" — a clear play for advertisers.

Statements like this have gotten tech journalists antennae waving. In a recent TechCrunch article, writer Josh Constine claims, "Instagram is embracing its true identity as a mail-order catalog." We say: all the better for e-commerce merchants looking to reach defined target audiences. Maybe consumers need a giant product catalog in the sky that is easily accessed through social. Perhaps Instagram is onto something.

Merchants are free to add one sticker and choose the color to complement their photo or video on each upload in Stories. Tapping on the sticker opens a product details page. Another tap takes shoppers to the merchant’s website for checkout.

The product details page on Instagram

Selling on Instagram Explore Page

It’s not only Instagram’s feed and Stories where you’ll start seeing price tags placed on products. Instagram is also testing starting the buyer’s journey for its advertisers on its Explore page.

The Instagram Explore feature evolved from its previously existing "Popular" feature where Instagram posted its most liked content. Accessed through the magnifying glass placed along the bottom of the screen, the Explore page is a collage of photos and videos that Instagram funnels based to the page on your past engagements.

Shoppable posts in the Explore section

The page is divided into categories: For You, Art, Beauty, Sports, Fashion . . . and now . . .  Shopping. In other words, the platform has created a individual magazine for each user, all with its own sections, the newest one being shopping. This new section only goes to Instagram users who’ve previously displayed an interest in shopping. Because these sections are shaped by each individual’s unique activity on the platform, no two Explore pages are identical.

Beyond funneling your own followed companies’ tagged posts there, it also sends tagged posts and stickered Stories liked by users you have liked. It’s this secondary sharing that should intrigue merchants.

We’re excited by the Explore page for merchants because of its viral potential. Instagram’s testing partners have been raving about how their posts that make it to the Explore page get more engagement than they’ve won on standard feed. It works like this: when enough followers like your Instagram post, it gets shunted to their followers’ Explore page. If those users engage with the post there, it could get shared to their followers’ Explore page and so on, multiplying to infinity.

Start Selling on Instagram Explore and Stories While It’s Still Free

Free digital marketing opportunities don’t come along every day. Jump on this one before it gets so popular Instagram can justify charging. Consider that there are 25 million Instagram profiles, but only 2 million active advertisers. Instagram wants to close that gap, and these tags and stickers are one step on the pathway to proving its value in reaching and selling to targeted audiences.

An Instagram store powered by Ecwid E-commerce gets you selling fast. When you use Ecwid to integrate your online store into your website, social media platforms and online marketplaces, you don’t need to understand or use coding. Our developers have done the hard coding for you.

All you need to do to start selling on Instagram Stories and the Explore section is fill out fields and click buttons. The process is the same as for setting up Instagram Shoppable Posts. More, no matter how many ways to sell online you need, you only have to upload products and make changes on the Ecwid dashboard, rather than going from Facebook to Instagram to Amazon, etc. One centralized dashboard sends the information to all your sales channels.

We hope you get this news in time to reap the rewards that come with being an early adopter of new free promotion opportunities on Instagram. By putting tags and stickers on posts and Stories, you’re entering relatively uncharted territory. But that’s where the money’s made. Whether you already sell on Instagram, or are just planning to, stay tuned for more tips!

What’s been your experience selling on Instagram? Don’t hesitate to share in the comments here— your fellow small business owners will relish your insights!

Most online entrepreneurs don’t start out as professional marketers or developers. That’s what makes drag-and-drop site builder platforms like Wix so popular.

With professional templates, on-site hosting and maintenance, Wix is very easy to use. But wait, "easy to use" doesn’t mean "simple." Every DIY small business owner can plug in enterprise-level e-commerce to their Wix website. Just type in the Ecwid E-commerce App for Wix.

Recently, we’ve been working hard on giving the Ecwid app the new look and feel. Read on to learn what’s so cool about it.

First, Why the App?

Ecwid has been in the online selling game since 2009. E-commerce has been our main focus and passion for almost 10 years. Ecwid stores are integrated with popular payment and shipping providers like Square, PayPal, or Stripe, social networks like Facebook or Instagram, Google search ads, Amazon and eBay. Everything’s already coded for you so you don’t need technical knowledge.

Ecwid store owners use top-notch e-commerce features the same way big brands do it (say, Instagram Shoppable posts). That said, adding an Ecwid store to Wix will do more that just provide with a modern, mobile-friendly shopping cart — it ensures growth and competitiveness of your e-commerce business.

Review these recent improvements of the Ecwid app for Wix. You’ll see that these changes make your store an even more powerful extension of your website:

30+ New Store Appearance Settings in the Wix Editor

An Ecwid store and a Wix website work together to get your business growing  — just as an esthetician and hairdresser work to improve someone’s overall appearance. Ecwid has created dozens of new store design options to brand your store, including new fonts, storefront layouts, sizes and ratios of product pictures, background colors, product cards content, frames, and more.

Preview your design settings in real-time and apply them right from the Wix editor:

1. Open the Wix site editor.
2. Click on the Ecwid storefront.
3. Click "Settings" and navigate to new "Product list" and "Product" sections.
4. Design your store!

A New Floating Shopping Bag Icon

When it comes to evaluating performance of an online store, it’s all about conversions. The new shopping bag icon is optimized to lead customers to their carts: it sticks to the screen and remains visible on every site page, even if the customers scroll down the page.

We’ve also empowered this icon with a set of customization options. Set the layout, position, icon type, and border to complement your store — also within the Wix site editor:

1. Open the Wix site editor.
2. Click on the Ecwid storefront.
3. In the store settings window, click Add-ons, then Add a Floating Shopping Bag Icon.
4. Click on the icon in your storefront to open the design settings and change the icon position.

Faster Page Speed

Surrounded by numerous distractors (thanks, Netflix) your customers hate to wait. The load speed of your website and its parts will define how many sales you make. It’s also a crucial SEO metric that helps Google rank your site higher. That’s why we made Ecwid storefronts working on Wix load up to 2x faster.

Remember that site load speed depends on many factors. For example, if your website has a lot of images (especially if they are not optimized for web) or installed apps, it may affect the load speed. So if you think your Wix + Ecwid website should load faster, contact our support team for more tips.

Curious to see how the Ecwid + Wix team complement each other so well? Check out success stories featuring Wix + Ecwid stores:

• How One Passionate Home Decorator Got Her Entire Family into a Prosperous Business
• Why Being Strange Is Good for Sales: Lessons From a Bikini Brand

Also, see a collection of stores built with Ecwid and Wix, or simply install a free Ecwid app in your Wix admin to give it a try!

Could you do something for me? Open a new tab in your browser and go to your Facebook Business Page. Next, view your profile. Did you manage? Wonderful!

Now, look at your cover photo and answer this question: does the photo encourage my audience (i.e. potential customers) to investigate my Page and learn more about my business and my products?

Here’s a hint: if you haven’t put much thought into picking that particular image, chances are it’s the wrong image.

Free stock photos, wallpaper images or random pictures should not represent your business. You heard it right. A cover photo is a photo that represents your business. It’s the first thing people see when they arrive at your Page.

Thus, it should be well thought-out, creative, informative and above all, closely related to your business. Why? Because it can help you increase your sales.

The Power of Facebook Cover Photo

A perfect cover photo can increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your blog or e-commerce store, encourage people to like your Page and learn more about your products, and also, boost customer engagement. These actions together increase sales.

Ecwid on Facebook

How to Improve Your Facebook Cover Photo

Now, let’s discuss the topic in more detail. Add these elements to your Facebook cover photo and invigorate sales:

1. Tell people how your business can help them

Every business has a purpose, for example: to help people create better websites, feed them delicious pizzas, or repair their equipment. You surely also created your business with a goal in mind, right? Why not to share that goal with your audience?

That’s exactly what Redington did with their Facebook cover photo:

Redingtonltd

Redington is a financial service, which, as you can see above, has a very ambitious target: they want to help 100 million people achieve financial security. By sharing that goal with their audience, Redington communicates not only that they are helping people reach financial security, but also that they can help you become financially secure as well.

Also read: What to Post on Facebook: 20 Post Ideas for Your Facebook Business Page

2. Draw attention to the call-to-action (CTA) button

A call-to-action is a short phrase that encourages people to do a particular action after visiting your Page, looking at your images, watching your videos or reading your compelling blog post.

Now, to increase sales through Facebook, you can either incorporate a CTA into your cover image or add a CTA button, which will be directly under your cover photo, in the bottom right corner.

Here are a few Facebook CTA buttons you can choose from: "Shop Now," "Sign Up" or "Contact Us." Once you add this button, you can use the cover image to draw attention to it. Take a look at how The Beer Dabbler does it:

In their cover photo, The Beer Dabbler, not only presents their product, but also, makes sure it’s directly above the CTA button "Shop Now." The first thing customers see when they arrive at the Page is a mouth-watering glass of beer and an encouraging phrase to buy it now. Simple, yet powerful.

3. Describe your brand in one sentence

Who said that the Facebook cover photo has to be a photo of an engaging object? In fact, it doesn’t have to present any particular item, product or view to engage your audience. Depending on your business goal for the channel, a single-color background with an intriguing phrase that describes your business may work better.

Something Store, for example, did a marvellous job:

Basically, Something Store is a website, which sends you something unnamed. Its whole business is based on surprise and so, they manifest it in their cover photo. Thus, as you can see above, the phrase on their cover image not only perfectly describes their business, but also, arouses curiosity and interest.

Also read: 5 Ways To Lower Your Facebook Ads CPC

4. Present your new products

The Facebook cover photo is a great place to present your products. By doing so, you show your customers what’s new in your store and/or which products are most popular.

These guidelines set you up for success:

• Arrange products you want to sell in an eye-catching way against an interesting background (it can also be a one color background). Don’t add any text. Let the image speak for itself.
• Highlight only one product and say a few words about it. You can also add a call-to-action and/or inform your customers about special offers and discounts.
• Take a photo of people using your product. For example, if you sell sports equipment, take a photo of a family riding bikes and wearing helmets from your store. You can also add an information about prices and a short call-to-action.

Here’s an example from The Protein Bread Co store:

… and Lintbells:

To boost your sales even more, improve your marketing strategy: go beyond sharing your products and start selling them on Facebook with Ecwid. We’ve found that Ecwid merchants who start a Facebook Store, get a 15% bump up in revenue.

5. Show off your awards, trust badges and certificates

Did you know that, according to a study, trust logos increase the perceived reliability of a brand in 75% of respondents? What’s more, 61% of participants of the study admit not completing a purchase due to an absence of trust logos. Demonstrating that your brand is legit and credible can juice your sales.

Of course, the best place to show your awards, trust badges and certificates is your website. However, you can also do so in your Facebook cover photo.

Placing badges next to your products:

… and/or services:

… builds trust with your customers. Next, if your customers trust your brand, they’re more likely to do business with you.

6. Show the life behind your brand

When prospects see that your products and services come to them via the hard work of men and women, they make more of a genuine connection. You shift your brand’s image from a faceless, profit-driven entity to a team of individuals looking out for customer happiness and satisfaction. People bond with other people. By giving prospects an "insider’s view" of everyday workings, you build trust, and even more important (for sales) loyalty.

There are a few ways you can show your customers the life behind your brand. One of them is to show off a happy and smiling team. Take the photo during a break at work, a celebration, a trip you took together or a party you had. Here’s an example:

You can also provide your customers with a sneak-peek into your office. Show your team working together, having a fun lunch or brainstorming. There are many possibilities!

7. Encourage your customers to use your mobile app

If you have a mobile app, use your Facebook cover photo to encourage visitors to put it on their smartphone. This is an easy one: present your products in your cover photo and add a Facebook "Use App" button underneath it.

Check how The Hunt did it:

If you don’t have an app, creating one is worth it. Your ShopApp puts your store in customers’ pockets for fast, easy access. More, the ShopApp:

• Complements your website and increases customer loyalty.
• Boosts sales, since most purchases are made on mobile devices. eMarketer tells us that this holiday season, Mcommerce (Mobile commerce) is set to surge 32% from $40 billion in 2017 to $54 billion over the next few months.
• Makes buying your products easy and convenient.
• Helps you stand out from your competition.

If you don’t know how to create your own ShopApp, Ecwid can help you: Ecwid automatically creates and publishes a native mobile application either in Apple App Store or Google Play. So, get yours now and start seeing a difference in your sales.

8. Share a compelling video

If you can invest a bit more in Facebook marketing, you can create an interesting video about your products and/or services and share it with your customers in the cover photo. After all, who said that Facebook cover photo has to be a photo? In fact, it can also be a video:

The Bearded Bastard, for example, a company producing beard grooming products, created an amazing video in which they show their customers how their products are produced. This way they increase brand awareness and inspire their customers to make more purchases. Clever, isn’t it?

Are You Ready To Create Your New Facebook Cover Photo?

Whether you have a big or a small budget, you can create a powerful Facebook cover photo that helps drive sales. All you need to do is to grab your camera, take a photo of your products and/or services and add text. Photo-editing software like PicMonkey or Canva helps you get the right sizes as well as the right elements into the ideal spots.That’s it!

Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, take advantage of your Facebook cover photo and be creative!

Also read: Introducing the Facebook Pixel for Ecwid Stores: How to Run More Effective Facebook Ads Easily

It’s fun to be in the fast-paced e-commerce space. The endless supply of new niche markets, ingenious products and fascinating ways to reach new audiences keep merchants engaged and selling.

Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, eBay and other e-commerce platforms advance at lightning speed. At Ecwid, we make sure not a day goes by between one of those platform upgrades and our integration of it into our software. When we tweak or update an aspect of our store technology, we make sure you hear about it.

Recently, we updated 34 of our core training videos to provide up-to-the minute information about building your store’s digital footprint. We’re determined that your customers can navigate your store without a hitch. These videos feature our current dashboard, complete with new storefront options like Amazon and Instagram. We mention features of all channels in their most current forms.

It’s smart to start off with our Introduction to Product, Attributes and Product Types. From there, we go more into depth with Set up Your First Product, Set up Related Products and Product Variables, Set Up Shipping and more. These are short videos (from 90 seconds to just short of nine minutes) that we recruited Ecwid employees with the most dreamy voices to record.

Video training has its advantages: you can replay the videos as many times as you want. No one keeps count! Press pause to give yourself a chance to carry out the action described in the video and then start again when you’re ready. You can watch whenever you have a spare few minutes, and watch several at a time or just one.

Quick Video Training Makes You a Super-Seller

Even though Ecwid has the simplest, fastest set up, merchants still need to go through some steps before the first sale comes in. Still, we’ve taken the utmost care to ensure all you’re doing is clicking buttons and filling out fields. Our programmers handle all coding and hide it behind buttons and screens.

When you watch all of these 34 videos, you can be confident you’re setting up your store so that it gives shoppers the best experience. As you browse the videos, consider what YOU would really like to see there. Email us your suggestions at blog@ecwid.com and we’ll consider adding videos based on your needs.

Check out one now to see how clear and quick it is!

Today, we’re updating this 2017 article on Facebook Ads to announce an exciting new opportunity for all Ecwid merchants.

With each passing quarter, selling on Facebook and Instagram gets more effective and more popular. Ecwid E-commerce wants to do everything possible to get merchants using these two social media channels to reach ideal prospects affordably.

That’s why, starting today, we’ve made it easy for all merchants, including free Ecwid users, to get started with the Facebook pixel absolutely free. Ecwid powers 50,000 Facebook stores. Our merchants report additional revenues of 15% after selling their products on Facebook.

Big companies have their tech departments to bridge the technology gap between their products and these social platforms. Without Ecwid, small and medium-sized business owners would have to struggle through hours of work and pages of documents to do the same. Our developers have hidden all the tough coding behind a friendly user interface so you can install the Facebook pixel in your Ecwid control panel in under one minute, with no technical skill whatsoever.

Implementing the Facebook pixel in your marketing today lays a solid foundation for social marketing and advertising success in the future. Understand that, among the many advantages it delivers (discussed below), the Facebook pixel can prevent you from spending more money on ads than you earn from them.

To take advantage of this opportunity, please read the following article.

What is the Facebook Pixel?

The pixel is a piece of code that tracks your store visitors and their behavior — and gives you a lot of data:

• It measures conversions so that you know exactly how your ads are performing
• It records visitors that left without making a purchase so you can follow up with ads later
• It can help you advertise to people similar to your existing customers.

If you want to advertise on Facebook and rest assured your ads are effective, this integration is for you. You can install and use the full power of the Facebook pixel in your Ecwid store without touching any code.

How Can I Use the Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook pixel can track various actions that happen in your Ecwid store.

It’ll "know" when your visitors:

• View products and categories
• Search products
• Add items to the shopping cart
• Enter the checkout flow
• Start the checkout
• Complete the checkout.

This data allow you to achieve the following:

Retarget your store visitors

Many people don’t buy during their first visit to the store. With the Facebook pixel, you can create Custom Audiences to follow up on those customers with your ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network. This is called retargeting.

Since the pixel tracks different sorts of events in your store, you can group people by their actions. Here are some cases:

• People who visited your specific product pages, for example, those who viewed your new arrivals
• People who appeared in your store but haven’t been there for a while
• People who spend a lot of time browsing in your store but hesitate to make a purchase.

Custom combinations are also available: you can mix the rules for pages, types of devices, and the number of visits.

The remarkable thing is that in all cases, you’ll advertise to people who have already shown an interest in your store. That means they are more likely to buy from you.

After clicking the "Create Audience" button, it’ll start collecting automatically. You won’t need to restart or renew it. Assign your ads to these audiences right away or refer to them later.

Wait. Is there a way to run retargeting ads without dealing with Ad Manager?

Yes! There’s a way to run retargeting ads without setting up your Ad Manager. Simply install the Scaler app, add funds, and it’ll start working.

Measure your results

What exactly happens as a result of your ad? The Facebook pixel makes it clear. It tracks conversions, so you can calculate the ROI (Return on Investment) of your Facebook advertising campaigns. It prevents you from spending more money on ads than you earn from them.

Results measured easily with the Facebook pixel data

It’s not only purchases that you can track with the Pixel.

The Ecwid integration with the Facebook pixel saves you from all the code work. Without it, you would copy a line of code for each separate event and install it in your store code.

Now you can easily get your pixel installed, and it will support the majority Standard Events  automatically:

• ViewContent: the Pixel will trigger this when visitors view product or category pages.
• Search: this event shows when people use your search box to find products.
• AddToCart: learn when visitors add products to the shopping cart without finishing the purchase.
• InitiateCheckout: this event detects people who click "Checkout".
• AddPaymentInfo: learn when people are halfway through their checkout.
• Purchase: know when visitors turn into buyers.

Get more conversions

Every Facebook ad campaign needs to have an objective. That is how Facebook optimizes the bids and ad delivery.

The pixel allows you to set conversions as an objective

Installing the Facebook pixel in your Ecwid store allows you to set conversions as your objective. That way your bid will be optimized to get your more conversions, and you’ll be able to see the results in your Ad Manager.

It’s possible to select different conversion events (identical to your Standard Events range) to achieve specific goals. If you want to know how many purchases your ad generated, stick to "Purchase" here.

How to Add the Facebook Pixel to Your Ecwid Store

The Facebook pixel integration is now available on all Ecwid plans, including free. The installation is easy for everyone, regardless of technical skills. You just need to generate your pixel ID and add it to your Control Panel:

1. In your Facebook profile, click the drop-down menu on the right. Choose "Create Ads" (if you’ve never logged into Facebook Ads before) or "Manage Ads" (if you’ve used Facebook Ads before).

2. You’ll then find yourself in the Ad Manager. Click the drop-down menu and select "Pixels".

3. On the next screen, click the green button "Create a Pixеl".

4. Name your pixel and click "Next".

5. On the next screen, click "Copy and Paste the Code".

6. Copy the pixel code, paste it into a .doc or .txt file, select your pixel ID, and copy it.

7. Go to your Сontrol Panel → Settings → General → Tracking and Analytics and paste your Facebook pixel ID there. Save the changes.

Then check if your pixel is working. Navigate to your store to get the pixel triggered. Then go back to your Ad Manager → Pixels and check your pixel’s status. The green light means it’s active. It might take up to twenty minutes to activate your pixel.

What’s Next

All your pixel activity will be displayed in your Ad Manager. There you’ll see the graph showing how many times the pixel was triggered. Below you’ll see the tabs with the stats for the pixel events.

As soon as your pixel has gathered some data, you’ll be able to use it in all gears. Here is a step-by-step guide on creating your Facebook Ad campaign.

Anyone with a business knows that the holidays turn into a relentless hamster wheel.

With holiday sales accounting for 30% of yearly retail income, however, business owners can’t ignore their ventures, no matter how many holiday parties or nutcracker performances they’ve agreed to attend.

We at Ecwid care about your online sales. But we also believe in family first. That’s why we handpicked four Ecwid features that can help you automate your holiday sales and give you more time with your family.

1. Get Your Own Marketing Army on Google

Many holiday shoppers start their search for gifts on Google. How cool would it be to meet them right at this point, before they discover all the competitors down there on the SERP?

It’s totally possible with Google Shopping ads. You can put photos and a short description of your products above search results which makes them hard to miss. Does this look familiar?

Google Shopping ads are best if:

• Your product is visually appealing
• Your product pictures have white background
• Your niche is not too competitive
• You don’t want to spend extra time on settings (only for Ecwid merchants).

Setting up Google Paid ads the regular way can take days of work, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. Save those days for holiday shopping, getting the decorations, planning your menu, and let Ecwid do the job.

Go to Control Panel → Sales Channels → Google Shopping and follow three steps:

1. Choose your target audience;
2. Select categories to advertise;
3. Estimate your budget, and here you go!

Thanks to a convenient integration, Ecwid saves you even more time: the store takes care of your ad spend, bidding to win the most profitable ads and stopping the less successful ones. It’s like having a virtual marketer work for you while you’re getting out the good dishes and tablecloths.

2. Launch Remarketing Facebook Ads Without Hitting the Books

It costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. If you’re on a budget, it may be smart to try dust off your current customer base first.

Ecwid is integrated with Facebook Product Catalog, which opens the Dynamic ads format to e-commerce merchants.

Dynamic product ads appear to people that have visited your website or Facebook page once. These ads display on subsequent websites the customer goes to. Surely, you’ve noticed an ad following you around the internet? Since those who have visited your site once already know your brand, Dynamic ads usually have higher conversion rates than regular ads.

Facebook Dynamic ads are best if:

• Your target demographic is present on Facebook
• You have sufficient traffic in your online store
• You’re somewhat familiar with Facebook Ad Manager.

If you’re thinking that Dynamic product ads are only for marketing superiors, here’s a hint. With Ecwid’s Product Catalog and Facebook pixel integration, tracking of your store visitors to follow them with your ads on Facebook takes way fewer steps and brain cells. No coding or scary data sheets. Set up Dynamic ads once and they’ll work for you as long as you wish.

3. Get 20% More Sales by Recovering Abandoned Orders Automatically

Soon enough, there are going to be many holiday shoppers is your store, but some of them will bounce before completing the checkout process.

According to the Baymard Institute research, about 70% of online customers add products to cart but leave without buying anything. This rate is even higher on smartphones, where abandoned carts can make up to 85% of all orders!

That doesn’t necessarily mean that something’s wrong with your store or products. The number one reason visitors fail to complete checkout is that they got interrupted. Also, choosing the right holiday gift is not easy, so your customers can spend a while browsing around a dozen of websites before making a purchase.

A quick friendly reminder sent by email can close those abandoned sales. In fact, our stats show that the average of 20% abandoned carts are recovered. That means +20% sales growth.

As soon as you upgrade to the Business or Unlimited plan, abandoned cart emails start hit abandoned customers’ inboxes automatically. No actions on your side, just watch sales growing! You can manage this feature in Ecwid Control Panel → My Sales → Abandoned Carts.

4. Let Your Ecwid Storefront Speak Volumes with Automated Product Labels

During the holiday season, malls will be shining with colorful sale signs. Your Ecwid storefront has its own tools for attracting holiday shoppers.

If you create a sale price for a product, it’ll instantly get an attention-grabbing "On sale" label:

Do you want to create an impression of a crowded store? With the "Sold Out" label, the demand for your product stands out.

Small and new businesses that don’t have enough customer reviews and trust by the holiday season can let these labels work as a vital social proof.

To make labels appear in your storefront, make sure you’ve set up stock level for your products. The label will be applied automatically when your product is sold out.

To Be Continued…

Did you like what you’ve just learned? Write a comment below about how your holiday plans have changed now.

Next week, we’re going to tell you about the Ecwids automated STORE features that save you time at the holidays. Stay tuned!

To many, choosing the right holiday packaging is almost as fun as selecting the gift itself. Merchants who pay attention to packaging can see their efforts returned in revenue. Product packaging significantly impacts brand perception. 44% of online shoppers believe that packaging reinforces that the product was worth the price.

Between family members and friends, typically a gift wrapped with extreme care indicates the strength of the relationship (or the wish for a strong one.) Businesses and customers have relationships, too. Strengthen that relationship with the tips in these 11 videos about packaging your products for the holidays and beyond.

How to Make a Custom Box from Scratch

Many enjoy giving unique gifts at the holidays. They can come in unique shapes and sizes. If you sell products that don’t fit standard boxes, use templates to make cardboard boxes yourself. After all, putting your creation in a box too small could result in damage. Putting it in a large box with extra padding results in high postage and materials costs.

Website Template Maker lets you enter your product’s dimensions and then creates the ideal template. All you need is cardboard, a ruler, pencils and some glue.

The process is quite simple:

1. Choose a template or create your own
2. Print it or draw on a cardboard
3. Cut and use glue if needed.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to build a labor process this intensive into your pricing. Individual product packaging makes most financial sense when your products are high-price and custom, like artwork.

How to Pack a Box

Here you can find useful tips from USPS on how to pack a box properly so that it survives shipping. If you often use USPS, you may want to check out their other how-to videos. You’ll get to know:

• How to select the right box
• How to choose packing materials
• How to wrap fragile items
• How to reinforce the box.

Packaging Strategies to Save on Shipping

The size and weight of your product packaging can mean a lot when volume orders are your norm. One-half inch here and three-quarters there can jump your packages up a pricing tier. This video explores the ways to cut on shipping costs with smart packaging:

• How to reduce space the products takes
• How to spend less on materials.

How to Calculate Dimensional Weight

Dimensional weight is a pricing technique, which uses an estimated weight that is calculated from the length, width, and height of a package. It shows how much actual space your package takes up in transit. The video will help you understand:

• How to calculate dimensional weight
• Why it’s important to calculate it right.

Note: DIM divisors may differ depending on a company you’re shipping with.

Also read: How You Can Make Your Shipping Costs More Accurate With Ecwid: Product Dimensions and Rates

How to Win Customer Loyalty All Year with Personalized Holiday Orders

Do you want to take your product packaging to a new level? Try some of these 5 ideas to make your customers feel special. A more personalized touch lets people know you’re thankful they chose your store. The video explores the following topics:

• What to add to the package
• Cheap and easy ways to personalize the order
• How to make people feel good about supporting small business.

How to Make a DIY Stamp Without Carving

A unique stamp adds a crafty touch to your package. Stamp your brand name or logo on tissue paper, parcels, boxes or your business cards you add to the package. The best thing about it is that you can actually make it yourself in 10 minutes! It is explained in the video.

Double Box Packing

If you sell (or plan to) fragile products this holiday season, you’re probably wondering how to pack it so it won’t break during shipping. Double box packing is one of the ways to provide maximum security for your product. This technique isn’t universal as it requires more packing material but some sellers may want to try it. The video will show you:

• Which materials to use
• How to pack a box inside a box.

How to Use Box Inserts

Box inserts help to secure your products in the package. They also make the unboxing experience more memorable for customers. Again, the more carefully the products are shipped, the more value recipients give them.

The author of the video will tell you:

• How to use box inserts
• What are the pros and cons of using box inserts

This channel has more useful videos, like using stickers in packaging or calculating budget.

How to Choose the Right Box Size

Сhoosing the right box size helps to avoid high volume metric rates. Learn how to pack efficiently, so that you don’t spend too much because of the dimensional weight policy. Here’s what you’ll learn from the video:

• When you can pay by actual weight
• How to pack efficiently.

How to Design Custom Packaging Tape

Custom packaging tape is one of those small things that make your package unique. At the holidays, you can select from unlimited images that reflect the holidays as you celebrate them. Use this instruction and design it yourself in Adobe Illustrator or any other program. The video will help you learn:

• How to choose the right size for the tape
• How to make a seamless pattern.

International Shipping Options for E-Commerce

This video is for those sellers who just started to think about introducing international shipping to their stores. It covers merchant’s three main options:

• Ship yourself
• Use third-party services
• Use freight forwarder services.

Remember Tiffany & Co.’s blue boxes? For some, they are as recognizable as the premium jewelry itself. The time and attention you put into your holiday packaging can turn gift-giving into more than an exchange but an experience.

We hope these tips will help you to make your holiday and any season packaging more efficient for you and more memorable for your customers. Do you have any tips you can add to the list? Don’t hesitate to share them in comments!

We bet the approaching holiday season gives you butterflies in the stomach. Inventory — check. Social media posts — ready. Newsletter — done. But have you prepared anything to cut through the holiday buzz and make the shopping experience in your store unforgettable?

Whether you need to plug in a rare payment solution, or just put an additional button in your online storefront, the Ecwid Customization Team can build almost any custom store feature, as well as host and maintain it. 99% positive reviews confirm: it’s as easy as Ecwid itself.

Look into some curious real-life examples of using custom Ecwid development for solving different business problems. Copy them or come up with your own — the inspiration is all yours. You can still make it for Black Friday; most custom features take under 10 days to build.

Add Google Maps to Checkout

Let your customers select any location on the map to pick up their order from — that is a life-saver for countryside businesses (for example, an online store of farm products).

Local customers will be amazed by the level or service when they can receive their order even when they’re taking part in a holiday parade or skateboarding.

Of course, this feature works best for stores with a courier delivery.

Google Maps at checkout, Fonola Mall

"Adding Google Maps to the checkout page of our website is a great relief
to locating our numerous customers spread across the country. It has eradicated our previous challenge of locating our customers in time. The feature gives us the exact coordinates of where the customers are or want the items to be delivered to, and all we need to do is put the coordinates into Google Maps and ask for directions… Doesn’t that sound easy?" — Ransford Parker, CEO of Fonola Mall.

Add the "Repeat Order" Button

Let’s face it: saying "I’ll have the usual" in your favorite place makes you feel exclusive. Allow your loyal customers to enjoy the same feeling online, while ordering more in one click. With the "Repeat Order" button, purchasing another similar set of products is easy. This small button can save your customers tons of extra clicks that they’d have to do if they created each order from scratch.

"Repeat Orders", The Hungry Ninja

"I’ve been working with Ecwid for about 4 years. I own a meal prep company, and our business model is quite complicated. We hand-deliver rather than ship, we work with fresh food that requires lead times, and we only deliver certain menus on certain days. Needless to say, it’s not an easy business to automate with a platform. The development team at Ecwid has proven to be quite resourceful in creating overlays that enable us to utilize the default Ecwid platform, but then customizing several components so as to streamline the online process and reduce the amount of manual data entry and processing required to fulfill our customer’s orders.

One customization is the ability for our customers to repeat previous orders within their account under the Orders tab. This makes reorders so much easier and takes far less time for our customers to order. After it auto-populates in the shopping cart, they can still tweak their existing meals in the cart, delete meals, and add meals. It works fantastically.

We have come so far from where we started, and Ecwid has been a great partner to work with, and the development team has been patient and creative to meet our ever-expanding needs. We’d definitely recommend Ecwid for your business." — Ryan, Owner of The Hungry Ninja.

Set Minimum Quantity Limits for Cheap Products

If you sell inexpensive and small products that people can buy in bulk (for example, crayons), you probably don’t want to pay for shipping a single product overseas.

You can bundle your products in sets (for example, selling a box of crayons). But it’s hard to guess the right size of that box. It can be too much for one customer, and not enough for another. As a result, some of them will bounce.

There’s a more elegant solution to this problem: set up the minimum quantity limit to the profitable amount. Say, you start getting real profits when you sell at least five crayons at a time. Set the minimum quantity to five, and your customers won’t be able to complete the order if they have put fewer items in the cart. But if they want more, nothing will stand in their way!

"When we needed a customization to set minimum quantities per product, Sergio at Ecwid’s Customization Department was there throughout the entire process. It only took a few days for the customization to be developed and it was exactly what we asked for. Ecwid’s Customization Department rocks!" — Ryan Kelsey, Owner, Valley Farms Hatchery.

Improve Your Own Custom Services

For some businesses, custom orders can make up as much as 80% of all sales. Since placing a custom order involves a lot of decision-making, it’s very important to simplify the process for customers (and for the merchant, too!) so that they complete their orders before their brain gets tired.

There’s a lot you can do to improve this process, but here’s a story of Mike LaTour, who shared a solution to a common problem of sellers of custom-printed products:

"A few of our products involve printed photos. This can be an issue if the customer does not have a high-resolution image. We asked Ecwid if they could provide a way to only allow an image to be uploaded if its quality was high enough. They developed a plugin for us which allows us to put a minimum resolution for the images so we get the correct high-quality image the first time, saving both us and our customers time." — Mike LaTour, President & CEO Soundwave Art™.

High-resolution image upload at SoundwaveArt™

Custom Can Be Easy

We’re developing Ecwid to fit any business, adding new features almost every other week. But if you have a specific request, we’re here for you as well.

When you order custom development, you get a personal manager that will work on your project with you until you’re satisfied with the result.

Upgrade to the annual Business or Unlimited plans to get 2 or 12 hours of custom development for free, or order any amount of custom development with 20% off! (The offer expires on November 23).

Oh my, it’s already November!

We are not here to panic, but you get what it means for e-commerce merchants. The holiday season. Sales. More sales than in the years before. So skipping the curtsey: let’s get ready.

Here are 20 ideas for nailing your holiday marketing campaigns. If you have an online store with Ecwid E-commerce, all of them can be easily implemented, so make sure you’re using your store at full tilt.

What’s inside

1. Show "Compare to" Prices in Your Storefront
2. Offer Discounts on Order Subtotal
3. Set Up Bulk Discount Pricing
4. Create Discount Coupons
5. Run BOGOs
6. Offer Free Shipping
7. Offer Gift Wrapping
8. Add a Sale Description to Your Homepage
9. Add Special Offers to Category Pages
10. Push Your Deals at Checkout
11. Offer Flexible Discounts Based on Cart Contents
12. Display a Promo Bar
13. Highlight Items for Sale with Labels
14. Show Related Products
15. Remind Visitors of Recently Viewed Products
16. Add Popups and Banners
17. Enable Social Selling Tools
18. Create Urgency and Scarcity
19. Advertise
20. Improve Overall Shopping Experience

1. Show "Compare to" Prices in Your Storefront

If you’re going to offer steep discounts, make sure all the store visitors are aware of them. Show them what the price used to be before the sale and how much they can save now.

Discount prices in Ecwid

Go to Settings → General → Cart and set up the manner your "Compare to" price will be displayed.

To set up the discount for each product, take the Catalog → Products route. Navigate to your product, find the "Price" section and set up the "Compare to" price. Save the changes.

Learn more about sale prices in Ecwid → 

2. Offer Discounts on Order Subtotal

This type of sale is based on the expectation that people will buy additional stuff to reach a certain threshold to get a discount.

To run this promo successfully, you should have a good portion of repeat customers that already know your product and are open to ordering more of it.

Set up discounts on order subtotal in Promotions → Discounts.

How to set up discounts →

3. Set Up Bulk Discount Pricing

Give a hint to your customers that they can buy several gifts of the same type for good money.

Bulk discount pricing

To do that, set up bulk discount pricing. Every next item will be cheaper and Ecwid will automatically calculate the total discount in percent for even more impressive deals.

4. Create Discount Coupons

E-commerce merchants love coupons for their flexibility. With their help, you can run a promo on many different terms:

• Give a discount to repeat customers only
• Give a discount depending on order subtotal
• Offer free shipping on specific conditions and more.

It works like this: you set the rules when the coupon can be applied, Ecwid generates the coupon code (or you can create it yourself, for example, BLACKFRIDAY2017). Then you share the code on your website, on social media, personally via email, by chanting it in the streets, by dropping a bottle in the ocean — the distribution really is up to you, depending on who you want to reach.

rockabilly-bowling-shirts.com

You can limit coupons in time (e.g. active for 24 hours only) to run flash sales and last-minute deals.

How to set up discount coupons →

Tip: It’s so handy to create, enable, and stop your discounts on the go with the Ecwid Mobile app.

5. Run BOGOs

There are many fans of the Buy-One-Get-One(-Free) type of sale. Ecwid makes it possible with the BOGO app from the Ecwid App Market. Get the app and set up the rules.

BOGO settings

We’ve talked about BOGO sales in detail in another post: 5 Types of BOGO(F) Promotions You Can Run in Your Store

6. Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is a bulletproof marketing strategy:

Source: stamps.com

You can set up free shipping for every order or for specific regions in Settings → Shipping & Pickup.

How to set up shipping in Ecwid → 

Or create a coupon code to apply free shipping based on the order subtotal, or to share it with certain customers only.

If you have decided to offer free shipping, it won’t hurt to remind your customers of it on each relevant product page. With the Free Shipping Icon app you can easily add a standard or custom free shipping icon to your product details section.

A free shipping icon

And if you run a daily deal with free shipping to everything in your store, it’s possible to enable the free shipping icon for all products with one click. Or tick separate products on the list and apply the icon to them.

Learn more: 6 Free Shipping Strategies and Their Alternatives

7. Offer Gift Wrapping

For free or for sale, gift wrapping offered together with a product is a time-saver. You can sell it as a separate product, or include it in Product Options.

Wrapping in Product Options

Learn more: 100+ Christmas Wrapping Ideas to Excite Your Customers

8. Add a Sale Description to Your Homepage

Offering a great deal? Declare it immediately as someone comes to your online store.

Go to Catalog → Categories → Store Front Page → General and add your deal description. You can add a text, an image, or even a video.

Sale description on the homepage

9. Add Special Offers to Category Pages

The same can be done for each separate category, if your discount applies to a certain group of products. Go to your Catalog → Categories, click on your desired category, and add a description.

Deal description on the category page

10. Push Your Deals at Checkout

Share offers and gift ideas at checkout with the Checkout Notices app. Use it also to notify customers about important shipping terms or holiday business hours.

Promo at the checkout

11. Offer Flexible Discounts Based on Cart Contents

Depending on what you sell and your holiday campaign goals, you may need to create more sophisticated discounts than just "50% off on everything". For example, you probably want to offer a special price on shoe care products if they are bought with shoes in your store.

To make your discount apply only to certain products or product combinations, categories, cart amount, local customers, date, customer groups etc., check out the Advanced Discount Rules app.

Create flexible offers with the Advanced Discount Rules app

12. Display a Promo Bar

If you want to inform customers about your deals regardless of the store page, you can add a promo bar with a CTA.

The Promo Bar app is free to use and has numerous customization options, like colors, texts, fonts, and styles.

Promo bar

13. Highlight Items for Sale with Labels

The Product Labels app is built to let you add and customize your labels the way you need. Use "Hot", "New", "Sale", "Sold Out", or other custom labels to draw your holiday shoppers’ attention.

Product labels

Learn more: How to Boost Sales of Certain Products in Your Store with Product Labels

14. Show Related Products

Showing related products on product pages or at checkout can increase the time customers spend in your store and result in a higher order value. If you sell supplementary products (e.g. razors and shaving cream), a ‘You May Also Like’ section is your sales machine.

Related products

Learn how to set it up: Related Products

15. Remind Visitors of Recently Viewed Products

The holiday sales frenzy can make customers distracted easily. There are so many deals out there, so many products to choose from. Follow them with the reminder of what products they just checked out as they are browsing your online store.

The Recently Viewed Products app is a free extension that helps you do just that. Choose where to show this section and the number of products you want to display.

Recently viewed products

16. Add Popups and Banners

Imagine a lot of salespeople would work for your online store during the holiday sales. They’d push your deals right when a customer needs it:

• welcoming newcomers with a special offer
• catching those who are about to leave without a purchase with a nice discount
• navigating customers to your bestsellers.

It’s great that you don’t need staff to do this job in your online store. Set up pop-ups for different customer actions: exit intent, scroll, time spent in store, etc. The Easy Popup app will do the sales work for you.

Easy Popup

Pop-ups can even hold an engaging contest. Launch the Scratch and Win pop-up to capture leads and grow fans in a fun way, or add the gamified wheel to let visitors win discounts, coupons, or free shipping.

17. Enable Social Selling Tools

Use social media to spread the word and drum up more people. Go to Settings → Social Tools to:

• Open a storefront on your Facebook page or sell on Instagram to allow customers to buy without leaving their favorite social media.
• Add like and share buttons to your products
• Add the Facebook Comments widget to your product pages
• Ask customers to share their purchase and follow you on Twitter
• Let customers ask their friends for advice while shopping.

To quickly share your product pics on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, turn to Ecwid Mobile.

18. Create Urgency and Scarcity

There is a number of ways to cheer up your customers while they are browsing.

Add a countdown timer — because no one wants to miss a great deal. The Ecwid App Market has two timers:

• Timer Plus: a countdown next to the "Add to Bag" button on the product details page
• Countdown Timer Popup: display it immediately, after a set period of time, on a page’s scroll down or upon site exit.

To create additional scarcity, show customers how much (or not so much) you have left in stock. Go to Settings → Design and enable to show stock to customers in the "Appearance" section.

Last, choose not to hide products that are out of stock; seeing that some products are sold out creates additional Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO). Add a "Sold Out" label to emphasize the feeling.

thepinkporcupine.ca

19. Advertise

If your marketing budget allows you to run paid ads, here’re some tools to help you out:

• Remarketing and dynamic ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network with the Facebook Pixel (now free!) and the Facebook Product Catalog
• Automated Google Shopping Ads
• Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr ads with the Orange Twig app.

20. Improve Overall Shopping Experience

Lastly, there is a bunch of features in Ecwid that improve the shopping experience in general, which can’t do anything but good for holiday shoppers.

• Enable "Buy Now" buttons to let customers buy in one click (in Settings → General → Cart).
• Offer in-store pickup to have fewer shipping issues.
• Write a clear return policy (and other legal pages) and display it properly.
• Add reviews to your products to gain more trust.

***

You might be using something else for holiday marketing campaigns in your online store. Why don’t you share your tecniques with us in the comments below?

75% of Instagram users take an action when they see a brand’s post. 72% of users have bought a product they saw on Instagram. Looks like that isn’t the limit, as the platform continues to improve the shopping experience both for sellers and customers. Shoppable Posts is one of the features that make it possible.

Instagram Shoppable Posts allow sellers to add a product tag to the picture. When followers tap it, they can see the full information about the product, and what is best, they can buy it at once. This creates a one-tap shop, which makes it easier to buy and sell on the platform. It is especially helpful with the holiday season coming — those presents won’t buy themselves, right?

If you use Ecwid, selling with Shoppable Instagram Posts requires no effort at all. Still on the fence about it? We asked Ecwid entrepreneurs to share their experiences using Instagram Shoppable Posts. Read on to learn how it worked out for their sales, and which other tips they use to make their stores popular on Instagram.

Rachel Lessne Moreschi, CakeSafe:

— What’s your impression on using Instagram Shoppable Posts? Are your sales growing?

— We only have 7 Shoppable Posts right now, but the results we’re getting are great. The link to purchase on our posts were clicked on average 40 times per post. We will continue to make our posts shoppable when appropriate.

— How much time did it take to get your account approved for shopping on Instagram?

— It was extremely quick. I want to say it was almost instantaneous. I don’t actually remember how long it took, but I would remember if it had taken a while.

— Are you going to take part in the holiday season sales? If yes, how are you going to promote your offers on Instagram?

— We typically offer a free gift with a purchase or a discount during the holiday season. Yes, we will promote the holiday offer on Instagram. Most definitely!

— What’s your best Instagram tip?

— Make your feed beautiful and visually interesting. I see so many accounts posting photos with overlaid text again and again. It’s too cluttered and doesn’t make a viewer want to follow the account. You might have great information or a stellar product, but with a feed that looks jumbled or boring, you won’t get followers.

Mircea Gligor, Gold Grillz:

— What’s your impression on using Instagram Shoppable Posts? Are your sales growing?

— Yes, I have noticed an increase in sales since we enabled the link to the product, as it’s a very quick shortcut to the website for that specific product.

— How much time did it take to get your account approved for shopping on Instagram?

— It took about 3-4 days for my products to be approved on Instagram.

— Are you going to take part in the holiday season sales? If yes, how are you going to promote your offers on Instagram?

— I am going to promote a special offer 2 weeks before Christmas on Instagram.

— What’s your best Instagram tip?

— Engage directly and quickly with potential customers on Instagram. Also, try to promote products as much as possible with targeted Instagram ads.

— I offer a special discount coupon of 5% off all orders with the code IWANTMYGRILLZ.

Carlos Carvalho, Borealis Watch Company:

— What’s your impression on using Instagram Shoppable Posts? Are your sales growing?

— So far we haven’t noticed an increase in sales due to shoppable posts, but at least we have found an increase in incoming traffic from Instagram. One thing we noticed, though, is that Instagram does not allow to sponsor shoppable posts.

— How much time did it take to get your account approved for shopping on Instagram?

— Since we started the application process, it took around a week and a half to get approved.

— Are you going to take part in the holiday season sales? If yes, how are you going to promote your offers on Instagram?

— Currently, we have no plans for seasonal sales as we are working mostly with pre-orders, but Instagram seems one of the right sales channels to use to appeal to a broader audience and exposition to market.

— What’s your best Instagram tip?

— Don’t give up and keep adding content to your Instagram account, using the correct hashtags in order to increase exposure and awareness. With time, followers start to appear.

Cherie Clairmont & Kim Mraz, Co-Founders Third & Main:

— What’s your impression on using Instagram Shoppable Posts? Are your sales growing?

— We love the idea of being able to have our customers click directly on the post to shop, rather than forcing them to head to our feed, look for the link, and then search for the product on our website. Having the post shoppable saves multiple steps for the customer; therefore, it increases the likelihood of the sale. Our sales have been continuously growing since our launch in early 2017.

— How much time did it take to get your account approved for shopping on Instagram?

— We are very happy to be able to offer Shoppable Instagram Posts to our followers and have used this feature quite frequently. It took no time at all to get our account approved.

— Are you going to take part in the holiday season sales? If yes, how are you going to promote your offers on Instagram?

— We are excited about the upcoming holiday season and can’t wait to launch our Black Friday and other holiday sales and promote these offers on Instagram.

— What’s your best Instagram tip?

— I would say that our best Instagram tip is to engage with your followers!

If these Ecwid merchants’ experiences have inspired you to use Instagram Shoppable Posts, find out how to get started in our guide. Please note that it might take some time for Instagram to review and approve your profile after you connect your product catalog.

As I write this, we’re barreling down the road to the retail frenzy that has come to be known as BFCM: the four-day period that kicks off with Black Friday and concludes (in principle) on Cyber Monday, draining post-Thanksgiving coffers across the entire world. It’s a prospective bonanza for online retailers — from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday in 2017, American consumers spent a staggering $19.62 billion online.

Any e-commerce business looking for a hefty slice of that pie must invest in paid advertising, and Facebook advertising is the cream of the crop. Offering complex targeting options fueled by the rich data collected from its 2.2 billion monthly users, it leads the way for ROI and advanced segmentation — but only if used correctly. Configure your campaign incorrectly, or fail to monitor it properly, and you won’t get anywhere.

Thankfully, Facebook advertising isn’t all that challenging to do if you’re familiar with the basics. Let’s go through how you can whip up some Facebook ads to effectively drive your BFCM sales:

Step 1: Lay the Groundwork in Ads Manager

From the Facebook account associated with your store page, head to the Ads Manager, select your account if needed, and click on "Create", then choose your objective from the list of suggestions. For BFCM products, I suggest "Conversions", since you’ll ultimately be caring about sales as opposed to lead generation (which is more suitable for long-term marketing.)

You’ll have two options before you proceed: "Create Split Test" (which will let your ad sets compete) or "Budget optimization" (which will automatically spread your budget across your ad sets).

Unless you’re really confident about making manual changes, I suggest going with the latter (you can only choose one) because you can then set a campaign level budget and let Facebook figure out which ad sets should get the most investment.

Continue, and select "Create a Pixel" for the website option. Enter your store’s URL, and once it’s done, choose to set up the Pixel: you can then decide how you implement the Pixel, which is what allows Facebook to track what happens when ad clickers arrive at your site.

If you have an Ecwid store, you can integrate it with the Facebook pixel for free. That’s very easy to do and doesn’t involve coding.

With your Pixel configured and added, you’ve laid the groundwork, and can now start thinking about the audience you want to target. Scroll down to the "Audience" section and read on.

Also read: Instagram & Facebook Marketing Update: Ecwid Now Offers Facebook Pixel FREE to All Merchants

Step 2: Prepare Your Segmentation

Facebook has a lot of targeting options that let you get really detailed with your ad segmentation, and it’s essential that you use them well. Try not to be too intimidated by the sheer breadth of choices. You don’t need to use every parameter — it’s actually more likely to be damaging if you try, because it will take up a lot of time and prove too restrictive.

Because Facebook will tell you roughly how many people you can expect to reach using whichever configuration you select (look to the panel on the right of the screen.)

Spend some time playing around with the settings. Given the hallmarks of BFCM, there are certain demographics that are worth looking at first: gamers, people who work in IT, commuters, those who have "liked" relevant brands, etc.

Closer’s Cafe has an outstanding infographic setting out all the targeting options you can use, so read through it carefully. As you do, think about your desired customers. What traits do they have in common? You’re trying to walk the line between being insufficiently specific and overly specific — getting your ads to the best possible audience.

If you’re also running other forms of advertising (email marketing is a must for Black Friday), then there’ll be a lot of crossovers to make things easier. Once you’ve done your segmentation work for one, you can carry the parameters over to the other.

Sticking with PPC may mean that your ad being displayed to a suboptimal recipient is unlikely to be too damaging, but it’s likely to prove a waste of time (there’s also the probability that your ad will attract some clicks out of idle curiosity from people with no genuine interest in it, costing you money and giving you nothing in return).

If you’re not 100% sure how to proceed, you can always set up multiple variants of your ads, with each one targeting a slightly-different demographic. After a few days, you can review the data to see which is performing the best. If there’s a clear standout, you can point your entire campaign in that single direction.

You’ll also need to decide how long you want your campaign to run. You should set it to conclude at the end of Cyber Monday, certainly, but you may want it to run for a few weeks ahead of Black Friday. It all depends on how much you’re willing to spend early on to hype up the event. If you have general brand ads, you can run them earlier, but leave the product ads until your big discounts are live.

Related: Ecwid’s New Social Selling Tools on Facebook

Step 3: Сhoose Your Payment Model

A Facebook ad can use one of two payment models, with the first being the familiar PPC (pay-per-click) model. Each ad will be served in accordance with your campaign settings, and when someone clicks on it, you will be charged based on how hotly competitive that particular placement was. If someone else is willing to pay more for a click, their ad will be displayed instead of yours.

But Facebook also supports the PPM (pay-per-mille) model, which charges you for every 1000 impressions. An impression is simply when your ad is displayed where someone can see it, and the cost is the same regardless of how many clicks your ads get.

In general, PPC is the safer bet because it carries less risk. Even if you win a bid and get the placement, you won’t be charged anything unless you get a click, so whatever budget you set will only be used if people click on your ads. This makes it a great choice for product ads.

PPM tends to be cheaper, though, so if you have particular ad that you’re confident will convert well, you might want to try swapping it to PPM. If your store is relatively new and you want to use BFCM to become a recognizable brand, PPM is the way to get maximum exposure.

Depending on the choices you’ve made about the purpose of your campaign (whether you chose "Conversions" or something else, for instance), your model may be set as PPC or PPM. If you don’t have a choice in the matter, you’ll need to change your "Optimization for ad delivery" option to something that supports the payment model you want to use.

Step 4: Create Your Ads

With your parameters decided, continue and you’ll be at the ad creation stage. Make sure the right Facebook page is selected (your store page), and review the available formats. You can create a carousel ad to show multiple products, or use a single image, or provide a slideshow.

You can even use an "Instant Experience" (formerly known as "Canvas") which is a mobile landing page inside Facebook that opens when your ad is clicked. If you have various products to highlight, or you have compelling imagery, give it a try. There’s value in mixing up formats, and you can always change things up later.

Set up your links and your text, and see what you make of the preview. BFCM is a frenetic time with a lot of retailers fighting for attention, so it’s even harder to stand out. Put a lot of work into making your ads look fantastic using the highest-quality images you can find, and review your likely competitors to counter their promotional tactics.

Keep in mind the aspect ratio requirements of Facebook ads, as well as the various restrictions, such as the limit on how much text you can display in an image (you can use this tool to check an image with text before you submit it, and I recommend you do so you don’t need to wait to see if your image is rejected).

After that, you’re ready to get your campaign going. You’ve done the initial work, and now it’s time to move to the most important stage: campaign monitoring.

Step 5: Review Your Analytics

Facebook now has a comprehensive analytics platform called Facebook Analytics, but it can be rough to configure, so only pursue it if you really want to learn how it works. Otherwise, you can stick to Ads Manager and review the results that way.

What you want to be doing as your campaign rolls on is seeing how different ads and segments are performing. For each ad, you can go to "Audience" for a breakdown of the people it has reached, and of course review the targeting options you set in step 2.

You may find that certain ads are barely reaching anyone because the parameters you set were too limited. Facebook’s audience prediction isn’t infallible, so it’s possible that it will predict that you’ll reach two thousand people per week but you’ll only reach two hundred. That’s why you can’t just set things up and let them run, even with budget optimization.

Related: 5 Ways To Lower Your Facebook Ads CPC

Step 6: Make Tweaks as Needed

If something isn’t working, change it. Even over a five-day period, it’s worth tweaking whenever you think it might help. If you set a healthy budget, the intense level of retail activity of Black Friday should give you a lot of valuable data by midway through the day, so that’s a good point at which to review your strategy. What’s working, and what isn’t?

Change things up heading into the afternoon, and again before the Saturday, and on a regular basis until Cyber Monday is over. And once it’s all over, don’t just forget about it and move on. Your results, whether good, bad, or somewhere in the middle, could be invaluable for having a vastly improved 2019 BFCM campaign — take some time to study the results and see how you could do better.

Facebook advertising is so powerful that it’s the perfect core of a BFCM marketing strategy, but it takes a lot of work to get it right. Run through these steps, find other resources where necessary, and keep experimenting, even as late as the morning of Cyber Monday. Leave no stone unturned!

Also read: What to Post on Facebook: 20 Post Ideas for Your Facebook Business Page

We’ve improved Ecwid’s SEO: stores on Ecwid Starter sites will rank higher in search engines and get more free organic traffic.

In case you didn’t know, each Ecwid user has a one-page website with a built-in online store. Ecwid can be embedded on any website, Facebook, Instagram, or marketplaces, but what makes our Starter site great is that it’s ready to sell within minutes of a no-brainer setup and is perfect for a quick launch.

You can attract customers to your Ecwid Starter site by different means, including free methods like search engine promotion. We have made Ecwid websites more Google-friendly, so it takes much less time and effort for your Ecwid Starter site to get indexed and rank higher on the search results page.

If you know your way around SEO and indexing, feel free to jump to the Ecwid updates now. And if you have added Ecwid E-Commerce to your own website, stay tuned for the updates.

Why SEO is Important

Search engine optimization is what you do to get your website as high as possible on the search engine results page to generate free traffic to your online store. Picture this: a user Googles a product and sees your store first, not someone else’s. In this case, you get the most clicks, and many of them can result in purchases. That’s why you need SEO.

There’s 644 million websites on the internet, so yours won’t get to the top of Google naturally. You have to enter the race for the sweet spot by working on your website SEO: collect keywords that customers use to find your products, include them in your product titles and descriptions, use only original and unique website content, advertise it, and make others want to link to it on their resources. That’s quite a bunch of work, so before doing it, you want to make sure the search engine actually "sees" your website and can index it.

Three New SEO Features for Ecwid Starter Sites

We have been working for a long time to make Ecwid stores better for search engines, and now we have released important updates that will improve the indexing of all stores running on Ecwid Starter Sites:

1. Smooth and fast indexation

We’ve improved the visibility of Ecwid store pages for Google so that it understands their content much better and can index them faster. Your customers will not notice anything — your store pages look the same to them.

Also, to get the most important store pages indexed first, we hide content that customers won’t search for (so search engines don’t need it either). For example, it can be the cart page, account page, and other service pages.

Ecwid automatically shows the search engine what to index and what not (service pages mentioned above) in the robots.txt text file. All Ecwid Starter Sites have it.

2. Sitemap helps search engines discover your content

Sitemap is a file of links to all pages of your site. With this file, the site owner shows the search engine all the existing links of the site in one document. That way, search robots do not need to look for product pages themselves, browsing categories, subcategories, and beyond. Sitemap simplifies and speeds up indexing. We update it every day, which means that search engines will quickly find out about all the changes you have made in the store.

Without a sitemap, indexing a website takes more time: nobody can tell when the search engine crawls all the site links on its own.

In Ecwid stores, the sitemap is generated automatically and includes the store’s homepage and all the category and product pages.

To view your sitemap, type "/sitemap.xml" after your website domain in your address bar (for example, myshop.ecwid.com/sitemap.xml):

The automatic Sitemap feature is available for Starter Sites on all Ecwid paid plans.

3. Microformats transform page content into rich Google snippets

Microformats are a set of tags that you can add to the HTML code of your web page to help search engines understand its structure and display it correctly in the search engine results page.

Compare these two snippets:

The rich snippet is more compelling to users as they see what’s called social proof (in the form of a star rating) and promo details. With microformats, you too can point Google to your page titles, headings, reviews, descriptions, prices, etc.

Ecwid uses the Schema.org — a standard markup worked out in a collaboration of popular search engines. And voila, it’s added to all Ecwid store pages automatically.

More Ecwid SEO Tools

Make sure you also use the other Ecwid SEO tools and features:

• Clean SEO-friendly store URLs: Ecwid store links are free from extra characters. Easy-to-read, user-friendly links are clear to search engines and can be the reason for the higher ranking of a site in search results. For Starter sites, these links are enabled by default (if you’ve got Ecwid on other websites, please enable clean URLs using our guide.)
• Custom meta tags for products: control how exactly Google displays your product pages in the search snippets with custom meta titles and descriptions.
• Site verification in Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a special service that helps to launch site indexing and monitor it. To start using the service, you must confirm that you are the owner of your site.
• Rich social snippets for product pages: This feature doesn’t impact SEO directly, but it makes links shared on social media and messengers more compelling to your potential customers. On Ecwid Starter Site, each product page link has a title, image, and description. No actions on your side to set it up.
• Managing indexation of different storefronts: Ecwid Starter Site gets indexed automatically, but if you’ve added Ecwid E-Commerce to another website (on WordPress, Wix, or another platform) and you don’t want your Starter Site to duplicate its content, you can hide it from search engines by disabling its indexation in Control Panel → Starter Site.

Your Actions

Here’s what you can do right now to see noticeable improvements in your Ecwid Starter Site SEO soon:

1. Get your Ecwid Starter Site verified in Google Search Console to start measuring your site’s search traffic and performance.
2. Add Your Sitemap to the Search Console to help Google discover the right content on your site.
3. Write good SEO-friendly copy on the first tile of your Starter Site. Not only should it provide value and be compelling to your customers; it should also include keywords that they use to find your products. Check out how to build keywords for your store and how to design your Starter Site if you need help.
4. Register your store in Google My Business. Complete these steps to improve your local SEO and increase visibility in your area.
5. Be sure to create unique product descriptions spiced with target keywords.
6. Regularly share links to your store on different social media and try to get other websites to post links to your store too.

SEO takes time, and the result is not immediately visible. But if you decide to optimize your Ecwid store for search results, Starter site is completely ready for it. If your Ecwid store is embedded to a different website, see how you can improve your store SEO and stay tuned for the updates.

The last step of the next-generation Ecwid storefront is completed: meet the reimagined checkout page, the page where the money comes in. And man, it’s just awesome.

The new checkout in Ecwid does not just look neat. It is built with 700 pages of conversion optimization wisdom and almost 10 years of our e-commerce experience in Ecwid. In this post, I’ll show you what has changed, why we did it, and how it’s gonna make you more sales.

A quick note: this update is automatically enabled for all new Ecwid stores. If you’ve been selling with Ecwid for a while, switch to the "Next-gen Storefront" in Settings → What’s New.

Collecting More Сustomer Emails

Now you can capture customer emails even before they start the checkout. If they drop out in the middle, you still have their contact details and can recover them with an abandoned cart email or build a custom audience for retargeting. It’s much more effective than asking for email at the end of the checkout because you capture every bounced customer.

There’s a psychological effect too: by entering an email address (which, by the way, is quite a simple thing to do), your customers become more committed to the order, and, since a part of the work is done, are more likely to complete it.

Сart Contents Always at Hand

Your buyers always see what they are purchasing in the cart contents section with all the product and order info in place (including discounts, taxes, shipping terms, etc.), which improves navigation and does a little marketing magic too:

"Believe it or not, pictures can help improve your conversion rates. Instead of just listing your products, show the customer what they’re buying. While you may have an image or two of your products on your e-commerce shopping page, make sure that image shows up in the shopping cart." — Neil Patel.

Moreover, since the cart page and the checkout are united on a single screen, the checkout process is one mouse click shorter (with the checkout optimization, every click counts!). It’s that simple: your customers go to their cart and can proceed to checkout right there. No extra clicks, less chance to bounce, less cart abandonment.

Single-Page Checkout Experience

A checkout that is too long and complicated is among the top three reasons for cart abandonment.

On the single and transparent checkout page, your customers don’t face a chain of steps that they didn’t know about when they started.

Reasons to love the one-page checkout:

• There’s no need to wait for another page to load
• No unexpected steps, fields, and forms
• It’s always clear how to get to the previous step and proceed to the next one
• It makes a better layout on different devices.

A short summary of every completed step relieves customers from going through every step again and again to make sure everything’s right.

Simplified Shipping & Delivery Forms

Shipping is usually the longest checkout step, but Ecwid has simplified it to three simple actions:

1. Choosing Shipping or In-Store Pickup (if you offer it)
2. Typing in the address
3. Selecting the shipping method.

Here’s why this approach is better:

• Bold buttons help to distinguish in-store pickup and shipping quickly and simplify decision-making for your customer.
• The address form is separated from choosing a shipping method and comes first. That helps to calculate automatic shipping rates more accurately and makes the overall flow more straight and digestible.
• Autofill makes filling this form a breeze (if a customer has entered this shipping address in the browser before.) Additionally, Ecwid tracks the location via IP, and your customer gets the country and state filled for them when they check out. If your customer makes a repeat order, this form gets auto-filled too, and it’s possible to proceed to the next step right away.

A Slick Сredit Card Form

The new design of the credit card form looks much better — but that’s not the only improvement here. The process of filling out the credit card form has to be perfect for you to keep the customer and get paid.

A lot of tiny details shape this perfection and ease of use:

• Ecwid checks the credit card number right away to make sure it’s valid to prevent customers from typos.
• After filling in the first four digits, your customer sees the credit card type, which adds confidence that he or she is using the right card.
• The credit card number is conveniently formatted (digits are grouped the same way they appear on the credit card for better visual perception).
• The form can be auto-filled with a single click if a customer has their credit card details saved in their browser. That saves your customers time and energy.
• No Cart Holder Name field: few people know that field is not mandatory, so it’s totally possible to skip it (just like Stripe does), speeding up filling the form and reducing traction.

Finally, the form, as well as the rest of the checkout, is completely secure. It works only via HTTPS. (If you’ve added Ecwid to an HTTP website, the credit card form will open in a secure popup. Still, we strongly recommend switching to HTTPS.)

An Actionable Order Confirmation Page

The order confirmation is a standalone page that makes it clear — the order is placed. Its content is now reorganized to improve user experience and amplify customer excitement from the purchase:

• A visible shipping address on the map creates an additional wow-effect: your customer sees his or her location and expects to receive the order here.
• If the order is paid and has digital products, your customer can download them right on the order confirmation page. No need to open their inbox or go elsewhere. They see the file type too (music, images, PDF file, etc.) to bring in additional safety.
• The customer sees instructions on payment if the order needs to be paid. You can set up these instructions in your Control Panel → Payment for each payment method.

Optimized for Mobile

With 52% percent of global web traffic originated from mobile devices, your smartphone and tablet shoppers are just as important as desktop visitors. The new checkout page in Ecwid stores is comfortable to use no matter the screen size.

Flexible and Customizable Checkout

If you want to add some checkout fields (for example, display a date picker or limit availability hours) or remove those you don’t need, the updated Extra Fields in the Ecwid API are now much more flexible. You might need help from a developer or simply refer to the Ecwid Customization Team.

People love online shopping for its convenience. With the new Ecwid checkout page, your customers enjoy a hassle-free shopping experience and you get more sales without extra effort.

I’ve been collecting merchants’ feedback for a while to make the Ecwid checkout page perfect, and now I’m looking forward to hearing what you think. Feel free to drop me a line in the comments.

Social media platforms play a very important part in the success of many online stores and companies. Among them, Instagram had grown a lot over the last few years, gaining a much bigger amount of users and attracting people of every niche to create and share the content they enjoy.

Selling your products and services on Instagram can turn out to be very fruitful if you know what type of content you are supposed to create. Personalized posts are a very clever way of attracting the right customers and followers, who will help your brand to grow quickly.

What is Personalization?

According to TechTarget, personalization stands for "a means of meeting the customer’s needs more effectively and efficiently, making interactions faster and easier and, consequently, increasing customer satisfaction and the likelihood of repeat visits".

Put simply, it means that businesses monitor and collect information regarding their target audience’s behaviors and interests to create more valuable content.

Here are some of the best examples of what companies do to come up with a personalized feed.

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1. Show People You Care

The smartest way to attract new followers is by treating your existing ones the best way you can. Personalized posts allow you to create a much more personal relationship with your audience and help them get to know you better too.

To achieve that, create posts welcoming your new followers by tagging them individually or repost some pictures from your followers’ accounts and let them know how much you appreciate their dedication and love.

There’s nothing better than getting something that makes you smile. And there’s no better way to do that than by treating everyone as an individual. If you can do that with a little bit of personalization, then you might just have a follower for life who will support your brand through every step of the way.

Also read: 10 Free Ways to Get More Followers on Instagram

2. Catch the Eye

Personalized Instagram posts allow you to focus more on your niche, your company’s vision and the message you wish to spread. By combining all of these factors together, you should be able to create a post which will be different from all the others Instagram users see on their feeds.

Anthony McGregor, Social Media Specialist for PickWriters, notes — "You should always try and bring yourself in the position of your potential followers. If you see something that speaks directly to you then it’s far more likely to catch your eye". This piece of advice is ideal if you want your posts to stand out from the crowd in an already crowded marketplace.

A unique picture with a special message from you or your team or an inside look at your facilities or the production line of your products and employees is a lot more likely to catch the eye of your potential followers and customers.

Related: 11 Expert Instagram Marketing Tips For E-Commerce Businesses

3. Post Content That’s More Likely to be Shared With Friends

The best way for a company to become more popular faster online is by creating content that is sharable. In most cases, personalized content will allow people to relate to it. Instagram allows its users to tag their friends on your original post and share it with them without having to copy the actual picture.

In other words, your followers are more or less turning into your very own, personal marketing team and are sharing it with their friends without a second thought. If people feel a connection to your content, then they’ll be more likely to want to show it to the people they hang out with in real life and that can benefit your business greatly.

Related: What Ecwid Merchants Say About Instagram Shoppable Posts

4. Mean More to the Recipient

Another big reason why personalized posts are so important for your business is because they will show your audience how much care you put into the content you create. Most social media sellers will not go above and beyond when it comes to creating content that will be special and meaningful to their audience, but if you do, your followers will be able to tell.

If you can send someone something that means a lot to them then they’ll be more likely to keep it and by extension, your followers will be more likely to come back to your page for more similar posts.

Even if it only stands out from the rest of the posts they see that day, they’ll be more likely to engage with it and share their own thoughts and experiences in the comments below it.

Related: 13 Instagram Apps to Increase Your E-Commerce Sales

5. Don’t Come Across as Ads

A common mistake which ends up driving people away is tooverly market Instagram posts in the form of ads. If you want to be able to sell to people on Instagram, then the worst thing is for your posts to come across as heavily sales-orientated ads.

Not only are people tired of seeing them on their feeds, they have just become too mainstream and uninteresting, so your potential followers will just end up skipping them without a second thought.

If you want people to be converted by your content then making it personal is always the way to go. The more your posts stand out from your competitors’, the more people will enjoy viewing them and actually welcome them on their feeds. You just need to keep in mind that you will have to put effort into creating a connection with your potential customers and making them feel welcome on your page.

Also read: How To Use Instagram Stories For Business

Making Your Brand More Popular Through Instagram: Your Actions

Selling your products and services on Instagram is all about creating a more personal relationship with your followers with every piece of content you create and post. People who follow accounts on Instagram don’t follow them because they wish to see ads. They want to come across interesting content, which will mend to their needs and provide them with personalized options.

By personalizing your posts, you are allowing your brand to stand out from the crowd in a heavily concentrated marketplace by going that extra step to establish a connection with someone. The more effort you put into the posts you create, the more people you will be able to attract, who will actually care about following your brand for a long time.

More: How to Develop a Visual Theme for Your Instagram Business Profile