Wanna grow your store in the new year? Over the last few months, our e-commerce elves have been been hard at work designing new features to help you sell more this season. Discover what’s new from Ecwid E-Commerce, and find out how you can take your Ecwid store to new heights in 2019.
Contents:
- A Sleek One-Page Checkout Experience
- Faster Indexation and Better SEO for Ecwid Starter Sites
- A Powerful Ecwid Starter Site Editor
- "Compare to" Price, Bulk Price, and UPC for Product Variations
- Automated Retargeting Facebook and Google Ads
- A Comprehensive Marketing Section in the Control Panel
- Product-Specific Shipping Methods
- Three Labor-Saving Control Panel Improvements
- Ecwid Supports PayPal Smart Button
- The Ecwid App Market News: 10 Handy Store Extensions
- Ecwid Mobile News
- Other Сool Updates
- For Developers
A Sleek One-Page Checkout Experience
When it comes to e-commerce, a positive checkout experience is invaluable to closing the sale. Thanks to some invaluable user insights from our e-comm experts, the Ecwid checkout page has been completely reimagined for your customers. This brand new conversion experience is the final piece in our renovated Ecwid storefront.
Revamped Ecwid checkout page
To buy or not to buy? Because the checkout page is where customers make their final purchase decision, we’ve loaded each checkout step with user science to optimize it for conversion:
- Collect more emails and recover more abandoned orders. By placing the email field at the very beginning of the checkout experience, you’ll capture more users and be empowered to reach out with remarketing messages or special offers if they decide to bounce at a later step.
- Сart contents are always visible at the checkout: This reminds customers of the cool stuff they’re about to purchase and also makes the checkout one step shorter (no need to proceed to checkout from the cart).
- Easy one-page checkout flow: Nobody likes filling out forms (or they shouldn’t). With a single page layout, your customers see all the steps at once and can easily navigate between them.
- Simplified shipping and credit card forms: With autofill, intuitive layout and a simplified form, we’ve made filling out credit card information a breeze.
- Optimized for mobile and customizable: Now your checkout page will look and work great on any device. And if your form needs a special touch, you can even hide or add fields (like working hours) via API.
This update is automatically enabled for all new Ecwid stores. Not seeing your new checkout page just yet? Manually switch to the "New and improved Shopping Cart and Checkout pages" in Settings → What’s New.
Learn more about this update and conversion optimization here: Introducing One-Page Checkout for Ecwid Stores
Faster Indexation and Better SEO for Ecwid Starter Sites
If you sell on a free one-page Ecwid website with a built-in online store — a "Starter Site" — you’ll see your store indexed much faster, thanks to three new features.
Improved Ecwid store page visibility for Google. By improving visibility, Google will be able to better understand your store content. The most important store pages now get indexed first, while the content that customers won’t search for (cart page, account page, and other service pages) is hidden from search engines. All this info is recorded in a robots.txt text file that indicates which Starter Site pages should be indexed and which shouldn’t. This process happens automatically and no further action is required.
Sitemap to help search engines discover your content. Sitemap is a file that shows the search engine all the existing links of the site. That simplifies crawling for search robots and speeds up indexing. The Sitemap gets updated every day to ensure the most recent changes in your store are indexed. The sitemap in Ecwid is generated automatically and includes the store’s homepage and all the category and product pages. The feature is available for Starter Sites on all paid Ecwid plans.
To view your sitemap, type "/sitemap.xml" after your website domain in your address bar
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 rich page snippets in the search engine results page.
The rich snippet is more compelling to users
Ecwid uses Schema.org — a standard markup worked out in a collaboration of popular search engines. It’s automatically added to all Ecwid store pages.
Learn more about these and more Ecwid SEO features: SEO Update: Why Google Is Gonna Love Ecwid Starter Sites
If you sell with Ecwid on a different website, stay tuned for SEO updates!
A Powerful Ecwid Starter Site Editor
Now you can design your Ecwid Starter Site from top to bottom on a single Control Panel page with a live preview.
- Go to Settings → Starter Site to see your free one-page e-commerce site with an Ecwid store already built in for you. Hit "Edit Content" and change any section right from here:
- Play with 40+ storefront design options
- Change the cover image, business hours, address, and other company info right here
- Change your Call-to-Action button text from "Shop Now" to anything else (like "Order Now," "Learn More," "Book a Table," depending on your business goals)
- See all the changes in a live preview.
"Compare to" Price, Bulk Price, and UPC for Product Variations
Product variations are combinations of your product options that you can sell on special terms (price, quantity, discounts). To make that crystal clear, let’s consider an example.
Imagine you sell a t-shirt. It comes in sizes S, M, L and colors yellow and gray. Those are product options. You’ve got leftovers of yellow t-shirts in size M and want to sell them out. So you decide to run a sale for this specific variation. The product variations feature in Ecwid allows you to set up a sale price for this particular set of options.
Product variations are sets of options for your product
Settings for product variations in Ecwid are now extended:
- Specify the "Compare to" price to promote certain variations with a discount.
- Add UPC for each variation for better inventory management.
- Set up bulk prices to make your variations more appealing to customers.
Add product variations in your Catalog → Products → Options → Variations. The feature is available on Business and Unlimited plans.
Automated Retargeting Facebook and Google Ads
96% people leave the store without making a purchase. Return your potential customers by showing them dynamic ads on Facebook and Google — all automated for you.
Dynamic ads are banners that automatically adapt their content personally to each user depending on their behavior on your website, delivering the most effective creative for that user.
Thanks to the new Ecwid integration, launching this effective format doesn’t require any special skills. Simple settings make it easy for anyone:
- In your Control Panel, go to Marketing → Facebook Ads → Automated Facebook retargeting.
- Select where to advertise your products: Google or Facebook (or maybe both).
- Follow the instructions to connect your store to the Google Adwords account or to associate it with a Facebook pixel.
- Set up your ads content, the audience, and daily budget.
Tips and hints will help you to set up your dynamic ad campaign easily. Image credit
What’s automated for you:
- Product Catalog creation. You won’t need to export your entire Ecwid product catalog and import it to Google Adwords or Facebook: the system gets all the product info automatically.
- Ad setup. The whole process is simplified, and you can set your ads from your Control Panel instead of going in the weeds of Facebook Ad Manager or Google Adwords.
- Bidding strategy. With a smart bidding algorithm based on machine learning, the system analyzes your ad performance and automatically spends less money on people with a low chance of converting and prefers groups with a higher chance of converting, so you spend your budget the most effectively.
Turn your visitors into customers, recover more abandoned orders, and increase your conversion rate — and spend nothing more than your advertising budget. Automated Facebook & Google remarketing is available on paid Ecwid plans.
A Comprehensive Marketing Section in the Control Panel
All Ecwid marketing tools are united under a single section in your Control Panel now:
Once you’ve completed the store setup, your adventures begin: now you need to promote your store to get your first sale. Even if you don’t know a thing about digital marketing, no worries: we’ve arranged the tools on this page in the right order according to how your customers move into the sales funnel:
- Attract shoppers to your new store: start advertising your products to those who are searching for them on Google, the most popular search engine, or find your target audience among the two billion Facebook users.
- Сonvert your visitors into customers: send automated emails to those who didn’t complete their orders, run a sale, create discount coupons, or run remarketing campaigns to reach bounced visitors.
- Keep your customers: integrate your store with an email marketing service and keep the fire burning with a regular newsletter.
- Analyze performance: check out your store stats and find room for improvement.
So if you don’t know where to begin, start at the top of the page. Just make sure your store is in its best shape before you launch paid advertising.
Product-Specific Shipping Methods
Now you can set shipping rules on a product level: limit shipping methods for certain products if it’s unprofitable or impossible for you to ship them with some of your enabled methods.
Picture this: Jeff sells aquariums, fish, and fish food. He can’t ship an aquarium via regular mail because it’s too big and heavy. He can’t ship live fish this way either because a special service must be used to transport live animals. But a regular parcel is perfect for shipping fish food. At the same time, all the products are available for in-store pickup. When someone orders a combination of these products, Jeff wants his online store to take that into account and display only the available shipping methods for the cart.
If you want to specify shipping rules for a product, go to Control Panel → Catalog → Your Product → Tax and Shipping. Here you’ve got four options:
- Use global rates: in this case, your product will be available to ship with methods that you’ve set up at the Shipping & Pickup page.
- Specify shipping methods for this product: add some methods to the whitelist to enable them for this product and to the blacklist to disable them accordingly. Note that these lists can’t be used for a product together.
- Fixed rates per item: if your product is fragile and requires additional packaging, you might want to set up a fixed rate that would include those expenses.
- Free shipping: customers love free shipping, so this option works like a charm for increasing the sales of certain products.
A product with these settings is available only for in-store pickup.
What if a customer added products to their cart that don’t have common shipping methods?
– Say, if product A is only available for in-store pickup, and product B is not, Ecwid displays a warning at the checkout and suggests to split the cart contents. If you have complex shipping terms, don’t hesitate to describe them additionally on product pages, in an FAQ section, or at the checkout using the Checkout Notices app.
What if I need to update product-specific shipping settings in bulk?
– You can do that via the Ecwid API.
Product-specific shipping methods are available on all paid Ecwid plans.
Three Labour-Saving Control Panel Improvements
Your Control Panel has become smarter too:
- Save custom filters in My Sales → Orders to access your custom order lists faster.
- Edit abandoned cart emails more conveniently: now you don’t have to mess with the code, and your changes are saved for future sends if you use the manual mode:
- Edit products from anywhere with mobile-responsive product pages:
Ecwid Supports PayPal Smart Payment Buttons
With the support of PayPal Smart Buttons, you can dynamically present the appropriate payment options (ex. PayPal Credit, Venmo, and others) to give your customers ways to pay based on your specific configuration and a buyer’s location and cookies.
If your customers see relevant payment options to choose from thanks to PayPal’s smart algorithms, it increases your conversions. And if you sell internationally, it means that you don’t need to sign up with a variety of local payment providers. Sounds cool? Then connect PayPal to your Ecwid store and learn more about PayPal Smart Buttons.
Image credit: PayPal
The Ecwid App Market News: 10 Handy Store Extensions
With new Marketing and Dropshipping sections in the Ecwid App Market, you сan get to the apps and in these categories way faster.
Beyond that, we’ve released six new payment apps:
- PostFinance: a payment provider for Swiss online retail
- Lemon Way payments: payments online in Europe
- QuickPay: secure payments with all common payment methods and a fraud filter.
- UniPAY: accept payments in Georgian Lari.
- Razorpay: a payment gateway for India.
- Size Chart: create attractive size charts and add them to your product details pages.
More of the new apps:
- VIOLET: automatically publish your products to VIOLET’s growing network of video, voice, AR, VR, marketplaces, and applications to increase impressions and sales.
- Affiliatly: increase your store sales via affiliate marketing.
- Advanced Discount Rules: create custom discounts according to a customer’s shopping cart contents.
- Check Out with Phone Number: make it possible to check out in your shop with a phone number instead of an email.
Ecwid Mobile News
Managing your Ecwid store from your mobile phone is constantly getting better: this time, we’ve dramatically improved the iOS and Android Ecwid apps.
Updates for iOS
We were able to participate in Apple’s application improvement campaign. Thanks to new knowledge and their competent advice, our application has not only become easier to use, but now also supports modern iOS features like Accessibility Options for people with disabilities.
Updates for Android
Now you can use a few more essential store management features:
- Add or edit product options
- Upload several product pictures at once
- Upload and edit files for your digital products.
Both apps got these improvements:
- Store settings (shipping, payment, design) are now easily accessible united under the "Store" tab.
- Automated abandoned cart recovery emails can be enabled in a single tap. Check out this feature in Store → Abandoned Carts of your Ecwid Mobile app: if enabled, your store automatically sends email reminders to customers who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the order — an effortless way for you to make more money.
Other Cool Updates
- Our e-commerce plugin for WordPress is now compatible with page editors. If you want to use the Elementor, Divi, or Beaver Builder rather than the default WordPress editor, Ecwid is now smoothly integrated into the page. Ecwid is also compatible with the Gutenberg editor that will soon be the new default. Just don’t forget to update your plugin to the latest version.
- Ecwid can now transfer preparation time for order pickup to Square POS. So, if you sell food for pickup online and use Ecwid E-Commerce + Square POS, your staff can see when the customer wants their order ready on the device.
For Developers: Ecwid API
If you build Ecwid stores for your clients or develop applications for the Ecwid App Market (or maybe you’re a tech-savvy Ecwid merchant?), check out these changes in our API:
- Now you can open an Ecwid store page with pre-selected product options, which can be a useful marketing functionality.
- Now you can get a static HTML snapshot (homepage, category page, product page) via the Ecwid API. Use it to develop a custom product catalog, optimize the store for search engines, or increase the storefront load speed.
- When making "heavy" requests to the Ecwid API (like getting all the products from a store), use the optional header Accept-Encoding: gzip to get a response from the Ecwid API faster.
We’re building Ecwid with you, merchants, in our minds (and hearts!) — if you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to chat with the team in the comments below.
