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).