New Sharing Buttons

Social networks, such as Facebook, have proven to be a great viral source for new customers. People love to share new things with their friends, so we’ve improved our social sharing options – it’s now easier and faster than ever. Ecwid already has the most popular button: Facebook’s “Like”. Now it also has these additional share buttons.

• Twitter’s button. Twitter, with its 140 million active users, is a great way to promote your products and inform your customers about your store’s news. Users can now easily tweet a link to a product in our store – we will even suggest for them to follow your store’s Twitter account (if you’ve entered it in the settings).
• Google+ Google pushes its social network very actively and there is already a lot of people who prefer Google+ to Facebook. Ecwid now has the Google+ Share button, which looks very similar to Google’s “+1″ one, however it is designed specially for sharing. This button was released a few weeks ago only and is already available in Ecwid.
• Pinterest’s “Pin it”: quite a new player on a social network field which gets a lot of attention nowadays. Pinterest is already named a 3d popular social network in US (after Facebook and Twitter), so it can bring you a lot of traffic. Check out our selection of articles describing why Pinterest is cool and how to use it properly.
• VK button: VK is the most popular social network in Russia, so if you’re targeting customers from Russia, this button will be very useful.
• Tumblr button – Tumblr is a microblogging platform, which is designed to share multimedia: most of Tumblr’s posts are images. The “Share to Tumblr” feature will be especially welcomed by merchants, who sell using Ecwid on their Tumblr blogs.

Embedding new buttons seems like not a very complex change, but actually our engineers had to perform a lot of work under the hood. For example each button loads an image, CSS and JavaScript files, so if you enable all of them, it could slow a product page loading down, even if a user didn’t want to share anything. This would be a big no-no for us, as Ecwid was built around speed. We had to create a system, where buttons are loaded only when a customer wants to share something. When the customers opens another item, the buttons and their resources are re-used, so the loading speed of product pages aren’t affected.

The other interesting task was to make the buttons work all together and on all sites without issues. We even had to reverse-engineer the faulty JavaScript code of some of the buttons to fix minor, but annoying glitches.

All of these additions and fixes were to make enabling and using them our your site extremely easy: just log in to your Ecwid control panel and open the “System Settings → Social Tools → Share buttons” page. Such buttons encourage your customers to share your items more, this in turn will get you more visitors and sales.

Improved Order API

When you start getting more and more orders, you will want to automate some actions. That’s why Ecwid API was implemented – to create a way to integrate Ecwid with other useful 3rd-party systems and apps (i.e. Quickbooks) according to your unique business needs. You can check some of these integrations in our “Goodies” section.

Our Order API already allows to get information about your sales, now it is possible to update orders’ statuses and tracking codes via API as well. This feature should be used for more deep integrations with other systems. For example if you update a tracking number in your shipping software, it now could be updated in your Ecwid store as well.

Speed

As you already know, constantly improving the speed of Ecwid stores is one of our primary goals. Ecwid is already an extremely fast shopping cart (thanks to its AJAX nature and our constant optimizations), however we improve its speed in every release. In v10.4 we paid very close attention to the initial loading of Ecwid stores, when all its main elements are loaded. We were able to further optimize Ecwid so the initial loading of an Ecwid store so that it takes 40% less time now. Pretty awesome result, isn’t it?

What’s next?

v10.4 is a minor release and doesn’t bring any big features. They will appear in v11.00, which will be released soon. We decided to add:

• Sale/”Compare at” price – new way to promote your items and their new prices.
• New social tool that will encourage your customers to share items with their friends – something even more cool than the usual share buttons.
• Bulk discount pricing.
• The completely re-vamped shipping module: ability to set rates based on order total (e.g. “free shipping for orders over $500″), ability to set a default shipping method on checkout and much more.

These features are already developed and currently tested by our QA team. So stay tuned and subscribe to our Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news.

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After a lot of research, and several prototypes our designers have found a way to make Ecwid even more awesome.

While we are planning to release this new design in the future (no exact ETA yet), you can already preview it and take part in our Beta program. To participate please follow these easy steps:

• Open your store
• Change the URL in the browser’s address bar. Add the #experimental_design part to the end of the URL. If it already has the # symbol, remove everything after it and add “experimental_design“. So your URL should look like this: http://www.example.com/store.html#experimental_design
• Refresh the page using this new URL and check the new Ecwid look. (The preview works for Windows and Mac users and for stores that are not embedded with iframes, like some sitebuilders (i.e. Wix )

You can check out the new design on our demo store: www.ecwid.com/demo-frontend.html#experimental_design

We have already tested this new design on small subset of users and received strong positive feedback. As one of our users said: “That is really great. New font is just gorgeous!“. Users also say that the new look is very impressive and fresh, so we are looking forward to releasing it to all Ecwid stores.

And lastly…
Happy April Fools’ Day! Don’t worry this is just a joke : -)

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Affiliate program: 20% revenue share

We are glad to announce that Ecwid Affiliate Program has been officially launched. Becoming an Ecwid affiliate is the fastest and easiest way to partner with us and get rewarded for spreading the word and love about Ecwid. Refer clients to Ecwid and get your cut from our profits: 20% recurring revenue commission for all their payments to us.

Our affiliate program is powered by zferral affiliate software and features:

• Automatic commissions payment via PayPal
• Real-time performance tracking and comprehensive set of reports
• Pre-configured marketing banners for quick start with the program
• Tools for running campaigns on Facebook and Twitter

To join the program please visit our web site at www.ecwid.com/affiliate-program.html and press the “Join Affiliate Program” button. We believe this program is a great opportunity for everyone that would like to help Ecwid grow and also earn with us as well.

Next / Previous product navigation links

Ecwid now displays special “Previous / Next Product” links on the product details page, so your customers can browse your items quickly, efficiently and more conveniently.

Prior to this new feature, if a customer wanted to browse all items in a specific category, he/she would need to open a product details page, then go back to the category level, then open the next product and so on. This was not ideal and not the way it should be. That’s why we added these links, so now your customers can easily press the “Next product” link and the next product is loaded instantly.

This feature hides a lot of great changes and improvements under the hood. We wanted to create the fastest and “wowest” experience as possible, so we implemented a complex combination of product caching and products pre-loading mechanisms to make sure the next/previous product will be loaded blazingly fast. Actually when a customer presses the link, the next product is already loaded and ready to be shown, so it is displayed instantly. This means that Ecwid will display product pages faster than any shopping cart on the market, period.

But this is not all. If you’re a keyboard ninja and love keyboard shortcuts, you can use them to browse your catalog. Use “Ctrl + →” and “Ctrl + ←” to browse products and “Ctrl + ↑” to go one level up.

As one of our users who tested this feature, said: “Ah that is really awesome… I was just messing with it in the test store. It’s kind of addicting, getting you to click through the whole catalog“.

Your customers will view more items and spend more time on your site, which will lead to more sales for you.

These “Next / Previous” links are new elements on the product details page, so if you use a highly-modified custom CSS theme on your store, you will probably need to style them as well. For this reason, we’ve disabled this feature for our users by default (as we do with other new features). If you would like to use this new feature you will need to enable it manually. Just log in to your control panel and follow the instructions.

Also

• We’re constantly working on improving the performance and speed of all Ecwid stores. We strongly believe that fast page loading is a big advantage and leads to more sales. As a result of our internal changes the average speed of Ecwid response was improved by 15%.
• We’ve also improved the order search in the control panel. As many of you probably know already, Ecwid provides a unified field to search for all order values. It’s very convenient not to think of what field to fill in and just enter the search string in one field and find the specific order for whatever you search for: customer name, email, purchased products or anything else. It works great, however as soon as the number of orders grows in a store, the performance begins to suffer – too far from our standards. That’s why our engineers revamped the order search completely. Now Ecwid uses a separate search server to perform such tasks. So even if you have thousands of orders (we wish for you to have them), the search will be extremely fast and accurate. As a neat addition to this feature, it is now possible to search by the “Affiliate ID” order field as well. This feature will be automatically enabled for all merchants who have more than 100 orders a few hours after v10.3 release.

Feel free to use and enjoy these new features. Our team is already working on the next major version, which will include a completely revamped shipping module, new social sharing buttons and many more important new features. Stay tuned and subscribe to our blog, Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news : -)

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Comment area for customers on checkout

Now Ecwid has a tool that allows you to ask the customer for additional information during checkout. You can enable this feature in the control panel and allow your customers to write notes and add specific information to their orders. After orders are placed they will display as notes in the backend.

This feature can be used to collect any specific information or considerations that your customers would like to attach to an order. For example a gift note, a preferred time of delivery, specific options related to a whole order. You can easily change the form caption to better suite your situation.

We know that many Ecwid merchants have waited a while for this feature, since collecting specific information related to an order is an essential part of their business. The more detailed information about your customers orders, the better you can serve them, and the more repeat sales you’ll receive. We’re happy to release this important and “must-have” feature. It can be enabled on the “System Settings → General → Cart” page, “Order comments” section.

Easy way to add tracking and affiliate codes to your store

A lot of merchants use affiliate systems and advertising tools (such as Google AdWords) as an additional channel to boost their website traffic and sales. Indeed, they can be very effective. Almost all systems ask to add some specific conversion/affiliate tracking code to your conversion page, also known as “Thank you for your order” page, i.e. the last checkout page a customer sees when he placed an order successfully.

Now Ecwid has an easy way to add such codes. Just open the “System Settings → General → Cart” page, find “Checkout Settings” section and enter the code there.

Now you can use your Ecwid store with your favorite affiliate system without any issues and get more sales. If you don’t have an affiliate program yet, we suggest you to consider adding it, because affiliates can bring you many new customers. For example check zferral.

More changes

• New Russian payment gateway: QIWI. It’s one of the most popular gateways there. It has low transaction rates, widely used by customers and it’s easy to sign up for a QIWI merchant account. That’s why we think it’s a great option for merchants who’ve just began selling online in Russia.
• A lot of internal architectural improvements under the hood. These improvements will increase the speed and stability of the Ecwid platform.
• Now it’s possible to change the endpoint URL of the Authrozie.Net payment gateway. It instantly allows Ecwid to support many different gateways that can emulate Authorize.Net SIM API. Moreover, it’s now possible to integrate a custom gateway with Ecwid without touching Ecwid code and asking the Ecwid team for changes. It’s a great opportunity for 3rd-party developers: there’s tons of different gateways, which we don’t integrate with Ecwid yet. Now you can create your own 3rd-party integration and offer it to merchants. More details: Custom payment gateways API
• We’ve updated Ecwid’s Single Sign-on API slightly for better integration with your site’s Sign in/Sign out links. So if you use this API, we suggest to update your integration.
• New translations of the control panel and storefront. The backend is now available in Spanish and Portugese. Storefronts are now available in Persian, Lithuanian and Macedonian. Ecwid now has 40 storefront translations, that’s a lot! Thanks to all of the volunteers who’ve helped us with the translations.

Also we want to describe some new features implemented in v10. You’ve most likely already noticed and used them, but we think that they’re worth mentioning in our blog.

Unfinished sales

Now store owners can view the unfinished sales. These are orders that were started by customers, but were not placed yet. For example you can always contact a customer and ask if he/she has any problems when placing an order. If you for example get an order by phone, you can always convert the unfinished order to a “real” one manually, by pressing the “Place this order” button.

This feature will be very useful for converting unfinished abandoned orders to the real sales.

Ask customers to select the product options

Customers who shop in Ecwid stores have many ways to add a product to the shopping bag.

Besides the old-school “Add to Cart” button on the product details page, a customer can also drag-n-drop a product to the cart or add it from the list of products in the “Table” view. When these ways are used, the customer skips the selection of product options and the default set of options is added to the cart. Some merchants found this behavior not desirable, because they wanted the customer to be able to select the necessary options to avoid possible incorrect purchases.

Now it is possible. If you enable the “Ask customers to select the options” button, Ecwid will always ask to select the options before adding a product to the bag, if they aren’t selected yet.

PayPal reasons of the Pending orders

There is plenty of reasons, why an order placed via PayPal has the “Queued” (pending) status instead of “Accepted” (order has been placed successfully, money received) one. The most popular reason is that for some reasons PayPal informed Ecwid that the payment was pending or Ecwid marked the order as “suspicious”.

Now Ecwid displays the exact reason in the order details. So you will always know, why the particular order is “Queued”.

New APIs for partners

A lot of API work has been done. We’ve added many new private APIs for our partners, such as a Single Sign-on for the backend, ability to create and manage stores via API calls, embedding our control panel to external websites. All these APIs allow to smoothly integrate Ecwid with your platform and offer it as an integral part of your business.

If you’re a web-hosting, site-builder, payment gateway or just want to re-sell Ecwid to hundreds of your client, drop us a line: www.ecwid.com/partners-program.html

Improved Dashboard

Some useful changes have been added to the “Dashboard” page. Now it displays the last 10 orders instead of the last 5. You can also hide the unnecessary sections if you don’t need them. For example if you wish to hide the integration code dashboard since you only need it once (when Ecwid is installed) you can. This way it doesn’t display each time you log in to the control panel.

We also added a new section, that displays your Store ID, storage and how much data has been transferred. So you have more stats about your store and will never miss your Store ID, which is often necessary when you install Ecwid plugins or ask a question on our forums.

Thank you all for the support and help. Stay tuned and subscribe to our Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news : -)

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You will find the details on Techcrunch, VentureBeat or in our official press-release.


This means a lot for every Ecwid merchant. Our startup was initially created by a small team and was growing without any investments (thanks to our users, who subscribe to our Silver plan!). In two years it grew from just a released app to a solid e-commerce platform used by 115,000 merchants in 174 countries. Nowadays if you want to sell on Facebook, add e-commerce functionality to your WordPress or Joomla site, or just have an easy-to-use and hassles-free store, Ecwid is the best choice.

The investment will allow us to grow even faster and make Ecwid the most popular shopping cart in the world. With more resources we will be able to seriosly expand our team and release new Ecwid versions more often. That’s the main advantage of this investment for each Ecwid user: more great new features you all ask for.

In addition, we will establish offices in the US and UK in early 2012, since roughly 70 percent of our users are based in the United States and European Union.

Thank you all for your support! Stay tuned, 2012 will be very interesting and great for Ecwid community.

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Today we’re happy to announce a new major version of our Facebook shopping cart with some new, very useful, and highly anticipated features added.

Browse your products right inside your Facebook tab

Some background of this change — We released our free e-commerce Facebook app about a year and a half ago. At that time Facebook didn’t allow the use of HTML in the page tabs. Only Facebook’s technologies called FBML and FBJS could be used there. These technologies are quite limited and it wasn’t possible to provide a great shopping experience using them. Moreover, FBML tabs didn’t support secure browsing via HTTPS and their speed was far from perfect.

At Ecwid, we care about speed and security. For this reason, it wasn’t a good idea to show the store in the FBML tab. This is why we decided to show just 4 random products with the big “Open our Store” button. Those products and button were linked to the main app canvas, which is still inside Facebook, but allows to use standard HTML and JavaScript and is much narrower than a tab. Your customers were still able to see the products in your store on the “Products” tab of your page, but at the same time they were able to checkout and place order in the secure and fast environment of our app’s main canvas. It was a good workaround, but your users had to click a button to browse your products and that wasn’t cool.

Facebook now has improved its platform and added this missed feature, making it possible to use standard HTML/JavaScript right inside your Facebook tab. So our app has been updated as well!

Now your customers can view and browse your products and categories immediately after opening the store tab of your Facebook page. No more extra clicks! Just open the tab and begin browsing your full-featured Ecwid store. You can view an example at the following URL: www.facebook.com/ecwid?sk=app_251458316228

If a customers tries to open a page, that requires a wider layout, then he will be redirected to the same page in a main Facebook app canvas. As a result, your customers can start to browse your products immediately after opening your ‘Products’ tab but will still have a great shopping experience and advantage of the wide app canvas.

All new users of our Facebook app have this feature enabled by default. Existing users can enable it in the app settings.

Straight forward installation process

We’ve improved the installation process greatly. Now our Facebook app has an awesome welcome page, which highlights the app’s key features. This page is shown to a first-time visitor, who hasn’t added Ecwid to their page yet. Also you can always open this page at apps.facebook.com/ecwid-shop/welcome

Moreover, the app guides you through the installation process step by step. This improvement will make the installation of our Facebook shopping cart as easy as pie.

Manage your pages

All your pages that have Ecwid installed are now displayed in one place. So if you manage many Facebook pages this feature will make your life much easier. You can open any of your pages in one place and have access to their settings.

Easy and free way to create custom Facebook tabs

Some Facebook page Owners want to create custom Facebook tabs to display their content on Facebook pages. These tabs are great to show promotions, your company description, welcome messages and other things that you may feel are important to your Facebook visitors.

For example check our “Testimonials” tab: www.facebook.com/ecwid?sk=app_207940915916695

There is no easy and free way to create a custom tab. You need to create your own Facebook application yourself, code it, host it and purchase an SSL certificate (recent Facebook requirement for all apps). Or you can use a one of many existing apps to create a custom tab. Usually such apps are free and show a pesky “Powered by” link, that doesn’t look professional.

We here at Ecwid want our users to have a hassle-free experience and not be worried about such issues. That’s why we’ve added the feature that allows every user of our free Facebook app to add a tab with custom HTML code to his/her page for free. No pesky “powered by” links inside the tab, No coding necessary, no additional hosting and avoiding unnecessary spending.

There is one more thing. This feature has the “Fan Gate” option included. Fan Gate is where visitors who open your page see one form of content and when they “like” it, the content changes to something different and just for fans. For example non-fans can see a message such as “Like us to access a 10% off coupon” and when they like your page, the coupon code appears there.

This is an awesome feature for deals, discounts, gifts, contests and exclusive content. It will encourage Facebook users to “Like” your page which will increase the number of your page’s fans and get more sales! : -)

We’re already working on new features and updates for the next major Ecwid version. Stay tuned and subscribe to our blog, Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news.

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Some quick facts

• We have already got about 100,000 registered merchants.
• Ecwid is used in 174 countries.
• Ecwid storefront has been translated into 37 languages.
• Our comminity have posted 35,500+ forum messages.
• Since the first version 500+ new features have been implemented.
• Our servers serve 200,000,000+ requests each month.
• Store owners have uploaded 6,000,000+ product images to our system.

Pretty exciting stats. However, we’re not going to stop. 2012 will be a great year for our community and Ecwid: we have very big and ambitious plans on Ecwid. So, stay tuned!

Thank you all

We’d like to give a big Thank You to all our community. You’re awesome. Your help, feedback and kind words and comments support us greatly. Thank you!

Happy Birthday, Ecwidians! : -)

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Search by transaction ID

Now you can search for your orders by a transaction ID. This feature is very handy, if you see the transaction in your payment gateway’s back-end and want to find the corresponding order in your Ecwid control panel.

New “Available, but out of stock” filter

The new filter allows one to quickly get a list of products which are enabled but out-of-stock.

New mail tags: %affiliate_id% and “%payment_transaction_id%

If you want to send affiliate ID’s or transaction ID’s in your admin notifications and have access to this information without logging in to your control panel, then these mail tags are for you.

New payment gateway: Multisafepay

This is a new payment option for our Dutch clients. The MultiSafepay payment gateway allows accepting payments via iDeal, Credit cards, Banktransfer (NL and BE), Bancontact/Mister Cash, Direct-debit, Giropay and DIRECTebanking.

Improved messages about shipping/tax/product price changes in cart

Now if a customer adds some products to cart and the store owner changes some shipping/tax/product prices/rates at the same moment, the customer will see a notice about this even without refreshing the store page.

So, your customers will always purchase your items using the latest actual prices and rates.

The “Formats & units” setting page re-designed

Now it is more convenient and clear. You can compare the old and new designs on this screen-shot: sys_set_compare.png

New Ukrainian translation

Ecwid already has 37 storefront translations out of the box. Thank you, our Ecwid users, who have contributed the translations and corrections for helping us to achieve this!

Feel free to use and enjoy the new version. Our team is already working on v10, which will add more interesting things. Stay tuned and subscribe to our blog, Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news : -)

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We’re happy to announce the next major release of Ecwid, version 9.0. All users have been upgraded automatically.

So what new features have our developers implemented during the last couple of months?

Category descriptions

Now it’s possible to add a description to any category or an entire store. This feature is extremely useful if you want to make your category pages more appealing, which can lead to more sales : -)

For example you can add a general description of a categories products or a graphic banner, promoting a special product or highlight some featured products (two products below the “This Weeks Featured Specials” header are added using a category description). Using this feature your category pages will look better than ever.

Good news for Ecwid developers: 4 new APIs have been added

We’ve added 4 new great APIs. Now Ecwid is even more flexible and can be integrated with different 3rd party applications and extended using custom modules! Let’s describe these APIs:

• JavaScript API
  This API is intended for JavaScript ninjas who want to integrate their own JS codes with Ecwid. This API allows you to attach your custom JavaScript functions to Ecwid events and access Ecwid internal variables (such as information about a logged in customer). For example this API can be used if you want to dynamically update the site page based on some Ecwid states and events: “show a special banner, if a customer is eligible for free shipping”. JavaScript is a very powerful language, so the number of possible mods and tweaks using this API is pretty vast.
• Single Sign-On API
  Single sign-on (SSO) is a user authentication process that permits a user to enter one login and password in order to access multiple applications. For example if your site already has the ability to create accounts and you are using Ecwid your customers may find it rather inconvenient that they have to log in to your site and store separately. No more inconveniencing your customers! This API allows your customers to sign into your site and fully use your store without having to sign into Ecwid. I.e. if a customer is logged in to your site, he/she is logged in to your store automatically, even if he/she didn’t have an account in your store before. This API will be extremely helpful for sites with an existing user base, who wants to make checkout process more transparent and easy for their customers.
• Order API
  Using this secure API, authorized apps and services can get information about orders in your store. It should be used for integrations with accounting applications(such as Quickbooks), CRM systems and affiliate systems; syncing orders with your other stores or creating custom reports, invoices and shipping labels.
• Instant Order Notifications API
  Now Ecwid can notify another application in a real-time about important events happened in your store: “new order placed” and “order status changed”. A developer can use this API to extend and customize your checkout process. For example send a custom e-mail notification, inform your supplier about a sale or generate a pin code or a license for a sold software.

All developers are welcome to create custom services and modules (free or paid ones) for Ecwid users with these APIs. We’ll be glad to help you to promote them and place them in our “Goodies” section!

Social tools

Ecwid has always been a social shopping cart. Using its free Facebook shopping cart application it is possible to start selling on Facebook in minutes. Now each Ecwid merchant has more social tools, which can be enabled with a single click: Facebook comments and Facebook Like buttons.

• Facebook comments are a good choice if you want to make your product reviews truly social. They have two important features:
  1. Social Relevance: Facebook Comments Box uses social signals to surface the highest quality comments for each user. Comments are ordered to show users the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked or active discussion threads.
  2. Distribution: Comments are easily shared with friends on Facebook, meaning more people who know about your online store. If a user posts a comment, a story appears on their friends’ News Feed indicating that they’ve made a comment on your website, which will also link back to your site.
  Friends can then respond to the discussion by liking or replying to the comment directly in the News Feed on Facebook or in the Comments Box on your site. Threads stay synced across Facebook and on the Comments Box on your site regardless of where the comment was made.
• Facebook Like buttons
  Using these buttons a customer can quickly share a product in the News Feed with a link to your site, so all his/her friends will notice that he/she liked it and will be able to check your product too. Nowadays Like buttons are a serious traffic source for websites.
  These buttons also have the other purpose: they’re modern equivalent of old-school “1-5 star” reviews. The more “Likes” a product has, the more popular it is. Since Ecwid displays Likes on category pages also, it’s easy to see what products are most preferred by customers.

And the greatest part of Facebook Comments and Likes is that they’re made by real people with real Facebook accounts. So your store visitors will trust them, which leads to more sales for you.

All images have been moved to Amazon S3

Geeky tech news: Ecwid now uses the “Amazon S3” service to host all category and product images. Almost 6 millions existing images have been moved transparently for our users from Ecwid’s Amazon servers to Amazon S3. All old links of course work without problems, however all stores are using new image links now.

Two main reasons why S3 is great for Ecwid users:

• Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities, so S3 provides 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of all objects. It means that your images are always safe and will never be lost. This enterprise technology is available for all our customers free of charge.
• Since images are served from Amazon S3 directly, Ecwid works faster now.
  For example check the screen-shot of one of our internal graphs which shows a load of one of our servers. As you see the load is twice as low after moving images to S3!

As you know Ecwid is designed to be a fast shopping cart. However we constantly look to improve performance. Our goal is to implement new performance improvements in each major release, so Ecwid will be the fastest shopping cart available.

2 new payment gateways

Ecwid supports two more payment methods: the South African “Virtual Card Services” and Russian “PayOnline System” payment gateways.
This will allow our South African and Russian users, who were previously not able to accept credit cards, the ability to begin accepting them.

Also

• It is possible now to force a storefront language selection regardless of a customer’s browser settings. This feature is useful when you want to have a separate site page per each store language.
• New optional currency setting has been added. Ecwid now can hide the fractional part of a price, if a price is integer. E.g. $55.00 will be displayed as $55.
• If you import your products via CSV file and some image URLs in that file aren’t valid, Ecwid will not stop the whole import process anymore. It will import all products and valid images except the invalid ones and then show on an import report warnings and links to corrupted/incorrect images, so you could upload them manually. So importing is now faster and even more convenient.
• Ecwid HTML code has additional CSS classes now which dynamically change depending on a current Ecwid page, enabled language or opened product/category. It allows to apply very flexible CSS rules, which will work on specific pages or products. So for example, if you want to hide breadcrumbs for some categories only or increase a font size when a specific storefront translation is active, it’s now possible.

Feel free to use and enjoy these great new features. Our team is already working on the next version, which will add more interesting things. Stay tuned and subscribe to our blog, Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news : -)

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So what new features have been added since v7.0?

Agree to terms before ordering

The long-awaited and important feature has been added to Ecwid. Now you can ask your customers to agree with your store’s terms and conditions before they can proceed to the checkout process.

If this feature is enabled the customer will need to check a box agreeing to the terms and conditions of your store before purchasing anything from you. However it isn’t just a boring checkbox as other e-commerce stores have. Our team always goes the extra mile to make sure each implemented feature will be the best in its class — and this one isn’t an exception. It has two cool little details:

• Ecwid will automatically warn the customer by highlighting the terms and conditions checkbox area when the customer mouse’s over the “Checkout” button.
• If a customer presses the “Checkout” button without agreeing with your terms, Ecwid will show an error in a really cool way. No more boring error popups or messages.

Check it yourself in our demo store. Just add something to a shopping bag and try to checkout.

Properly written “Terms and Conditions” protect your online business because if a problem arises, having terms and conditions will help resolve that problem in your favor. So we recommend all merchants to enable it. The “Terms and Conditions” can be enabled on the “System Settings → General → Cart → Terms and Conditions” page and is available for paid accounts. An awesome reason to upgrade your store and support our team.

4 more payment gateways

Ecwid now also supports the following payment options:

• iDeal(via Mollie): the very popular Dutch payment method;
• iPay88: the Asian payment service, which supports Malaysian, Thai, Singaporean, Chinese, Philippine payment options;
• PayJunction: a US service, which offers merchants accounts and payment gateway at lower rates;
• Suomen Verkkomaksut Oy: the leading e-payment method provider in Finland.

6 new storefront translations

Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Estonian, Norwegian and Vietnamese are built-in to the Ecwid core. So you can now enable them in one click from the Ecwid backend. Ecwid has 34 storefront translations now and counting. Impressive! Thank you to all the volunteers who’ve helped us translate Ecwid. With your help Ecwid became a truly international app: only a handful of e-commerce solutions have as many translations as Ecwid.

The list of the backend translations was also extended. Now our control panel is also available in Hungarian and Dutch.

If you’d like to add your language to our list of built-in translations, please refer to the “Translations” article.

FedEx, USPS and Facebook APIs have been updated

Periodically shipping carriers, payment gateways and other services update their API’s (a set of rules, which are used to communicate with them). When this occurs, the old API’s become outdated and don’t work correctly any longer. If you use an average shopping cart, then you need to update its API modules manually yourself or pay somebody to do this task otherwise your store will just stop working properly with these services. Imagine: a store just stops getting real-time shipping rates, so your customers would not be able to checkout. It’d be a nightmare!

Ecwid is different. If you use Ecwid, then you don’t need to think about all these “under the hood” things or update anything. Our team does all the necessary work for you: we track the API changes and update Ecwid accordingly, so you don’t ever need to worry about these things. Win over your competitors: while they apply patches and mess with a code, focus on a really important thing: Your sales! We will handle the rest : -)

Ecwid uses Amazon Route 53 now

Geek news: we’ve moved Ecwid’s DNS to the Amazon Route 53 service, which uses a global network of DNS servers. Queries for Ecwid domains are automatically routed to the nearest DNS server and thus answered with the best possible performance. Just another way to make sure Ecwid will always be the fastest shopping cart on market.

Feel free to use and enjoy these new awesome features. Our team has already working on the next major version (8.0), which will add more cool and necessary things, such as category descriptions and Facebook “Like” buttons. Stay tuned!

P.S. Bonus: the photo of our team just a few hours before v7.1 release.

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