“Our goal is to let retailers sell wherever their customers wish to shop online. In the end it’s really going to be the consumer that dictates which venue they prefer. ” – Jim O’Hara, President of Ecwid

Take advantage of the changing world of ecommerce and be where your customers want to shop online. It’s easy to open an Ecwid store on your site with just a few clicks. Then add it to your Facebook page and other sites online, and manage it all from one central location. Sign Up for a free account today!

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Premium Feature: Google Shopping Feeds

Now it is possible to export your products to Google and use it as an additional sales channel. Ecwid was created to enable sales on multiple channels. You can embed your storefront to many sites at the same time, add it to Facebook and still manage from one backend. We’re happy to provide our merchants with one more source of new customers and sales: Google Shopping (former Google Products and Froogle).

The setup is easy. Please log in to your Ecwid control panel, upgrade if needed (this feature is available for Business and Unlimited merchants), then open Promotions – Google Shopping page and follow the instructions there. After all steps are complete, your products will appear when someone searches for your products on google.com and google.com/shopping for hundreds million of Google users. Isn’t it great?

Related items for the cart page

Ecwid now can display related products on the “Your shopping bag” page. This feature can be enabled on the “System Settings – General – Cart” page, “Related Products” section.

Related products have always been a good way to increase the average size of a sale in an online store. Now this feature is more powerful! You can suggest to buy some additional items when a customer decides to checkout. It will lead to more views for your products and therefore more sales.

New type of product options: checkboxes

Ecwid product options are one of the most popular Ecwid features. They allow your customers to customize your products: for example, select size, color, add a custom text, select a date or upload a file.

We’ve added one more option type, so now it is possible to select multiple choices using one product option. It is a great tool for businesses that sell additional accessories with their products, for example pizza and multiple toppings.

“Buy Now” buttons on product lists

It is possible to enable “Buy Now” buttons that will be displayed on the product lists. You can enable this feature on the “System Settings – General – Cart” page, just check the “Show “Buy Now” buttons on products list pages” checkbox in the “Catalog Settings” section and save the changes.

Products of some merchants are similar and self-explanatory from the title and image. So users are now able to add to cart from the category pages, instead of having to first go to the detail page, then add to cart. Less clicks for your merchants mean more sales and better conversion rates.

And if you’re a web developer or familiar with CSS, then we have some more good news for you. These new buttons are 100% CSS3 based, and don’t use images, so they’re very flexible and can be changed to a completely different design easily.

New Product Update API

This is something special for developers who use our platform. Our Product API now includes methods that allow you to update products: change quantity, price, availability, description, product types and other fields.

This is a great tool to automatically sync with different 3rd-party systems — for example accounting or POS apps. Your store will always have the actual information about items without needing to update it manually.

Ask your friends for advice

This is a new social feature to get more visitors to your store. Sometimes customers are not sure what to purchase or if they want this particular item. Just enable this feature (“System Settings – Social Tools – Ask Friends”) and your customers will see “Ask for Advice” link on a product page. It will encourage users to share information about products they want to purchase to their Facebook friends, so your store will get some new visitors and potential buyers.

Small things that matter

• Support of Social Tracking feature in Google Analytics. Merchants can now track social interactions and see how customers engage with products. You don’t need to do anything to enable this feature. New information will start to appear in your Google Analytics account automatically.
• New payment gateway: Global Iris / Realex. The HSBC CPI gateway integrated with Ecwid is shutting down, HSBC and all current users of its gateway are switching to Global Iris.
• Canada Post integration has been updated to the latest version. This is why Ecwid is so easy, you don’t need to worry about technical details, integrations and APIs – we do all this work for you.
• Additional CSS class for out of stock items. This will allow merchants to create CSS custom themes that highlight or mark out of stock items somehow.
• When you try to upload a new image in the control panel, Ecwid sends a hint to a browser to only show files that are allowed, e.g. images. It helps narrow down the results for users by default, so you can get exactly what you’re looking for without having to sift through a hundred different files.

We hope you like these new features. Our team is already working on the next version : -)

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Hello, Payvment sellers

Greetings to all Payvment sellers on behalf of the Ecwid community – welcome aboard! We’re glad to have you join our family of over 250,000 sellers in 174 countries and are here to help you grow your business. In order to automate your Facebook store setup, we’ve created a tool that transfers your store (including products, orders and settings) to the Ecwid platform – something no other store-builder can do! Just a few further clicks to grant Facebook permissions and your store will now have the exact list of products on the same Facebook page, minimizing any potential disruption to your business. You will also have access to several new e-commerce features and extend your store to mobile and web.

If you have further questions please review our Transfer FAQ, knowledge base or interact with other sellers on our community forum – we are eager to help!

Social commerce matters

This news has generated considerable excitement in the market. Techcrunch, Social Commerce Today, Vator News, Yahoo! and many other media sources have reported that Payvment sellers can transfer their stores to Ecwid in one click.

Social commerce is a great growth opportunity for SMBs like you and you can take comfort in the fact that the #1 Facebook shopping cart is behind you!

Our data shows strong sales growth via Facebook referrals over the past year. For example, in the holiday shopping period from October through December, 2012 Facebook directly referred 8.5 percent of all online purchases! It confirms USA Today’s theory: small businesses know how to succeed on Facebook and can use it as a powerful sales channel.

This is a great period in Ecwid’s evolution. As the leader in social commerce we will continue to innovate and chart the future of this industry together with our community of sellers. Take this opportunity to ride the social commerce wave, open your store on Facebook, and see your sales grow!

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Now, just in time for the holidays, PayPal is rolling out new financing tools that can help you boost sales. If you’re using one of PayPal’s checkout products to accept payments, now you can offer customers financing through their Bill Me Later® service.

Here’s how it works: When your US customers check out with PayPal and use Bill Me Later, they can get 6 months financing on qualifying purchases. The awesome part is that you get paid right away, regardless of when your customers pay.

How to get started

1. First of all, please make sure that you use and have enabled one of PayPal’s checkout products: PayPal Payments Standard, PayPal Payments Advanced, PayPal Payflow Link or Express Checkout. There’s no extra cost for you – Bill Me Later is already included in these payment options automatically. (Please note that Bill Me Later is available to US customers only at this moment)

2. Then, you should visit the PayPal Financing Portal to add banners promoting this financing offer to your site. Shoppers consider how they’ll pay before they check out. When you let your customers know they have financing options at the beginning of the shopping process, they’ll be more likely to spend more. You decide where to place the banners and which size to use. Just copy the banner’s code and paste it into your website’s source code where you want the banner to appear. For the best results, add the financing banner on your home page above the fold or to your site’s sidebar.

According to the Forrester Research’s study Bill Me Later can increase average order size by up to 75% and drive up to 43% more new sales, so it is a great thing to set up before the holiday sales. More information is available at www.paypal.com/financingportal.

New service plans

As we announced two months ago in our blog post, we’ve changed our service plan offerings in this release. The new Ecwid service plans will include the following options: www.ecwid.com/plans-and-pricing.html

We wanted the change to be as smooth and transparent as possible for our existing users. If you registered before the release of Ecwid 13.0 (i.e. before October, 30  2012), you will continue to receive the same level of service you currently receive today and until forever. There will be no change to the current features or pricing you receive.

Along with the service plans update, we also completely revamped our billing subsystem that processes recurring payments. We’ve teamed up with the CyberSource payment gateway (subsidiary of Visa Inc.) to make the billing system a lot easier and transparent for our users. For example you will be able easily update a credit card that is used to pay for our plans without contacting a payment gateway. Need to print payment receipts? No problem – you can download them from the “Payment history” page in the Ecwid control panel. (Existing paid users will need to re-subscribe to access new billing workflow) If you have any question about our new billing system or plans, feel free to contact us at billing@ecwid.com

After the initial announcement of new plans we have received a lot of great feedback from you, our Ecwid community. Thank you all. Your feedback, kind words and support help us greatly. These plan changes will benefit the whole Ecwid community.

And one more thing: after some considerations we decided to remove the monthly transaction volume limit in our new plans. So all new plans have unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited monthly transaction volume and 0.0% transaction fee. A truly unique offer.

Product types and attributes

We’ve added a very anticipated feature: product types and attributes, also called “extra fields”. 

Sometimes default product fields such as product name or description aren’t enough to display all necessary information about your products. Attributes solve this problem. They are custom product detail fields that show additional information of the product to your customers.

However what if you have different products that require different attributes? Then you should use product types. Product types are groups of products which share the same attributes and properties. The most popular examples of product types and attributes are “Books” with “ISBN, Number of Pages, Author”; “Apparel” with “Brand, Season, Material, Gender”, etc. 

For your convenience all product types have two default attributes that we consider the most commonly used.  “UPC” - unique product identifier which is called EAN in Europe, JAN in Japan and ISBN for books. And “Brand” -  brand or manufacturer of the product. While these attributes are default and cannot be deleted, you can rename them to the more suitable name, for example “Brand” can be renamed to “Author” for books or hidden completely from the storefront.

You can create your own custom product attributes and types on the “Catalog – Product types” page in your Ecwid control panel and assign attribute values to products on the “Attributes” tab on the product edit page. 

The more information a customer has about a product, the more probable he or she will buy it. However this feature is something more that just a tool to display additional information about your items. It’s also a way to structure your products and add meta information to them. This feature is the first step and foundation of other great features such as export to different marketplaces(Google Products, Amazon, etc) as well as faceted search with filters. All these next features will use product types and attributes as the source of the information about items and their attributes.  

New URLs and native AJAX indexing

As we announced on our forums in July, we’ve updated how Ecwid URLs look like.  The “ecwid:” part has been removed and replaced with “!”. For example this URL:

http://www.ecwid.com/demo-frontend.html#ecwid:category=3003&mode=product&product=5002 

has been changed to 

http://www.ecwid.com/demo-frontend.html#!/~/product/category=3003&id=5002


You don’t need to change anything – the transition is smooth. All old URLs and existing links to your store will work just fine. Even if you used an old URL notation to create custom menus or links to your store, the links will work just fine.

This change was made to support the Google’s “AJAX Crawling” API for native indexing AJAX applications. This will significantly improve the indexation of Ecwid stores. To comply with this API,  it is also requires a small change of your site as well – the updated versions of our WordPress plugin, Joomla extension and PHP module for custom-built sites will be released shortly. 

Ecwid is really unique in its approach and concept. It has advantages from both worlds: dynamic AJAX and old-school plain-HTML. It is faster than usual shopping carts, can be installed to any website and mirrored to many places because of its AJAX nature. And now it can be natively indexed by Google just as usual HTML website. 

Print many orders at once

If you get a lot of new orders every day (congratulations, by the way : -), printing them one by one will take a lot of your time. Not anymore. Just select all the necessary orders, press “Print selected” and print all invoices at once.

Great tool to automate repeating tasks and save your time for more important things, such as promoting your site to get more sales.

Remarketing with Google Analytics

Ecwid now supports Remarketing with Google Analytics. It lets you follow up with people who have already visited your website, and deliver ad content specifically targeted to the interests they expressed during those previous visits. 

For example, a group of visitors who spent time investigating specific products but didn’t add anything to their shopping carts might be swayed by additional ads for those same products. A group of visitors who added items to their shopping carts but didn’t complete the purchase cycle might be enticed with a coupon for free shipping or a discounted price. A group of visitors who have made purchases have demonstrated not only an interest in your products, but a willingness to buy, and so you have an opportunity to cross sell other products in which they may be interested. 

This feature can be enabled on the “System Setting – General – Store profile” page in the Ecwid control panel. 

Please refer to these articles for more information: 

• http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2611268
• http://www.google.com/analytics/features/remarketing.html

Remarketing with Google Analytics is an incredibly effective way to take advantage of all the rich data you have in Google Analytics and use it to improve your Adwords campaign performance.

Accept credit cards without leaving your store

Ecwid now supports one more PayPal product: PayPal Payflow Link. This payment gateway allows you to accept credit cards online using your existing merchant account. 

What makes this gateway really different is that it allows Ecwid merchant to accept credit card without leaving your checkout pages! It is something that our customers wanted to have since the first Ecwid version has been released. Some merchants want to have a total control over checkout process and don’t want to redirect a customer to a payment gateway to finish the transaction. PayPal Payflow Link is a perfect choice for them now. 

This gateway also has built-in support of PayPal’s  Bill Me Later  option.  Bill Me Later is a credit line that’s built-in to a customer’s PayPal account. With a Bill Me Later  credit line, customers can buy now and pay later with special financing for 6 months on purchases of $99 or more. Customers simply select the Bill Me Later  option on your checkout page, enter two pieces of information, accept the terms, and get an approval decision in seconds. Best of all, Bill Me Later  customers tend to spend more and buy more often—increasing your sales and average order value. As the merchant, you get paid right away – funds are deposited into your PayPal account within minutes.

So it is a great choice for every merchant who want to increase sale and conversion rates. You can apply for it there: www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/payflow-payment-gateway

Not so big features that make a big difference

We’ve optimized the loading of the main image on the “product details” page. It is now faster than ever making the product browsing a “wow it is so fast” experience. 

The icon of the “Share” section in the storefront has been changed to more familiar for your customers. It will lead to more tweets, shares and likes of your items.

When you upload a product or category image in the control panel, you now don’t need to hit the “Upload” button – as soon as you select the image on your computer, it starts to upload automatically. If you upload many images, not having to do an extra click will save you a lot of valuable time. 

You can now easily share your products to your Facebook page or Twitter right from the control panel.  Social media is widely recognized as an effective source for new customers. Sharing new items on Facebook will bring you more traffic and sales. If you have a FB page, we’d also recommend you to add your Ecwid store to it.  Please check the article in USA Today why it matters.

Easier product navigation in the control panel – we’ve added Next / Previous product navigation links there, so you can browse your items in the control panel more quickly and conveniently. Prior to this new feature, if a store owner wanted to browse all items in a specific category, he or she would need to open a product details page, then go back to the upper level, then open the next product and so on. This was not ideal . That’s why we added these links, so now you can easily press the “Next product” link and the next product is loaded instantly.

You can now set your package dimensions for UPS, USPS, Canada Post and FedEx to get more exact automatic carrier-calculated rates. 

New “This product requires shipping” option. Before Ecwid treated all items with empty weights as intangible ones and didn’t ask for shipping address for such items. Sometimes merchants forget to set up weights and wondered ‘why aren’t shipping rates appearing’. Now it is a separate option, so it will make product setup easier for new merchants.  

We’ve worked hard to release all these new great features. Feel free to use and enjoy them. 
Stay tuned and subscribe to our blog, Facebook page and Twitter for updates and news : -)

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Quote:

Facebook commerce can be great for businesses such as the Apricot Lane franchise Jena Green runs with her mother, Renee Dixon, in Peoria, Ill. The boutique makes up to half of its overall sales of women’s clothing, shoes and accessories on Facebook, says Green. She engages the more than 19,000 customers who have “Liked” her store by posting pictures of new arrivals, promotions and answers to customer inquiries throughout the day.
She says customers favor Facebook shopping because they’re already checking the page for pictures of the new items anyway. If they see something they want, “It’s just easier for them to click ’shop,’” Green says.

You can read the full article on USA Today site or its scan copy.

If you want to set up a Facebook storefront to increase your sales and leverage the power of social media, feel free to use our Facebook application.

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Ecwid grows rapidly and we’re not going to stop.

Thank you

We’d like to give a big Thank You to all our community. You’re great.
Your help, support, suggestions, feedback, criticism, comments and kind words have been invaluable to Ecwid’s development and achievements. Thank you.

Happy Birthday, Ecwid!

Ecwid flag at 7,100 m (23,406 ft) — at Lenin Peak.

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We have some updated service plan information to share with you. Ecwid will be changing our plan offerings in October, and wanted to let you know what new choices will be available for you and for our future customers. The new Ecwid service plans will include the following options: www.ecwid.com/plans-and-pricing.html

If you already are a registered Ecwid user on our free (Basic) or premium (Silver) plans, you will continue to receive the same level of service you currently receive today – forever. There will be no change to the current features or pricing you receive, unless you choose to upgrade to one of our new service plans.


Existing Ecwid Free Plan Users


If you currently have a free Ecwid store, then you will retain all of the free features that you have today, including your 100 product limit.

Existing Ecwid Premium (Silver) Plan Users


We sincerely appreciate our users who already have upgraded to our Silver plan. Thank you.  All of our current Silver users will retain their existing features (including your 20,000 product limit) and pricing forever.

Why the changes?



Ecwid has grown and learned alot over the past two years, and our users, partners and others in the e-commerce marketplace have provided valuable feedback to us along the way. Today, we understand very clearly the selection of services that we need to offer globally, and what it will take for Ecwid to prosper so that we can continue to provide the best shopping cart in the world – including the best free and premium options available anywhere. 

Further details on our service plan changes are available in the following FAQ.

Update (30 October): Our new plans have been released. After the initial announcement of new plans we have received a lot of great feedback from you, our Ecwid community. Thank you all. Your feedback, kind words and support help us greatly. These plan changes will benefit the whole Ecwid community.
And one more thing: after some considerations we decided to remove the monthly transaction volume limit in our new plans. So all new plans have unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited monthly transaction volume and 0.0% transaction fee. A truly unique offer.

FAQ on New Ecwid Service Plans

What are the new Ecwid plans and how will they be priced?
The new plans and pricing can be found on the “Pricing” page on our website. We will continue to offer a “Free” plan, in addition to three new premium options.

What about existing Ecwid users? Will pricing and plans be grandfathered?

We want to ensure that our current users can continue using Ecwid seamlessly. Therefore, our current customers will retain their existing price, plan and feature functionality. We will grandfather plans and pricing for all of our existing users.




I am a free user currently. What will happen to my store?
You will keep the same free features you have now, including the product limit of 100 items (note: the new “Free” plan allows 10 items only).

Will we still be able to create and use free stores?

Of course. One of Ecwid’s key goals always is to offer an affordable solution that enables everyone to start selling online with a completely free plan, with no transaction fees or other hidden costs. Ecwid always will have a free plan available for our users.




When will the new plans be available and the changes take effect?
We’re planning to launch the new plans in October and will post announcements on our Facebook page, forums, Twitter and blog, when the new plans are available.

I currently am an Ecwid Silver user. What will happen to my store?
You keep the same features you have now. You will continue to pay the same $17 per month and will keep your existing limit of 20,000 items. 



What if I upgrade to the “Silver” plan before new plans are released?

In this case, you will be grandfathered and get all of the benefits of the “Silver” plan now and after the plan change, so it is a great idea to upgrade now.

I still have questions about these new plans
We’re open to all of your questions, suggestions and feedback. Please send them to
 billing@ecwid.com

New completely revamped shipping module

Shipping is an essential part of every online store. This process should be easy and user-friendly as well as powerful. We found that our old admin interface for setting up shipping rates wasn’t intuitive enough. Some merchants even had to study our knowledge base to add the shipping rates. This was clear indication that this area should be improved. We re-imagined the shipping module from scratch and created a completely new experience: easy and intuitive for starters, yet powerful and advanced, with many “under the hood” tweaks, for experienced merchants. Along with these changes some highly anticipated shipping features were added.

Setup of a new shipping method is now much easier and convenient.
Just press the “Add new shipping method” button and follow the steps – our wizard will guide you through the whole setup process. If you need to create a simple rate (e.g. $5 for all US orders) the wizard will guide you through, or if you’d like something more advanced – it will help you through each step. We’ve designed it to be the perfect balance of simplicity and flexibility.

Ability to limit carrier-calculated shipping rates by a region.
So for example if you want to limit your shipping to only a few US states, but at the same time want to use automatic carrier-calculated USPS or UPS rates to avoid creating rates manually, it’s now possible.

Ability to sort shipping methods and select a default one.
Now you have full control over displaying the list of shipping methods on the checkout pages. Prior to this upgrade it wasn’t possible to set the necessary order of shipping methods or select the default one. The cheapest shipping method was selected by default. Now you have full control over the default shipping method and can define them in any order you’d like.

Ability to create custom shipping rates based on order subtotal.
Before user-defined rates could be based on cart weight only. Now they can be set up based on order subtotal as well. For example $14 for orders more than $100, $6 for orders less than $100.

Finally you can now offer your customers free shipping based on their cart subtotal.
In a ComScore survey, 84% of consumers indicated that free shipping was somewhat very important when making a purchase, and 55% of respondents indicated they would be at least somewhat likely to abandon their shopping cart without a free shipping promotion. We’re happy to offer this feature to our users so that they could fully utilize and take advantage of this marketing tactic.

Important note: the new module is very different from the old one. So it will not be enabled for the existing users automatically. In the next several days it will be rolled out for merchants and you will be promoted to upgrade your shipping rates to a new system. If you agree, Ecwid will convert your shipping rates to a new format. So if you are not ready to upgrade your shipping rates yet, just wait a little. Please refer to our migration FAQ for more details.

Bulk discount pricing

Ecwid merchants can now offer price discounts based on quantity breaks. For example if a t-shirt costs $24.99, but if you buy 3 items, the price will be dropped to $20.99 each instead. It’s a helpful tool for merchants who have a lot of products in stock and want to attract customers to buy more items.

Discount prices are shown on the product details in the storefront and discounts are applied immediately as soon as the quantity added to the cart changes.

This feature also has something unique. We implemented an algorithm which suggests users to add more items to get higher discounts. How it works: you add some items to a cart and eventually a message appears informing you that there is a chance to save some money by adding a bit more items. Such suggestions are smart. If you have 1 item in the cart, Ecwid will not offer to add 10 more just to get a 3% discount. However if you already have 8 items in a bag, then the suggestion to add 2 items more and save, will popup. Otherwise if a discount is huge, the suggestion will appear at the early stages: “add 7 more and get 80% off!”.

The goal is to show these messages at key moments, when the chances that customers will like the discount and add more items are the highest. We think this feature will encourage your customers to purchase more items from your store.

Sale and promotional price

Customers love discounts and deals. Putting a product on sale or showing that this very price is less than a customer will find elsewhere is a great way to get more orders.
And this is how the “Sale price” feature works. You can set the special “Compare to” price for your product and this price will be shown struck out to demonstrate how much the current price is better.

For example, if you want to show that your prices are better if compared to your competitors, you can use this field to inform how much they charge for the same product. The other way is to represent your regular price when you want to put a product on sale or to show the suggested retail price (“MRP”, “List price”, etc.)

You can set this “Compare to” price in the product details and fine-tune it on the “System Settings → General → Cart” page.

Want to change its look? This feature was created to be very flexible and highly customizable using custom CSS themes. For example check the following screen-shot. It is the same feature modified by CSS.

We think it is a great promotional tool with high potential. We hope you will like it too.

Share your purchase

Twitter has 140+ million active users. Facebook has 900+ million. Almost everybody around us has accounts in social networks. People use such accounts (e.g. a Facebook profile) to showcase their personalities. To show who they are and, most importantly, show the image they want to be. For example they “like” Facebook pages not just to get the status updates in their news feed, but to express themselves via liking particular brands. I.e. they don’t like Converse just because they like their shoes. But because this brand represents a special life style that users want to follow. For example people who love these brands are different from people who love these ones.

It means that people love to share pages and links, as it expresses themselves. Just search for “just bought” on Twitter. If a user wants to look very intelligent, he will surely share the smart book he just bought. If a user want to look “bad ass”, he will share a link to a purchased cool snowboard. And so on. Not many of us will admit this, though, but our shares are always highly influenced by our image we want to show to our friends.

And that’s a peculiarity of the “Share your purchase” feature used to drive more traffic to your store. When enabled, customer is encouraged to share a purchased product on a Facebook or Twitter after an order is placed. And since customer likes a product and it is a part of his lifestyle and “image” (that’s why he purchased it, right?), the chances he will share it to all his friends are very high.

Ecwid is the leading shopping cart application on Facebook, actually we’re #2 based on the number of active monthly users. So we have a deep understanding about what social commerce is and how it should work. The “Share your purchase” is the first of big list of social features we want to add to use the power of social commerce and drive you more sales.

Improvements of the product editor

Most likely the “product editing” page is one of the most opened in the Ecwid control panel. If you create a new store or update an existing one, you will spend some time on it editing your items. So we decided to add some neat improvements to optimize this page and save your time when editing your items.

Now the “Save” button is always visible, even if you scroll a page. Save some seconds by not scrolling to the top to save the changes. And don’t forget, you can always hit Ctrl+S shortcut to save an item

We have moved the “Assign categories” section to the General section. No more separate tab for it. So you can now assign a product to different categories faster, without switching to a new tab and back.

You can set a default category for a product, which will be used if you open it via a direct link or from the search results. This feature is extremely useful if your items are assigned to multiple categories and you want to have control over what category to show by default.

We hope these improvements will allow you to edit and manage your products a bit faster.

Faster checkout for Google Chrome users

Ecwid now supports experimental Google Chrome feature that allows Chrome users to fill Ecwid checkout forms in much faster, easier and smarter: literally in a single click. Google said in their blog post:
One of the biggest bottlenecks on any conversion funnel is filling out an online form – shopping and registration flows all rely on forms as a crucial and demanding step in accomplishing the goals of your site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like our names and addresses on different sites across the web – a tedious task that causes many to give up and abandon the flow entirely.

That’s totally true. Nobody loves to enter the same information again and again. Browsers have the “autocomplete” features that help to do this by remembering a common profile information and pre-populating the form with those values. However, they don’t work accurately enough – sometimes browsers just cannot understand what form fields are for – e.g. is it for “Country” or for “Company name” ? So some fields remain unfilled.

That’s why Chrome announced support for an experimental new “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields that allows web developers to label fields with common data types such as “Full name” or “State”. If form has such attributes, Chrome always knows what each field is for, so it can pre-populate all the checkout form correctly.

We’ve added support of this experimental API to Ecwid. So now any Chrome user who stored his personal information in Chrome can fill an Ecwid checkout forms in in a single click. They just start to fill in any field of the form, select a stored address and all fields in the form are filled in properly. Very convenient and fast, no more boring typing of the same text again and again.

As we know Ecwid is one of the first shopping carts (maybe even the first one) which implemented that experimental Chrome feature. While this attribute is still experimental, it is already available for Google Chrome which has about 33% worldwide usage share. So now one-third of all your customers has the opportunity to fill in a form in a single click and checkout much faster, which leads to higher conversion rates and more sales.

Improved behaviour for the zero-total orders

People love free things. Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics, has the theory that for normal transactions/purchases, we consider both upside and downside. But when something is free, we forget about the downside. “Free” makes us perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. So it is a good idea to offer a free promotional product to attract customers. Especially if you sell intangible goods, such as music, books, etc.

However most of the online payment gateways don’t allow orders with zero total. So there was an issue: a customer adds a free product to a cart, however if he or she selects an online payment method, such as PayPal, they will see a warning that checkout with zero total isn’t allowed. The only solution was to create a special custom “offline” payment method and ask users to select it, if their order total is zero. Not a very good and usable workaround. Moreover if you want to offer promotional free e-goods, you had to change its order status from “Queued” (default status for orders placed by custom payment methods) to “Accepted” manually in order to trigger sending the download links.

Now this behavior has been improved dramatically. Ecwid has the “Skip payment method selection, if the order total is zero” option. This can be enabled on the System Settings → General → Cart” page, “Checkout Settings” section. If this option is enabled and the order total is zero, Ecwid will skip the payment method selection, so a customer doesn’t need to think what payment method s/he should select to place a free order. Ecwid even can set such orders to “Accepted” status, so it will send the download links of your free promotional files automatically. No more manual work.

This feature makes the ability to promote “free items” much more efficient and convenient for you and your customers.

What’s next?

This is just a small part of the features our engineers worked on in the past months. v11 introduces great marketing tools to promote your items, we hope you like these new features. We are working now on v12, which will also have some highly anticipated and great new features included. Thank you all for your support, ideas and suggestions and stay tuned!

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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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