Ecwid boasts that it is a “new breed of shopping cart” and is a new player in both the e-commerce and SAAS offerings available in today’s market.
Whilst it may be new it’s developers certainly have a profile in the shopping cart industry.Ecwid’s developers are Creative Development DBA Qualiteam, the Russian company behind a range of popular PHP shopping carts including X-Cart.
The service looks to target website owners wanting to add an e-commerce element to their website without the hassle of setting up a full shopping cart directly.
After signing up for the service, users can quickly create their categories and products directly in Ecwid as the application offers catalog management. Once these are set up integration into your website is as simple as pasting in the supplied code and, before you know it, you will be sporting an AJAX enabled store front.
Ecwid definitely adds another option to the large array of shopping cart/e-commerce applications available to website owners. It isn’t as simple a widget as say those offered by Shopit nor is it as complicated to set up as a full blown e-commerce platform such as Magento. I certainly can see it being adopted by those looking for a middle ground when setting up a store. Ecwid is also not currently charging users anything so the barriers to entry are low.
Whilst Ecwid certainly wins when it comes to it’s simplicity it is in this area that I also think the service is at its weakest. After signing up and testing an account, I do not believe that a serious store owner would opt for Ecwid over other shopping cart services. The flaw being in your ability to optimize your store for search engines. I will give the team credit in that they have attempted to work around how the search engines will treat Ecwid stores by developing a HTML only mobile catalog to overcome some of the shortcomings of its AJAX interface. This mobile catalog does mean, though, that users finding you through it in search engines will be sent to a page designed for a mobile interface rather than a full browser experience. In an increasingly competitive online shopping industry I do not believe that store owners can afford such a limitation.
Have you set up a store with Ecwid? If so what were your experiences?
Thank you for the review, Robert.
You’re right that AJAX apps have issues with SEO. Here are some our thoughts about it.
About nowadays.
1. Currently when a visitor with usual non-mobile browser opens a page from the mobile catalog, Ecwid prompts him/her to go to the normal full-featured and AJAX-loaded page.
2. We’re considering adding a semi-automatic redirection from the mobile catalog to the regular pages, so when a visitor comes from a link to the mobile catalog he/she gets the regular page immediately. It will fix the issue with the mobile interface for new visitors.
3. Another important thing is that Ecwid can be a standalone shopping cart, but it also can be an addition to your site. In such a case Ecwid will be as SEO-friendly as your site is.
I.e. you create pages using your CMS, make them SEO-friendly using your CMS abilities and then just embed your products using the special code and use Ecwid as a free checkout platform (many our users do such a thing).
4. SEO and search engines aren’t the only source of visitors nowadays. Let’s imagine that you’re a photographer with a blog and you have enough visitors and admirers of your photos. You want to start selling your photos. Which way to select? In my opinion big well-known carts like Magento isn’t a good option. Just because they require 1) good hosting 2) technical knowledge or hiring a web developer 3) adaptation of a shopping cart to the existing site
Well, not an easy task for a non-techy who just want to start selling.
Ecwid solves all such issues and SEO in such case doesn’t matter, because visitors will go to the blog and only then – to your cart.
As a free addition you get immediate integration with your existing site, no worries about hosting perfomance and security, and no messing with PHP code.
Moreover, Ecwid cart is a widget so you can have your store at different places at the same time. I.e. in your blog, on your web site, in your mySpace and Facebook pages, etc.
Yep, Ecwid can be used as Facebook shopping cart and it supports not only PayPal as some other Facebook carts do : -)
About the near future:
- yeah, AJAX apps are cool, fast and modern, but search engines cannot index them for now, if you don’t apply some workaround (like mobile catalog in Ecwid). However I’m sure that things will get changed the next year or two. Google has already made an proposal for the search engines to index AJAX, so I believe all AJAX apps will be indexable soon.
Hi Eugene,
Thanks for your comments and I definitely think that Ecwid meets a gap in the market for a well-featured cart that is simple to use and integrates easily both in code but also in design.
I disagree in regards to the SEO side of the service but I understand your argument. I also agree that services such as Magento and other carts do not meet the needs of casual sellers.