ecwid_team

Hello Friday!

Thank you really much for your lovely feedback. It means a lot to us. It is so kind of you to spread your word in the WordPress community. It’s truly great to hear that your store has performed well so far.
I want to suggest you a referral program – you refer people to Ecwid and earn commissions for it. Feel free to check the article on this matter – Referral program.

Also, whenever you need our assistance, you can rely on us and reach out to us via email at support@ecwid.com or via the Live Chat.

We’re always happy to help you!

Hello!

This is the Ecwid team. Thanks for reaching out to us.

Ecwid has integration with Instagram, which allows tagging products on Instagram. When you connect your Instagram account to Ecwid, the account is sent to review. If you’re from a country where Instagram Shopping is not available, the Instagram account won’t be approved and it will not be possible to tag products on Instagram, as we offer our integration with Instagram only in countries where Instagram Shopping is available.

We would recommend checking the article “Instagram Shopping Availability” (https://help.instagram.com/321000045119159) on a regular basis to check for your country to appear in the “All Eligible Businesses” tab. As soon as it happens, it will be possible to connect your Instagram account to Ecwid, send the Instagram account to review, and after the account is approved, tag products on Instagram.

Feel free to reach out to us at support@ecwid.com if any further questions arise, we’ll be glad to help!

Hello,

This is Anastasia from Ecwid Support team.

Thank you for such a detailed feedback. We really appreciate you taking the time on this! I’d like to comment on some of your points, so users who do not know Ecwid would understand it.

As I get it, you prefer to store your data on your own servers, since you see it as a downside that Ecwid is hosted with us. Basically, Ecwid is a hosted SaaS shopping cart, so all the code and store data is hosted on our servers and delivered to you and your customers in the background by means of AJAX. We store our data on Amazon Web Services.

So there are two different approaches: one is when you use your servers for site/store and another one is SaaS solution — everything is stored on our servers. Each of these solutions has its pros and cons, so everyone can decide which one works for them. One of the pros of SaaS (which I do love to post here) is that we take care of security breaches, software updates, and do other routine tasks to make sure Ecwid servers are stable.

We definitely do not have any plans to discontinue Ecwid service. Anyway, we’d take care of our customers and make sure they have a solution to migrate their store to another platform. Also, if you need your store data (customers’ info, products, orders), you can download it on your computer in a CSV file any time in your Ecwid Admin.

What comes to the pricing for Ecwid, you can check our plans and what features they include at https://support.ecwid.com/hc/en-us/articles/207100729-Ecwid-plans-and-features

I’d want to provide more information on our Free plan. Indeed, the Free plan has a limit on features, just like any other services. You can add up to 10 products (including options, by the way) and 2 categories. Though there are all the basic features to start selling:
— Set up different payment methods: manual (offline) methods or online payments with a card.
— Add shipping methods: custom rates based on subtotal/weight, automatic rates from carriers like USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc, in-store pickup, and others.
— Change storefront design
— Complete checkout: customers can add products to the cart, select a shipping, pay, and complete their order. Email updates to admin and customers, invoices, etc, including.

So basically you can sell on the Free plan.

Also, we try to find a workaround for a paid feature that can be used on the Free plan. For example, instead of automatic tax calculation, you can set up different tax % depending on a customer’s location with the manual taxes on the Free plan, see how: https://support.ecwid.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099899-Setting-up-taxes#Manual_taxes

I understand your point on support and the approach when you have to pay to get it. We choose another way for now. Additionally, we try to develop Ecwid as simple as possible, contribute a lot to self-help service and knowledge base, — all these should help users set up and manage Ecwid stores on their own. Besides, our Support team provides help to all users. If you have any issues, we will help no matter what plan you’re on. You’re right, every paid customer is a paying customer. Every customer deserves to get help.

Just in case, support options by plan:
— Email support – available for all plans including the Free one
— Immediate help in live chat – all paid users
— Phone support on Business and Unlimited plans. It’s a dedicated service: an online meeting with a targeted and dedicated talk, allowing to solve questions of almost any tier.

Further to generic shop items that are shown to you sometimes, I think it might be a cache of the page. The thing is Ecwid has a special option called “Static Page”, which saves a static version of a page in your store and displays it while your store is loading in the background. It might not work correctly in your case, thus, generic shop items are shown instead of your products when you load the store.

You can disable this option in the hidden settings at yourdomain.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=ec-params (change yourdomain.com to your actual WordPress site) > change the option “ecwid_static_home_page_enabled” to N (screenshot). Then save the changes and publish the site.

If it doesn’t help, please, send us a link to your WordPress site to support@ecwid.com. We’ll look into this.

We’re thankful for your feedback! I shared it with our team so they can consider adding the features you mentioned to Ecwid.

Hello!

This is Dexter with Ecwid team. Thank you for your message!

Normally, the Ecwid plugin (including its latest version) is compatible with WordPress 5.6. We have multiple users with WordPress 5.6 and the Ecwid plugin operating on it just fine. It’s working on my test WordPress site as well. From this, we need to take a closer look at your case. I’ve checked the website https://www.stevewhittington.com/ and haven’t been able to find Ecwid there, so I assume that you removed Ecwid from this page for now.

Please, contact us at support@ecwid.com with the following details:

1. The exact page on the website where Ecwid is added (if it is);
2. The ID of the store in question.
3. The email used for registering the store.

We’ll be glad to look into it for you. Thanks!

Hello,

This is Anastasia from Ecwid team. I will be happy to help!

I will explain why you get low results for your store on PageSpeed and then provide recommendations on how to improve your store load speed.

The thing is Ecwid is a so-called dynamical application. This means that the contents of your store are loaded dynamically on the page when a customer visits your store. We continue loading some scripts after a store load on the page to ensure the smooth work of an Ecwid store. These scripts are loading in the background and don’t affect your store visitors’ experience anyhow since they don’t see the execution of these scripts.

On the other hand, the Google PageSpeed tool doesn’t know when exactly the main content of a page is loaded and the store becomes visible for the store visitor. It only checks, when all the scripts are fully loaded and executed, and, therefore, shows this poor result, even though the store itself was loaded and your customer could interact with the store much faster.

We have plans on optimizing our WordPress plugin so the page speed test programs show accurate loading rates. Hope our team will implement this in the near future. We will notify you in this thread and over email.

Then I checked your store at https://www.rogua.com/. I noticed that you use the old design of the storefront in your account. I highly recommend that you switch to a new one at Ecwid Admin > Settings > What’s new > Next-gen Storefront. It should help with the load speed of your store. Read more: https://www.ecwid.com/blog/introducing-one-page-checkout-for-ecwid-stores.html

Also, I’ve enabled the “Interactive load” feature for your store. This feature accelerates and improves a load of javascript to help our merchants improve the performance of their websites.

After this, please, open your store again and check the loading speed. If it still loads slowly on your end, please, email us at support@ecwid.com. It will be very helpful if you also include your browser info from this page https://www.ecwid.com/internet in the email. We will have a closer look at your issue and help!

Continuing the previous post, here’s some more details on using Ecwid API to redirect category thumbnails to custom URLs.

We have an open and very flexible API which you can access by registering a free custom app for your store — more info on this can be found here:

— https://api-docs.ecwid.com/reference/access-ecwid-api

I can recommend creating a custom script to subscribe to the “Ecwid.OnPageLoad” event and specify the “CATEGORY” type as well as the required category ID — this way the script will launch upon trying to open this category in your store. You can then use the script to redirect the user to another URL. Here’s an article from our API documentation on this event:

— https://api-docs.ecwid.com/reference/subscribe-to-events#ecwidonpageloadecwidonpageloaded

If you need help with API, you can get in touch with our API support team via apps@ecwid.com — this email is used for all API related questions. Thanks!