New Ecwid Version Released: Tons of Great New Features!
Posted 30 October, 2012 by Qetzal. Posted in Blog, Ecwid News, New Releases
A new major version of Ecwid (v13) has been released. All Ecwid merchants have been upgraded automatically. This release adds a lot of new features and changes, so prepare for long read – this post is big : -)
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 : -)
This is why I love Ecwid so much (despite a few c'mon folks from me)
Ecwid must be the most pro-active shopping cart solution out there. They listen to what we want and get busy creating it for us.
Take the weekend off Ecwid team - Monday's bound to be full of loads of new requests! lol
Round of applause from me and no-doubt many others
Lots of great new features here.
However, where do I implement parcel dimensions? The logical place would seem to be in the Products: Tax & Shipping tab for each product, but I don't see anything there.
And please tell me -- and my fingers are crossed here -- that we will be able to assign a different parcel size to different products, instead of assigning just one parcel size for the specific carrier method as a whole?
blind mellow jelly,
Hi,
At this moment you can set one parcel size for a specific carrier method as a whole. You can set them in the carrier's settings on the "System settings - Shipping" page.
Before this improvement Ecwid always used the pre-defined parcel dimensions for all carriers (e.g. something like 5x5x5). Now you can set custom dimensions, so automatic rates will be more exact.
In the future we will improve this feature even more - it will be possible to assign separate dimensions for specific products and product types.
Amazing new features! Great job Ecwid! I'm looking forward to the next release where maybe we could have a Wishlist?
Hi, thank you!
The "wishlist" feature is in our roadmap, so yes, it will be implemented in the future (no exact ETA though).
Thanks for your job.
You say:..... 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.
If I need usually to print payment receipts have I to downgrade and to re-subscribe ???
mediterrania,
Yes you need to downgrade and re-subscribe. You payment will then go through our new payment gateway that the new "receipts" feature is compatible with.
rrf,
That's just wrong.
New billing subsystem is totally different from the old one. We re-wrote it from scratch in order to make it more flexible and provide more features to our customers, such as ability to view payment history and download payment receipts. We've also switched to a new US-based payment gateway: Cybersource (which is a subsidiary of Visa).
All these new great changes make the new billing system and features uncompatible with the old billing system. So if you're our Silver user who subscribed using 2Checkout, then you will need to downgrade your account to Free plan and then upgrade again in order to get access to the new options.
We're sorry, but unfortunately this is a required step to switch to a new billing system. The good news is that no products or settings will be lost during the downgrade and switching will take literally a few minutes.
For new users and those who use our Free plan this step isn't required - they were upgraded to a new billing system automatically.
I guess my issues has not solve through this version as well
http://www.ecwid.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14973
- Automatic reoccurring option for weekly orders. Customers purchasing a product like fruit basket have the option to set up a reoccurring weekly order that can be switched off by logging into their account.
- Ability to place warnings or different messages per product for eg./ healthy hampers will only be available to Brisbane metro customers. When another postcode is submitted an error message must appear requesting the customer to review
Payflow is apparently only available in the US & Canada?
Payflow is currently available for merchants residing in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
We are going to add support of PayPal products for EU merchants as well.
Hi, it's a great update. Unfortunately, when I like a product on the Ecwid based FB store, the URL link on my wall doesn't work correctly and ends up with a message that a page was not found
Ruta Kudelyte,
Sorry, first it didn't work and now I can see it does. Strange thing but I must take my words back
Great features!
Now, one more thing that is REALLY IMPORTANT and needful (and i'm not sure why it hasn't been done yet) - add an option for MINIMUM FOR ORDER.
I have to put " (Min 50Pcs) " in the title in order to let them know, and hope that they won't order less. unless, i need to put the price for 50pcs (which is quite a bit) and this way drive customers away from the page (because they see such high prices) . PLEASE ECWID ! IT IS SO SIMPLE AND NEEDED !
Thanks
Max Hefter,
System settings >> General >> Cart >> Minimum allowed order subtotal
I guess we just don't understand what this payflow is all about, it's asking us for our current payment processor? We have a paypal account but we've never had a payment processor. I thought we all voted on PayPal Payments Pro where you don't have to leave site to make payment for our customers.
Also, with the remarketing addition, good job, but why can't we add custom combination scripts to individual product pages? Perhaps we only want to display remarketing ads to users who viewed a specific category of our website, or perhaps we only want to display ads to users who viewed product A / B but did not view product c.
More clarification would be great.
Thanks and good job guys
Derek Bess,
PayPal Payflow is a "true" payment gateway that links your website to your merchant account (a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments by payment and get payments directly to your bank) and payment processor (a company that handles credit card transactions for a merchant acquiring bank). More informaiton: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/payflow-payment-gateway
--
If you don't have a merchant account, you can use PayPal Payments Advanced:
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-payments-advanced This payment method enables online stores to collect payments directly via credit card without leaving site as well. From an integration standpoint, PayPal Payments Advanced is identical to the PayPal Payflow gateway (so you can use it with our Payflow integration), with the following exceptions:
- PayPal Payments Advanced includes a merchant account from PayPal.
- PayPal Express Checkout and Bill Me Later payment methods cannot be disabled on the hosted checkout template for a PayPal Payments Advanced user.
So, to sum up: if you don't want to create a merchant account, go with PayPal Advanced to accept credit cards without leaving a website.
I think it is already possible using our integration. All visited products and categories are logged by Google Analytics. So it is possible to create a custom segment based by visited or non-visited pages.
Thanks a lot Ecwid! I love your software.
But there is ONE new thing which is realy annyoing: Me, and probably lots of others use CTRL and arrows to jump from word to word when working on text. Its something which is very intuitive and a good funktion of windows.
So please do not use this shortcuts in a webbased, textediting envirement. It makes working on product descriptions realy hard.
Regards, Patrick
patrick.baur,
Thank you for your feedback, Patrick! Much appreciated .
You're right, CTRL+arrows is a common shortcut in text editors to jump from word to word. However the same shortcat is also a standard for quick switching between web pages.
We will try to find a solution that will suit everyone.
please prepare ecwid for the new european payment system (similar to the dutch ideal system): https://www.mybankpayments.eu/
Why doesn't google fetch my pages and index them. I thought the new urls should now be easily indexed. Is this not the case?
Hi - Very new to Ecwid. I am an artist. I wish to list my Originals for Sale, but under those I wish to have Prints for Sale - kind of like a Related Product. Completely separate prices, not add-on pricing to the Original but still related to the Original.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to do this. Can you help please? I would so greatly appreciate it.
Joyce Nina Auteri,
Hi,
I think the "Product Combinations" feature will help you: http://kb.ecwid.com/w/page/40532454/Product%20Combinations
For those trying to leverage the new PayPal Payflow Link option:
Within PayPal Manager (manager.paypal.com) you have to configure your Hosted Checkout page for it to work correctly. Otherwise, you'll get an error message on the Place Order page.
Within Customize Your Page, we selected Layout C. But after some testing, it seems as though it might not matter what Layout you use. It appears you just need to have at least one Layout Published.
We were instructed to use Layout C when we used the same setup on another store, so we used that same layout in our Ecwid store.
getDeoGo,
Thank you for sharing! We've added this information to our knowledge base: http://kb.ecwid.com/w/page/15853304/PayPal#IgettheMerchantDesignIdentificationErrorerrorwhensettingupPayFlowpaymentoption