Latest Ecwid version: More tools to increase your sales

A new version of Ecwid has been released and all Ecwid users have been upgraded automatically. We didn’t rest on our laurels after becoming #1 Facebook shopping cart. Below are some of the new and highly anticipated features now available to you: Google shopping feeds, related items for the cart page, checkboxes for product options, “Buy Now” buttons on product lists, new product update API, and much more.

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 : -)