Weebly designer platform review
Weebly is one of the popular website builders that allows you to build your website for free. They offer multiple platforms to cover different user groups. You can also use Weebly on the cloud with Bluehost, SiteGround, or other paid hosting services. In this article, we will explain the use of the Weebly designer platform.
Weebly Platforms
Below are the platforms offered by Weebly:
- Weebly is on the web for all
- Education platform for teachers and students
- Weebly designer platform
- Cloud reseller, you can access through paid hosting companies
What is Weebly Designer Platform?
Weebly’s Designer Platform allows webmasters to build and maintain websites for their clients. This is ideally suitable for the designers owning their company with staff members and clients. You can remove the Weebly designer brand and customize your portal with your logo, company name, favicon, color scheme, and domain name. You and your staff members can then access your portal and maintain the client sites.
How to Enable Weebly designer Platform in Free Weebly Account?
Years back, Weebly allowed the average users to share the designer platform using the same account. You can log in to your Weebly designer account and go to the “Accounts” tab to integrate the platforms. However, at present, you should register for a separate account for the designer platform.
Customizing the Weebly Designer Platform
You will have four options under the Designer Platform menu:
- Clients – Here, you can add all your clients and assign the staff responsible for creating and supporting that client.
- Staff – Here, you can add your company staff details and provide permissions according to their role in your company.
- Company Portal – This is where you can create your company portal, which is the front end visible to staff and clients having access to your account. You can also add a Favicon and Logo to your portal and preview it before finalizing.
- Settings – Here is where you can provide your custom domain name for your company portal. You can set your custom domains for both your company portal and the preview site. When the client site is under construction stage, you can provide the preview URL link to your client for review and payment.+
Pricing for Designer Platform
Weebly offers two plans for the designer platform – Lite and WebPro. You can register for a free account and start using the platform to check the features. If you want to publish a website, you should upgrade to the Lite plan, which will cost you $15 per month.
The WebPro plan is for design agencies who want to offer a custom branded solution to clients. This will cost $30 per month for the platform and $8 per month for publishing websites. In line with Weebly’s new pricing plans, every client site under your designer platform account needs to be upgraded individually.
Ease Of Use – How Easy Is Weebly to Use?
People use eCommerce website builders because they want to be in control of their online store. It’s also a cheaper alternative to having it designed for you and means you can update the site whenever you want. It’s vital, then, that you invest in an eCommerce website builder that’s easy to use. But how can you tell how easy it’ll be? Well, fear not! We’ve tested Weebly with everyday people to find out exactly how easy you found it. Overall, Weebly eCommerce came in as one of the easiest-to-use online store builders. People particularly liked its drag-and-drop editor and well-structured product inventory.
What Are the Pros and Cons of Weebly Ecommerce?
Pros
- It offers excellent additional features such as blogging tools
- Easy to use, making it a good choice for beginners
- Best value for money out of any eCommerce builder
- It lets you sell products on its free plan
Cons
- Limited checkout options, for example, you can’t customize the checkout page
- Lacks big data tools such as inventory management, making it unsuitable for large businesses
- It doesn’t let you sell across multiple channels like Facebook and Instagram
Product, Storefront, and Category Pages
Product Pages
One of the critical things that make Weebly eCommerce stand out is its ability to allow you to create standalone, dedicated Product Pages for each of your products.
(i) Product Images
You can insert multiple images on these Product Pages, with the main image and “sub-images” below the main image in a gallery where your shoppers can click to see them. When you hover your mouse cursor over the main image, it will show you a zoomed-in version of the image, allowing prospective customers to see your product in detail. The overall experience of this feature is very smooth and functions very well.
(ii) Multiple Product Variations
Weebly allows you to have complete control over product variations to allow your customers to choose from various variations of the same product. You can customize this in Weebly Editor and add multiple product options for your customers to select. For instance, a typical example is an ability for someone to purchase an oversized, green, collared shirt. Weebly gives you complete control to display variations (size, color, type) of your products, which is a compelling and flexible feature in our view. The example we’ve provided above (color and size) is only an example. You can set up whatever product variations you want to suit your needs. After you’ve configured your product options, they will show up on your Product Page so your customers can select whichever variation they want to purchase from you. This Weebly eCommerce feature gives you a lot of flexibility to run your online store.
(iii) Sales Option, Product Description, and Social Sharing
Weebly gives you a sales option, which displays the discounted price next to the crossed-out regular price. This is a very effective tactic to draw on people’s love for sales, and Weebly gives you this display option. You can also add your custom product description to your Product Page, and you can do some basic styling such as bold, underline, italicize, and insert numerical or bullet points. Crafting an attractive product description can help you sell more products.
(iv) Drag and Drop Zones
You have a total drag and drop zone below the main image and the product variation controls to insert various Weebly elements into this area, such as more text descriptions, slideshows, image gallery, maps, videos, contact forms, etc.
This enables you to add more details to your products or even display product videos, powerful ways to convince your shoppers to purchase.
B) Storefront Page
One of the excellent options from Weebly is that you can insert a Storefront Page where you can pick and choose what products you want to display on this Page. This allows you to highlight selected products to showcase to your shoppers, which are particularly helpful in highlighting your best sellers, seasonal items, or promotional sales. Your shoppers can click on any one of them to get to the product pages. A very effective way to direct your shoppers to relevant product pages.
C) Category Pages
Weebly also allows you to categorize your products into different categories so your shoppers can start narrowing their search to get to what they want to see. You can create multiple categories and choose which product to insert into each category.
Fully Integrated Shopping Cart
When you turn on your eCommerce function in Weebly, a shopping cart menu item will show up on the menu bar and indicates to your shoppers how many product items they have inserted into the shopping cart. When they go through the checkout process, your shoppers will remain in your store as they fill in their information while having their Order Summary displayed on the same page to remind them what they are about to purchase.
Other Weebly eCommerce Features
There are other practical and flexible eCommerce tools from Weebly:
(i) Mobile Ready (available to all plans)
Weebly designer built in a mobile shopping cart for all their websites that show up on mobile devices so that your shoppers can also purchase from their phones or tablets if they choose to. The checkout process is also secure (as mentioned above). So it’s nice that Weebly has catered to this as mobile shopping is a massively growing trend – over half of the global web traffic comes from mobile!
Weebly also has iPhone or Android mobile apps so that you can monitor and update your online store at all times while you are on the go. You can add new products, photos, descriptions, product variations/options, and update prices while away from your computer. You can also get instant notifications on your phone whenever someone purchases something from you!
(ii) Filtered Product Search (available to Weebly Professional and Performance plan users)
Weebly’s filtered product search allows your shoppers to quickly find the most relevant products. You can search by filtering products by attributes like price, color, or whatever product variation you have set up (see our detailed discussion on product variation above). The faster you can help your customers get to the product they want, the higher probability they will purchase from you. This Weebly feature, if used properly, can help you grow your sales.
(iii) Flexible Shipping Options (available to Personal, Professional, and Performance plan users)
You unlock its shipping calculator if you subscribe to Weebly’s premium plans. This allows you to fine-tune your shipping rates based on price, weight, and define shipping carriers (e.g., UPS, USPS, FedEx) and delivery time frame (ground, 3-day, overnight). You can adjust the shipping rates based on geographical locations and dig into sub-regions such as by state or province. You can even offer free shipping on select orders.
(iv) Detailed Tax Control (available to all users)
Don’t forget taxes! Weebly provides and maintains the current city, state, and province level tax rates for the US and Canada for you. If you are located in the US, it has an Automatic Tax Calculator that will do all the heavy lifting. You have to insert a US address, and the relevant taxes will all be calculated for you. That’s pretty handy! If you are outside of the US or Canada, you have the flexibility to define your tax rates manually.
(v) Inventory Tracking & Management (available to all users)
You can display and track your inventory level for each of your products. But showing how many units per product is left available, you can let your shoppers know if you still have plenty of product in stock or temporarily out of stock.
(vi) Sell Digital Products (available to all users)
If you are selling digital products (e-books, music, software, or other non-physical products), Weebly eCommerce allows you to do this. Your digital product files are delivered via email with a secure link, so your customers can download their purchases that way.
(vii) Importing Products from Etsy, Shopify, or CSV File (available to all plans)
Weebly has made it easy if you want to import products externally (either from Etsy, Shopify, or from a CSV file). Just select the one you want to import from and upload the files. Etsy and Shopify allow you to export your product details into a CSV file (think of it as an Excel spreadsheet), so you don’t have to recreate the information manually. If you are not using Etsy or Shopify, most other online store builders can export your product details into a CSV file so that you can upload it to Weebly. This makes switching from other platforms to Weebly designer eCommerce much easier and faster.
(viii) Coupon Builder (available to all users)
Weebly designer has a Coupon Builder that allows you to create and manage a couponing system directly in your Weebly store dashboard. You can create coupons by code, date, and quantity. The coupons can be dollar-based or can be a percentage of the sale. You can also restrict the coupons to be only used for specific products, for orders over a certain dollar amount, and only for specific product categories. You can even set up coupons to grant your customers free shipping! This comprehensive coupon building engine gives you more flexibility in coupon setup than some other eCommerce online store builders.
(xi) Square Gift Cards (available to all users)
You can set up gift cards so your customers can purchase a particular denomination, and the digital gift cards are emailed to whoever they want to gift this card to. The recipients can then visit your online store and redeem the gift cards for your products. These cards don’t incur additional fees, and they never expire! Customers can select the dollar amount they want to gift, insert their name, insert the recipient’s name and email, and insert a gift message (optional). Once that is done, add the card to the shopping cart and checkout as usual.
Conclusion
You can try out the designer platform for free and build your client site. If you are happy, upgrade your account and publish the sites to the client’s domain. Though Weebly’s site editor is super easy for every age group, the pricing is also costly. This means you also need to charge your client accordingly to profit from your business. This is a challenging task with the limited functions available on Weebly. If you are launching a web design business, we recommend going with self-hosted WordPress. This will help you save costs and design unlimited websites for different purposes.
