Weeblycom eCommerce is a solid choice for building a functional online store – its reasonable prices and a good range of features mean you get fantastic value for your money with its eCommerce plans. It’s pretty easy to use and comes with a good range of extra features, such as blogging, meaning you can create a well-rounded store.
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 Weeblycom 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 Weeblycom Editor and add multiple product options for your customers to select. For instance, a typical example is the 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 Weeblycom 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 Weeblycom 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, which are 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 Weeblycom, 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.
If you upgrade to Weeblycom Personal, Professional, or Performance plans. (more details about pricing below), The entire process will be under your custom domain name. If you stay on the free plan, the checkout process will be using a Weebly sub-domain while still styled. in the same way as the rest of your website (to make sure you shoppers have a consistent experience). An SSL Certificate typically costs $70 and above per year (source: GoDaddy.com). Weebly includes a free SSL Certificate as standard on all of its free and premium plans.
Payment Options
Since the payment processor, Square, owns Weebly, this is something it specializes in. Weebly’s setup process is all in-built, so getting started takes a few clicks. Weeblycom allows you to choose from 3 different leading payment processors:
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Square
(i) PayPal (Requires Weeblycom Performance plan – see more information below)
PayPal, goes without saying, is probably the most well-known payment processor. Using them conveys a sense of trust to your shoppers due to PayPal’s brand. This is a primary option that all website builders provide. One downside of PayPal (for some people) is that your shoppers will actually have to leave your Weebly site to make the payment upon final confirmation of purchase.
(ii) Stripe (Can be used with all Weebly plans)
Stripe is a fast-growing payment processor which allows you to deposit money directly into your bank account. The application process for a Stripe account is fast and painless so that you can get up and running in a day. The entire checkout process, from beginning to the end, your shoppers remain on your site the entire time, and the checkout cart is branded as your shopping cart. This helps preserve branding and redirect your shoppers to another site.
(iii) Square (Can be used with all Weeblycom plans)
Square is a very fast-growing payment processor that owns Weebly. You probably know of them as the credit card processor plugs into a smartphone so people can make payments with their mobile phones (so you can accept payments in person). Your funds are deposited into your bank account in 1 – 2 business days, which is faster than Stripe.
Other Weebly eCommerce Features
There are other practical and flexible eCommerce tools from Weeblycom
(i) Mobile Ready (available to all plans)
Weebly 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 Weeblycom has catered to this as mobile shopping is a massively growing trend – over half of the global web traffic comes from mobile!
(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 Weeblycom 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 own 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 eCommerce much easier and faster.
(viii) Coupon Builder (available to all users)
Weebly 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 is a very comprehensive coupon building engine that gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of 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 certain 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! A customer 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
Overall, with all the features you get with Weebly eCommerce. It combined with its drag and drop website building platform, Weebly is a great platform to build your online store. Its ecommerce tools are available to you no matter which plans you use. But you get more advanced sales tools the more you pay. The fact that you can sell items on Weebly’s free plan is a huge plus. It allows you to test the ecommerce waters before you commit. To get full access to Weebly’s advanced ecommerce features, sign up for the Personal, Professional, or Performance plans. Also remember that there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. This completely removes all the financial risks while you test it out.
