New plugin: Ecwid Online Store

Hi Everyone!

We at Ecwid created a plugin for RapidWeaver. It allows you to add an online store to your site. Please give it a try and let us know what you think:
https://rapidweavercommunity.com/addons/plugins/ecwid-online-store

About Ecwid:

  • Ecwid is a SaaS shopping cart. You add your products, set up payment and shipping settings and Ecwid displays the catalog, cart and checkout on your site, so that your customers can find and pay for your products on your site.
  • Supports 40+ payment options including Stripe, Paypal, Square and AuthorizeNet
  • Integrates with popular shipping carriers to calculate shipping rates at checkout (USPS, UPS, FedEx, CanadaPost and others)
  • Supports digital goods — you can sell your files as products in the store and they will be available for customers to download as soon as the order is paid. Download links can be limited either by time or by the number of download attempts.
  • Allows to set up local order pickup and delivery options for customers to choose at checkout
  • Has various promotional tools including discount coupons, wholesale discounts, membership-based discounts, abandoned carts management
  • Allows to sell on Facebook
  • Provides iOS and Android mobile apps to manage store from a mobile device and charge customers offline (works as a mobile POS)
  • Integrates with popular POS systems (Square, NCR, Clover, Vend) to sync offline and online sales
  • Allows to sync products with eBay and Google Shopping
  • Automatically translates storefront to 45 languages based on the visitor language
  • Ecwid handles backups and automatically scales to support whatever traffic and storage you have — no hosting/bandwidth fees.
  • Has a free and three paid subscription-based plans: Ecwid Pricing - Choose the right Ecwid plan for your business!

The plugin is free to install so you can try it out on the site you’re working on: http://plugins.ecwid.com/files/EcwidOnlineStore.rapidweaverplugin.zip

We’d appreciate your feedback!

Thanks!

~Matt

9 Likes

By the way, we know that some of you have used Ecwid before (without a plugin). The question you might have is why using the plugin if you can use Ecwid without it? That’s true — it’s easy to add an Ecwid store to an existing site by copy’n’pasting Ecwid code snippet. As to the plugin, our goal is to make it easier to add and adjust store to a site in RapidWeaver. We plan to extend the plugin functionality further, but some of the features are already included in the first version of the plugin:

  • The plugin allows to connect an existing Ecwid account and integartes the storefront itself so you don’t have to deal with the code
  • Once an Ecwid store is connected, the plugin settings in RapidWeaver give a shortcut to the store control panel that will log you in your Ecwid account automatically, so you won’t have to put your login/password .
  • The plugin settings page allows to easily enable/disable categories and search widgets in the storefront. Plus the plugin adds a new “floating” minicart widget automatically, which is not yet available in the Ecwid integration code.

The plugin works with the Ecwid store API, which means there is a lot of things possible. In particular, what we consider adding is:

  • extra products widgets to the site pages, e.g. single buy now buttons, latest/new products, random product etc
  • extra controls to adjust design/appearance, e.g. customizing storefront colors, adjusting product thumbnails etc

What would you suggest? What would you like to see in the plugin?

Thanks,

~Matt

3 Likes

This is awesome! ECWID is my goto for e-commerce, and use it on a few Rapidweaver sites (and some Wordpress ones), and will start adding this new plugin right away!

Just wondering, has anyone downloaded the free plugin yet? The link in the community page goes to their pricing store and I can not find it listed there.
Thanks

Hi Robert,

The link is http://plugins.ecwid.com/files/EcwidOnlineStore.rapidweaverplugin.zip

We will update the link on the plugin page, thanks for noticing.

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Sweet, have used Ecwid in the past and want to check this out.

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Is there a reason for making this a plugin rather than a stack? (or set of stacks).

Most folks use stacks extensively. Overall plugins (except for Stacks) are not used very much anymore.

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Hi Mathew,

As far as I understand, stacks wouldn’t allow us working with the remote Ecwid HTTP API in the RW admin (in the edit section). Isn’t that right?

We’re new to RapidWeaver, so we’d appreciate any advice, thanks!

Best person to answer that interesting question would be @isaiah

I don’t know the answer to your question as I’m not a stack developer. But as Gary mentions, @isaiah will know for sure!

All I can tell you is that from a practical perspective you’ll get a lot more interest/traffic if there’s stacks that have the same/similar functionality as the Ecwid plugin. But it may be that there’s no technical way to pull it off: I just don’t know.

Hi Matt,

I downloaded the plugin and tried to open it in RapidWeaver, but when I do, RapidWeaver closes.

Any ideas?

1 Like

I noticed that RapidWeaver just process plugin installation this way:

  • you double-click the plugin file on yoru computer
  • RW asks if you want to install it
  • you agree
  • RW installs it and either asks you to re-launch it or re-launch itself
  • after that, you open RW and the plugin is installed and you can use it.

Does it work for you?

Plugin is working fine for me here.
http://www.zeebedesigns.com/ecwid/

Demo store works fine for me too. Looks really good. And even that 10 product limit on the free version isn’t the end of the world, especially for - say - musicians who maybe have 6 or 7 CDs to sell.

Nice one!

Rob

nice sharing. I will surely give a try there. lol

The Ecwid plugin installed successfully, and I have reopened RW, created a new project, gone to - +Add -> All Plugins -> Online Store -> Click and…“Something went wrong…application quit unexpectedly (you know the rest)”. I have uninstalled and reinstalled, restarted (all the usual) and it just keeps closing. RapidWeaver 7 - v.7.5.4. OSX El Capitan 10.11.06.

Can’t figure it out…yet.

Cheers

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Have you tried deleting the RW app and reinstalling it? You can get downloads of the app here

and just deleting the app will not delete your serial number or your addons.

Thanks Rob, I will give it a go and let you know the outcome.

Also, products can have their own variants, so it’d be possible to have each product with a few different variants and end up with an inventory of quite a bit more than 10. As an example, if you had a hat with 4 distinct designs, instead of creating 4 items, you could create 1 and have each different design be an option (the same way you would for S, M, L, XL sizes).
I did something similar with a non-profit art society where they used Ecwid as a way to register for classes many free). Having each class/workshop as it’s own item would’ve gone over the limit, but they made categories for Free, Paid (and just update dates/descriptions every few months) and then another set for their various markets they do.

1 Like

Nice one. I like the look of Ecwid. What with this, Cart 2 and Cartloom, RW is starting to have some serious e-commerce options for sole traders and small businesses.

Rob

2 Likes