Thursday, November 13, 2014

Trying out Ecwid for online shopping site

I have been creating my own website to sell Shiroi Koibito chocolates as that is what I do for living; I have been reading about some online shop templates and I wanted to try it out.  I can think of some advantage of using these sites are
1. obviously, we do not need to know the programming
2. the site is optimized for mobile ready which can be quite tricky for programming.
3. ease of maintenance especially if there are lots of inventory

And of cause, the con of it is that we have to pay monthly subscriptions and sometimes the customization of the site can be quite tricky.

Since ecwid is one of the popular ones I often hear about, and also provide free account for up to 10 products, I thought of trying it out.  

The process of setting up and uploading pictures etc are quite straight forward.    It took me a bit to get used to it, but after posting couple of items, the site guide to learn the shortcuts (like control + s to save) which made it a lot easier to post the products later on.

The site looks pretty good, but the customization require manual changes to CSS other than their only three templates (blue/brown/red) I wished they have more templates to choose from.  (There are actually quite a lot of cool looking templates out there with fees.)

I think this is a good option for someone with no coding skills, but I decided to keep my original website to sell Shiroi Koibito for now since I have more than 10 products and I do not need to be paying for monthly subscription for more than what I am already paying for my hosting and payPal etc.  But it was a good experiment.




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