Have you ever thought about selling the jewellery you made, the t-shirt you designed or e-book you wrote right from your blog without the hassle of setting up a full e-commerce store for just one single product? Have you ever wished you could sell your items in a way that looks professional instead of dowdy?
We feel you.
What if we were to tell you that you can easily begin selling with Ecwid’s “Buy Now” button. Essentially, it’s a plugin you can directly add to your WordPress blog or any website that allows your customers to purchase your products with just one click – they don’t even have to leave your site and won’t be directed elsewhere to complete their checkout.
In this post, we’ll show you how to setup Ecwid’s “Buy Now” button.
Selling From Your WordPress Blog Using The “Buy Now” Button
One of the most simple ways you can sell from your WordPress blog is to add a button or widget that links directly to your product located on specific page or blog post.
“Well Produced Food & Wine” blog is a good example. A team of writers, reviewers and curators manage a blog about wine. They sample all of the wine, develop content based on their tastings, then make their selections available for consumers to purchase directly within the blog post.
Most importantly, this check-out process keeps customers on the blog while they purchase.
3 Simple Steps to Start Selling Directly From Your WordPress Blog
Ecwid is the easiest way to sell as many or as few items as you want. By embedding your items into your blog posts, you can sell right where your content is and right where your readers already are – similar to the “Well Produced Food & Wine” blog example above.
Creating a “Buy Now” button with Ecwid is easy. Read below for a step-by-step guide through the entire process.
1. Get Ecwid plugin for WordPress
You can quickly add the Ecwid plugin via your site administration panel. When the plugin is installed click the “Activate Plugin” link.
On the dashboard page of your control panel you will find an onboarding wizard that will guide you through all necessary steps like setting up tax rates (automatically calculated for US rates), adding shipping costs and choosing the payment options that best fit your needs. The full setup can be started and completed in ten minutes or less.
2. Prepare the product
You can add the product right inside the plugin. Make sure your products have high-quality images, descriptions and pricing assignments.
3. Add the product “Buy Now” button to your blog post
To add the button to your blog, just click “Embed Product” then copy shortcode the to your WordPress site – it’s super simple!
There’s other good news, you can sell up to ten products for free.
The Other Benefits of Using Ecwid on WordPress Blog
In addition to Buy buttons and Pop-up checkouts, there are many benefits to selling with Ecwid on your WordPress blog. Read the list below to learn more about some of our other most notable benefits.
- Ecwid takes just a few minutes to setup and doesn’t require any coding knowledge.
- You can get started for free with no transactions fees.
- Secure checkout process that keeps customers on your blog while they shop.
- You can add multiple sales channels including Facebook, marketplaces, and point of sale, and you can manage all channels from one convenient place.
- Offer customers the choice of multiple on and offline payment options including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and thirty plus more options.
- Ecwid takes care of everything. You get a reliable, secure store, and don’t need to worry about SSL.
- It’s easy to change the look of your store by customizing the CSS.
- Host digital products with no bandwidth or storage limits to worry about.
- You can manage your store on iOS or via the Android app.
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See for yourself how quickly and easily you can begin selling from your WordPress blog.
6 Responses
What a bunch of garbage – Russian style!!!
By your definition, Apple is not n American Company, Microsoft is not an American company, neither is Google. And I can go on and on… I’m talking about trust and you guys throw this kind of nonsense that even a 5 year would not be fooled.
Let me bottom line it for you:
If I have let’s say 7,000 items and ecwid goes out of business or increases their prices by let’s say 500%, I’m stuck and screwed, because ecwid owns and controls my data.
If however I’m using an e-commerce plugin like Woocommerce and the server goes down, or the hosting company goes out of business, I will be in business within the hour with a new server or a new hosting provider… it’s that simple!!!
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Now ecwid being Russian is VERY important, as the general behavior and attitudes in that part of the world is sometimes dangerous and downright criminal. I’m not saying ecwid is like that, but the opportunity for them is there, as they control all the data. Same goes with some parts of Asia like Iran, China, N. Korea, and even some parts of Africa, like Nigeria. If things get fishy, how am I going to sue ecwid? In Russian courts? That’s laughable.
About security. Tell about your security measures to the 500 million Yahoo, users, Target users, and countless other big corporations that got hacked. Compared to these big corporations ecwid is a tin-pot Mickey Mouse operation, so if they got hacked, what chance do you have? It’s just a matter of time. I prefer to control and own my data, and me being responsible for it’s security. Nobody will care about my data than me. That;s the same reason why I don’t have stock brokers. I do my own homework and investing.
Besides, hackers would target your servers just because you host and hold the data of thousands of websites, as opposed targeting one e-commerce web site at a time.
The implication that with ecwid you won’t have hosting, theme and other development expenses, is again embarrassing laughable.
I’m really fearful for you guys that with these weak responses, all 3 of you will be transferred to the Siberia office!
I was fearful that my ecwid data was at the mercy of just ecwid employees. Thanks to you guys with your responses, now I have to worry that my data can be mined and stolen by Amazon employees as well. And before you would say again, we would not do that, or we don’t store any credit card numbers, let me remind you of these phrases:
– The NSA does not collect and store communication data of American citizens.
– If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
– It was all because of the Youtube video.
– They have weapons of mass destruction.
– We are not in Crimea
– We are in Crimea to assist the citizens.
– We did not shoot the plane.
– Iran has no intentions in building an atomic bomb.
Btw, you will never be as big as some of your competitors, that’s plain and simple. With your mentality, and dishonesty you are not doing any favors to yourself either. Being honest, and proud in what you are, where you are, and how you can help people is your only chance to cut a nice chunk of the pie for you. I don’t have a horse in this, I just call it as I see it. In fact I hope ecwid does well, we need the competition and the choices…
If you can accept all the limitations and dangers of going with ecwid for your e-commerce needs, it is a very good service, and relatively speaking easy to use. My newest concern is that, when I exposed the truth about this company, I got responses from the company spokespeople that are downright lies and a lot of hot air. I’m looking for and questioning their honesty, and I end up with all this aggressive, panicky excuses.
Hi,
I couldn’t help but join in on the conversation, specifically because of the last comment made by Nick.
Of course, it is self-evident that Ecwid is an international company that should not be discriminated against or judged because of its Russian roots. I am a fervent user and have consistently received remarkable service from Ecwid’s team that has outstanding standards in terms of customer relations and user experience with the platform.
Secondly, “really, why pay?” Because Ecwid is capable of doing Incredible things you may not even know possible – either for free, or for a very very low cost.
Examples:
– Want to make a survey with a payment method or offer customizable products? Solutions allowing this range from 10$ to 250$/ month. You can do it for free in Ecwid.
– Want to sell digital goods online? Do a Google search – solutions allowing you to do this range from “free with 5% fee on each transaction” to 500$per month depending on bandwidth. You can do it in Ecwid for 15$ – no transaction fees ever.
– Want to accept online bookings or reservations from clients? Solutions that allow you to set that up range from free (for few “Features”) to up to 250$ a month.
– And, of course, if you want a mobile responsive online store that is multilingual, highly secure and automatically updated, where you can sell on Facebook, offer promotions, sell downloadable goods, view unfinished sales and integrate literally any platform – Ecwid is the answer. By the time you sold an item you have already reimbursed your monthly fee.
So thank you Ecwid for your incredible solution that empowers entrepreneurs with little programming knowledge (something Woocommerce does not do). Ecwid allows anyone to open their own online store and sell anywhere on the internet autonomously – for free: a price I am willing to pay.
Hi All,
This is Jesse the marketing manager from Ecwid writing from San Diego, CA, USA and I saw some comments that needed a response to educate any readers.
– ECWID is a Russian company, why is this important to know?…
(Actually, not that important since hackers don’t care where you are based (ask Yahoo, Target, eBay), but Ecwid, Inc. is an American company that was started in Russia and with support and development there and management in the US.)
– It’s important to know because ecwid really is a cloud service. (yes)
They own and control your date, including your products, customer information including credit card numbers.
(Not sure how we “own and control data”, but your product information is on a server just like your Facebook profile or any other cloud service. We never receive nor store any customer CC numbers or we wouldn’t be PCI-DSS certified like most of the top ecommerce platforms, CC numbers are only handled by CC gateways like PayPal)
Now knowing that a lot of hacks, and online thefts originate from the Russians, it’s up to you to decide how safe is your info. and your customers info safe.
(indeed, and if you care about safety, please stick with PCI-DSS Level 1 companies that are best served by the cloud, don’t do security by yourself with WooCommerce on a $5/mo hosting plan)
– Unless things have changed, you cannot import product options into the catalog.
(you can)
Other than these points, ecwid is nice and easy to set up, even though the free version allows you only 10 products (last time I checked), this used to be 100 products. The real question here is: For WP users, where Woocommerce is available and 100% free, with gazillions of plugins available for it, why pay for e-commerce for your WordPress site?
Really, why pay?
(100% free????? plus hosting, plugins, development, themes, support and if you care about security and hackers you will have to pay extra to be secure and forget about PCI-DSS certification)
This article was looking pretty good unless i read the comment of Nick DerAvedissian. Thank you Nick for sharing your views about this and for being realistic.
All true, but what Lina fails to mention:
– ECWID is a Russian company, why is this important to know?…
– It’s important to know because ecwid really is a cloud service. They own and control your date, including your products, customer information including credit card numbers. Now knowing that a lot of hacks, and online thefts originate from the Russians, it’s up to you to decide how safe is your info. and your customers info safe.
– Unless things have changed, you cannot import product options into the catalog.
Other than these points, ecwid is nice and easy to set up, even though the free version allows you only 10 products (last time I checked), this used to be 100 products. The real question here is: For WP users, where Woocommerce is available and 100% free, with gazillions of plugins available for it, why pay for e-commerce for your WordPress site?
Really, why pay?
Hi Nick,
This is Jeff Brandimarte with Ecwid – I am also in the San Diego office with Jesse. He mentioned the article/comments to me and I wanted to give my thoughts as well because I feel this is an important conversation to have. First off, I really appreciate your input; you raise some good points and I’ll do my best to answer with some detailed info. Apologies in advance for the length of this reply, but this is all important and good knowledge to share!
1. So how does security with Ecwid (and other cloud applications) work?
This is a rather large topic so I will try to be as brief as I can, but here is my summary: Ecwid is more secure than any downloadable e-commerce available BECAUSE it is a cloud platform. To give some external info, here are the first two articles I found when searching “are cloud services secure?” in Google:
Now let’s cover the two specific points you brought up in more detail.
i.) Is Ecwid a Russian company?
No, Ecwid is an international company which has Russian roots. Ruslan Fazlyev founded Ecwid back in 2009 – at the time, we were part of another e-commerce startup called X-Cart, which Ruslan also founded and it is one of the first PHP shopping carts ever created. We currently have offices in the U.S. (San Diego) and Russia (Ulyanovsk and Samara), with remote team members working in the US and Europe. Ecwid’s team in general brings a significant amount of experience from many leading and reputable companies, including PayPal, Symantec, Boeing, Miva Merchant, Certona, Demandware, Cisco, Hewlett Packard and much more.
Regarding the security of data because of the Russian roots, of course hacking our own customers’ data is not something we do, have done, or ever intend to do. In fact, just like other cloud technology providers, we have a specific team in engineering focused entirely on data security. You can be certain we are doing everything possible (and legally required) to be sure all merchant and customer data is secure from any hacker, including – or, maybe, especially – those from Russia.
Let’s address that a bit more as security (PCI compliance, SSL cert, etc) is really a major advantage of the Ecwid platform.
ii.) How is data stored with the Ecwid platform?
We use Amazon Web Services for data storage with storage centers in multiple countries, which provides Ecwid users with a great level of security, speed, reliability, and the delivery of powerful features described in this WPMayor post. Storing data in the cloud is one of the key principles of the Ecwid SaaS architecture – we host all data in our AWS centers.
A few other important points:
– Ecwid is a PCI DSS Level 1-certified solution. Simply put, this is the highest level of security you can get for an online store. More and more banks and payment gateways require merchants to make their online store compliant with PCI DSS standards (extra info: . Does Woocommerce make your store PCI DSS compliant? No. Does your hosting provide that? It could, but it isn’t common. Ecwid provides that as a built-in function for free; the goal of the company is to give small businesses the unique ability to launch an online store quickly and securely on their existing website, and ensuring we comply with and surpass industry security standards is a vital part in attaining this goal.
– As mentioned we have a dedicated team monitoring data security and service availability 24/7. Having the data stored in the cloud is a benefit for small businesses, as it allows us to quickly detect and fix any availability issue, add a security patch, restore data from a backup or even scale up your shop in minutes so that it can get 1000x more traffic (for example, if you launch a TV commercial).
– Having data and functionality “hidden” in the cloud also helps us to protect users from all kinds of software vulnerabilities. PCI DSS certification also includes a lot of responsibilities on our end like constantly monitoring, auditing and updating every bit of the software we use to store and process customer data. This means that as soon as we hear about any new vulnerability, we’re working on fixing it for the 1 million Ecwid users out there and these updates are made seamlessly and automatically. No downloadable solution can do the same, simply because the whole system highly depends on the specific environment you use (hosting, plugins, ftp access, etc). You can Google “WooCommerce vulnerability” to get an example of what I mean. Ecwid has never been hacked and we will do everything we can to make sure it never does.
– Since Ecwid hosts the store data with Amazon Web Services, even if your site or hosting is hacked, your data is still protected. This is also helpful when you restore your site or switch to another hosting, since you can connect your same store to your site in minutes – all the data still intact. In fact, we even provide a simple one-page website for a merchant to sell online called the Ecwid Starter Site – so that our merchants can use it as a backup plan in the case their website hosting goes down on any given day. On the other hand, when you store your shop and customer data on your server, it’s only as safe as your hosting and your specific implementation of the technologies you’re using.
2. Why pay when there are free WordPress e-commerce plugins?
This is a really important topic of conversation, and one which should revolve around total cost of ownership of the entire system of technologies one chooses. With a free e-commerce plugin, you get the basic plugin for free, but then, as your store grows, you will likely need to have: a more expensive hosting plan; a shipping rates calculator plugin; tax tool to automate your sales tax rates; maybe a plugin to export your products to marketplaces to attract more traffic to your store, etc etc. You will get some of those features for free, some will be paid and it really depends on the specific technologies being used. I think this recent article here on WPMayor as well as the comments on it are a good example of getting into the details of this important total cost of ownership conversation: https://wpmayor.com/real-cost-setting-woocommerce-store/
In addition to the forever-free plan, Ecwid offers paid plans with premium functionality – at the end of the day, we’re a business and making money is one of our goals. With the revenue we bring in, we are constantly improving the platform to accommodate the changing technology landscape, and some of many things we’ve done is added native mobile app functionality (for the merchant to manage their store and for a store owner to easily launch their own consumer app), launched partnerships with leading POS providers (Square, Clover, and Vend) and will continue to innovate and lead the way for omni-channel capabilities for small businesses. To your point, the good news for small merchants is that Ecwid’s free plan is still very powerful; it allows you to test your business idea, start selling online and become a successful seller even before paying Ecwid a dime. In fact, Ecwid’s free plan includes the things I described above – unlimited storage and bandwidth, automatic and seamless updates, security patches and monitoring, PCI DSS Level 1 certified online store – all as part of that free plan. Plus, it includes vital e-commerce functionality like 40+ payment gateways, UPS/USPS/Fedex and other shipping carrier integrations and much more.
3. Is the importing of product options supported in Ecwid?
It’s 100% possible to import products including product options to the catalog.
Please feel free to reply with any questions.
Thanks!
Jeff