Ecwid

Adding a store without starting over

The usual advice when a business wants to sell online is to rebuild on an ecommerce platform. Sometimes that is right. Often it is an expensive answer to a small question.

Ecwid takes the other approach: the store is embedded into the site you already have. Your pages, your design, and your URLs stay exactly as they are, and a fully functional store appears inside them.

What it does well

• Drops into an existing site on effectively any platform
• One catalog, many places, so the same products can sell on your site, on social channels, and in person
• Handles the hard parts: payments, tax, shipping rates, and inventory
• A relatively quick path to launch because the existing site can remain in place
• Scales down affordably, which matters for a small catalog

Where we have used it

Pars To Go, the online ordering portion of Pars Cuisine’s website, is handled by Ecwid within the restaurant’s main Weebly Cloud site.

What to know before choosing it

It is a store inside a site, not a store platform. For a business whose entire operation is ecommerce, Shopify gives more depth.

Design control is limited to what the widget exposes. It can be adapted to the site’s look, but it is not fully customizable.

If you already run Square in person, Square Online will usually serve you better, because inventory then stays in step with your register automatically.