Weebly offers a global platform that lets people easily create a personalized website. They aim to provide everyone the freedom to build a high-quality site that works across all devices used to browse the internet.
Weebly provides a fantastic website builder that makes it easy to build a professional online presence. But that’s not all. Since e-commerce has become so important they’ve now enhanced the editor with many features that will help you sell online without having to learn any coding skills. A simple drag and drop is all it takes to add text, images or forms to your Weebly website. So, if you are looking for a way to build and host your online store, then Weebly may just be what you are looking for.
The Starter and Pro plans provide a very limited version of the Weebly e-commerce solution where they charge an additional sales fee. The best solution for aspiring shop owners is probably the Business plan or the Performance plan. They have all the features that are necessary to run an online store.
In this Weebly e-commerce review, we’ll go into some of the online store features that Weebly business and performance plans offer, and how they can help you grow your business if you are selling products online. But first, let’s take a quick look at its Pros and Cons.
PROS:
- A free SSL certificate
- Fully integrated shopping cart that uses your own custom domain name throughout the entire checkout experience (beneficial to you as your shoppers never leave your website through the entire purchase process)
- Inventory control & management
- Full shipping configuration options
- Shipping & Tax calculator
- Discount code engine
- Ability to use PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, and Square to power your shopping cart
- 1 free custom domain name for 1 year
- Real time shipping rates (only available to Performance Plan users)
- Abandoned cart recovery (only available to Performance Plan users)
- Gift card products (only available to Performance Plan users)
- Unlimited number of products
- Zero transaction fees
CONS:
- Builder Limitations: While Weebly offers an easy interface for you to build your website, there are certain limitations to it. If you want to make some in-depth customization on your website then you would have to go into the code or would have to hire someone to do it for you.
- Lack of Advanced eCommerce Analytics: One helpful tool that Weebly is missing is advanced e-commerce. However, Weebly does allow you to integrate your store with Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking function. But the user experience is not as good when compared to advanced e-commerce analytics dashboard that is built into other online store builders such as Shopify, etc.
FEATURES
Easy to use Ecommerce Website Builder
With Weebly e-commerce, getting your store up and running is as simple as choosing a design theme, adding your products, setting up shipping and taxes, and then selecting your preferred way to accept payments. It automatically creates a storefront for you to customize, including the option for full CSS/HTML control and editing.
Enhanced Customization
Weebly lets you choose from a wide variety of modern and unique e-commerce templates and color combinations to design the perfect look for your online store. Flexible e-commerce design elements make it easy to fully customize your storefront experience for visitors and customers. The Weebly e-commerce platform brings the ease of drag and drop website creation to product merchandising. You can showcase featured products, categorize items for easy browsing, customize fonts, and define photo display options to create a store that matches with your brand.
Fully Integrated Shopping Cart & Secure Checkout
Weebly e-commerce provides customers with the convenience of a fully integrated shopping cart and a secure checkout experience directly from your e-commerce website. The shopping cart software is set-up automatically when you create your online store so you can start selling online immediately. Your customers get through the checkout flow easier than ever with a simplified one-page purchase process. The responsive checkout flow features an order summary and collapsing sections. Special areas for custom coupons, security information, and return policies help customers complete checkout quickly and confidently.
Easy Inventory Tracking
With Weebly’s e-commerce, you can easily track your inventory to manage your supply, show customers the number of items remaining to create urgency and boost buying behavior, and automatically update customers when items are out of stock if they attempt to purchase from your store.
Powerful Filtered Product Search
Weebly e-commerce gives customers a faster way to find exactly what they want. It highlights the most relevant products. Your customers can filter the results by attributes like price, color, etc. Filtered product search helps you maximize exposure across all of your inventory and create more buying opportunities.
Supports Digital and Physical Products
Weebly gives you flexible options for selling a wide range of products directly from your e-commerce website. Digital and downloadable items are automatically delivered to your customers via email with a secure one-time use link. There are extensive options for physical products, one-of-a-kind handmade items, services, and donations that can be completely customized to meet your needs.
Complete Store Management from your Phone
With Weebly e-commerce, you can manage your store right from your pocket. The Mobile app makes it easy and convenient to manage your online store from anywhere. You can process and fulfill orders, provide personalized service and respond to customer inquiries, upload new products and photos, notify customers when a purchase has shipped, check sales figures in real-time and receive notifications whenever a new order is placed.
Free Ecommerce Hosting
The Weebly’s e-commerce gives you a reliable, world-class cloud hosting that’s redundant and scalable. They handle all the details to ensure your e-commerce website loads quickly every time, no matter how much traffic you receive.
Full Technical Support
The Weebly support team offers live chat, email support and a variety of resources to assist you every step of the way. If you are creating a store for the first time, their help center and free live training sessions will walk you through everything you need to know to get your store up and running.
Seamless Mobile compatibility
With mobile compatibility, your online store and products load quickly and display perfectly on screens of different resolutions. All e-commerce websites include a free mobile shopping cart and secure checkout experience that’s designed to work perfectly on smaller screens like phones and tablets.
Fully Search Engine Optimized
Weebly’s e-commerce automatically optimizes your site and product pages so you’ll have everything you need to start ranking for search results. There are additional SEO fields you can customize for advanced metadata optimization and tracking. So customers can find you better.
Integrate Content and eCommerce Side by Side
Weebly e-commerce lets you combine content and products in unique ways to create more buying opportunities. In addition to a powerful storefront, it gives you the freedom to showcase and sell products from any page on your site such as a blog or your homepage with the standalone e-commerce element.
Payments
Weebly lets you tap into the growing global market for international support for accepting payments, shipping, and taxes. You can choose from a variety of payment options including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and Square. Plus, you can instantly accept major credit cards directly from your own domain name. Payment processing is available in 25 countries with PayPal and 11 countries with Stripe.
You can also manage shipping to any destination. Flexible tax management is also available to support your online store globally.
Orders Processing and Management
With Weebly e-commerce, you can process and manage orders from end-to-end with order confirmation emails, shipment tracking notifications, refunds and returns processing and real-time reporting for orders and sales.
Import Your Store from other platforms to Weebly e-commerce
If you are not satisfied with your existing e-commerce platform or want to see a preview of what your existing store could look like on Weebly? You can import your store from Etsy, Shopify or upload a CSV file directly into Weebly’s e-commerce platform for fast and easy setup. Once imported, you can adjust and tweak your store design to create a unique look.
Flexible Shipping Options
With Weebly e-commerce, you can offer the shipping choices that your customers want, which will easily handle a full spectrum of shipping situations ranging from simple to complex. You can offer “free shipping” on select orders, set shipping rates based on price or weight and define carriers (e.g. UPS, USPS, FedEx) as well as delivery speed (e.g. ground, 3-day, overnight). Rates can be adjusted for geographic locations including full international support and fine- control options for sub-regions (states, provinces, etc.). Weebly e-commerce also gives you real-time shipping rates across a variety of carriers to save your precious time and money. Shipping rates are determined dynamically based on the customer’s shipping address and products in the order.
Boost Sales with Coupon Codes
Arm your online store with promotional offers to compete effectively and increase sales. With Weebly e-commerce, you can incentivize visitors to purchase with a limited-time offer, attract new buyers by offering a coupon discount and generate repeat sales from existing customers by running a sale.
Fine-Grained Tax Controls
It’s simple to manage even the most complex tax situations with a Weebly e-commerce website. You can determine when and where to apply taxes. Weebly provides and maintains the current city, state and province level tax rates for the United States and Canada. For all other countries, tax rates can be defined by the seller. Also, the tax calculator makes tax management much less of a headache. It calculates taxes automatically in the US. Indicate if taxes are already included in the price of your product and specify if shipping should be taxed.
Bulk Import and Export Options
Weebly e-commerce offers streamlined management tools perfect for big stores with lots of orders and products. You can quickly make bulk edits to your products with the ability import and export batches of information between platforms.
Branded Digital Gift Cards
With this feature, you can drive new sales with custom branded gift cards. The gift card platform makes it easy to generate a variety of gift cards that you can sell on your site and use to for new customer sales, word of mouth marketing or rewards programs.
Automated Abandoned Cart Emails
This feature lets you hook customers with an automatically abandoned cart email sent at exactly the right time to land a sale you might have otherwise lost.
Integrated Email Campaigns
This feature lets you create email campaigns effortlessly. You can do it by just dragging and dropping content directly from your site and store into an email template. Products, blog posts, logos are pre-loaded and are ready to send to contacts collected from your site forms and lead capture. So you can grow your sales and traffic in just a few clicks!
Suggested Emails
Weebly automatically creates a “ready to send” an email when you add a new product, category or coupon code to keep your customers in the loop. You’ll get notifications on when to send emails with in-product prompts based on your store activity.
Customized Transactional Emails
With this feature, you can give your transactional emails more personality by designing custom, automated messages from your store. These branded billing messages are powered by “Weebly Promote” so it’s simple to set up the templates and let the emails run automatically.
Pricing
As discussed above, Weebly has 4 pricing plans and each of them is slightly different when it comes to e-commerce offerings. The Starter and Pro plans provide a very limited version of the Weebly e-commerce solution where they also charge an additional sales fee. The best solution for aspiring shop owners is probably the Business plan. It has all the features that you really need. Weebly’s ultimate solution is the Performance plan. It comes with an abandoned cart email engine and real-time shipping rate calculation.
Following are the prices charged for each of Weebly’s plans:
- Starter Plan at $8/month
- Pro Plan at $12/month
- Business Plan at $25/month
- Performance Plan at $49/month
Conclusion
Weebly is a great choice for an all-inclusive website builder. They have great pricing, decent functionality, and a good user experience. They also offer unlimited items so you can sell as many products on your store as you want. Therefore, Weebly’s online store is worth a look, and now finally plays in the same league as the rest of the website builder in terms of features and design.
As far as the Weebly’s performance plan is concerned, we have mixed feelings about it. Even though it contains more features than Business, we don’t think that it’s worth almost the double price of the Business plan. Also, with Weebly e-commerce, you don’t get close to the amount of features as Shopify, but the Business plan is a bit cheaper than the Shopify Basic Plan, so if you want the simplest interface with unlimited product uploads, and you’re short on money, then Weebly is a solid choice.
