10-second breakdown:
Weebly is a great entry point in the world of online selling (on your own). If you want to create a place to sell your goods, but aren’t the most tech literate, you’ll love the simple and friendly interface as well as how fast your first pages can be available to customers.
The good:
Weebly may be the easiest platform to build the kind of online store you want. The builder is intuitive and easy for beginners. There are templates that can easily be tweaked without knowing how to write code. Being able to see your results immediately in a drag-and-drop style will help you move through the process quickly.
This ecommerce software is one of the lowest cost options on our list. If you only have a few products, or have a brick and mortar store that you would like to add an online branch to, this may be the best way to “test the waters” and see if you want to take online shop building more seriously.
There are some great educational resources to help you understand everything that is happening with your account.
The bad:
Some of the features you’d expect to see on other platforms just aren’t available. Photo editing is one feature that isn’t up to par (even though you can edit photos).
There isn’t an undo button. If you make a mistake, you’ll have to manually fix it.
How it works:
Weebly isn’t primarily an ecommerce platform. It does intend to help business owners, creatives, and just about anyone else have an online platform to spread their message. However, there are online selling capabilities with every plan making them a solid option for those looking for an extremely easy way to sell stuff via the internet. As with all of the other options, you’ll first have to choose a plan. To assist you with that, we’ve put together a rundown of each.
Free: Believe it or not, even the free plan comes with the ability to sell online. You get free hosting, unlimited pages, and can have up to five products. There is a 3% transaction fee for each and you don’t have a personal domain. This means that your branding is going to be tough and we really don’t recommend this route. It’s just not a good idea for a business to rely this much on a third party.
Starter: This plan makes things more interesting for those with a few info products, or just a few items for sale. At this level you get your own domain and can sell up to 10 types of products. Your customers go to the Weebly checkout process (meaning they leave your site to purchase your goods) and the 3% transaction fee remains. Not the best option for a robust ecommerce site, but not bad to “test the waters”.
Pro: Things get a little better at the pro level. You’ll be able to have 25 products and a few more features like videos and the ability to have a membership-style site. Again, you have the third-party Weebly shopping cart and 3% transaction fee.
Business: The last plan isn’t bad for a full-fledged ecommerce operation. You can put up an unlimited number of products, the transaction fee goes away, and customers stay on your own website when they checkout. It’s a big jump, but even this plan is priced better than most other software on the market (for the features you get).
The site supports both digital and physical product offerings and gives you some impressive features. Things like a shipping and tax calculator, inventory management system, and coupon codes to discount your goods (a premium feature among many ecommerce solutions).
As far as site design goes, Weebly starts to shine. For starters, there are several dozen themes to get you started quickly. Next, the drag and drop builder is one of the easiest ways to build a site on the internet. You essentially start with a great design template and change it to be unique to your brand. You choose the elements you want (e.g. pictures, icons, and text) and move them around and change colors until you are happy.
Since this isn’t exclusively an ecommerce platform, there are some things that are done better than the top online shop builders. Blogging is extremely easy, so if content marketing is a big part of your overall strategy; it’s something to think about.
Support is both good and bad. Bad in the sense that the only real support option is email. Opening a ticket and waiting isn’t something you want to do with a site that is potentially losing money. On the plus side, there are extensive learning resources. What seems like over 100 detailed articles on every nuance and tool to run your Weebly site properly.
If running your store on the go is important, don’t write this solution off. Their app is really powerful and can help you manage your site from any smart device. This feature is something that some of the top players in the ecommerce game don’t have (yet). It’s another shocking thing that throws Weebly into one of the best value options to start a store, well, at least the business plan.
It’s easy, inexpensive, and surprisingly feature-rich. The obvious downside is building your business on someone else property. If Weebly closed down tomorrow, you’d be in for a long-haul moving all of your files and setting up shop somewhere else. While it’s not likely, building something that is a little less reliant on a third-party is more sustainable.
For complete rankings of all ecommerce software, go here.
http://authority.org/ecommerce-software/weebly/ http://authorityorg.tumblr.com/post/150393917267
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