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Weebly eCommerce Review

Author: / Date: August 3, 2017

Highlights:

  • Easy to use
  • Many pictures per product
  • Zoom-in function
  • Product variants
  • Digital goods
  • SSL encryption
  • Reasonable monthly fee

About Weebly eCommerce:

Weebly Business plan put in your hands a diverse and powerful website builder with top-notch ecommerce functionality. Unlimited products, digital goods, discount coupons, advanced inventory management – you name it, Weebly has it. Even if it is not there by default, there would be a handy app to remedy this. Cheaper than other comparable offerings, Weebly eCommerce is value.

Weebly has a free plan to demonstrate the platform; the Business plan is the one you need for ecommerce.

Pricing

Starter

$8/mo

Free Domain

Pro

$12/mo

Phone Support

Business

$25/mo

Free SSL

  • Easy to use
  • Many pictures per product
  • Zoom-in function
  • Product variants
  • Digital goods
  • SSL encryption
  • Reasonable monthly fee
  • No shopping analytics
  • No customer log-in area
  • Email templates don’t include your company logo
  • Unsuitable for really big stores

Ease of use

Weebly is one of the most user-friendly website builders in existence. Unlike Shopify, it is not specialized exclusively in ecommerce but the ease of use stretches over to the shopping cart management too.

All setup options are accessible with a click or two. The initial configuration of the store takes minutes. After that is only a matter of expanding the inventory.

I strongly recommend to create a Weebly account and play around with the site builder to see how smooth it is. Doubtlessly, adding products is the most time consuming thing in any online shop setup but the Weebly Online Store interface makes the entire process seamless and quick.

Themes and designs

Weebly has a decent amount of free themes. (Nearly) 70 is a good number but the best part is that you can customize each one of them as much as you want by dragging and dropping elements wherever you desire.

The themes created for online stores are 13 in total but with a crumb of imagination and a fleck of creativity you can make any of the free designs a remarkable Weebly storefront.

In case none of the available templates tickles your aesthetic bone, you can always import a theme created for you by a professional web designer.

Interactivity and responsiveness

All Weebly themes are mobile-friendly. There is no need to manually adjust them for mobile devices as their responsive design realigns everything automatically to fit smaller displays.

In terms of performance, the 4 Weebly store examples I tested ranked reasonably well: 2 showed average loading times, the other 2 were going toward quick loading speed.

This was a bit surprising, as online stores require serious optimization due to the amount of images they display and the numerous database queries running in the background.

I cover the support in greater detail further down in this Weebly ecommerce review, but I have to mention here that the Weebly support centre can help you speed up your site with very accessible tips and tutorials.

Applications

Weebly is a versatile platform with many applications for increased interactivity and functionality.

As far as ecommerce is concerned, even though the shopping cart is included in all plans, it is the Weebly Business plan that covers all grounds right off the bat.

Each product you add can have up to 250 variations. You can add multiple pictures to demonstrate the goods from different angles.

Email templates for order confirmation and shipping confirmation can be edited with the initial setup. Shipping rules and tax rules can be defined manually in the Business plan. Once set up, the Weebly store will automatically apply them to any new order.

There are a few other useful features, which are covered in the section about the Weebly ecommerce packages.

SEO features

All paid Weebly plans provide a $100 worth of Google Ads, which can help you boost your rankings once the store is up and running.

Other than that, Weebly allows you to alter meta tags, to insert page descriptions, to edit header and footer codes in order to embed analytic tools and to manage 301 redirects.

What is more, you can supply custom meta description to each and every product you sell.

The Weebly support centre has useful information about SEO strategies and growth management.

Weebly packages

Weebly has 5 plans: Free, Starter, Pro, Business and Performance.

Paid once per year, they would cost you $0, $8, $12, $25 and $38 per month, respectively.

If you intend to use Weebly for ecommerce, I’d strongly recommend the Business plan for a number of reasons:

  • There is no Weebly transaction fee; payment gateways’ fees still apply
  • Unlimited products
  • You can sell digital goods
  • Advanced inventory management
  • Coupons
  • Shipping and tax calculator
  • SSL certificate is included, covering the entire website

These features make the Weebly Business plan ideal for ecommerce purposes. The smaller paid plans include 3% Weebly store fee and limit the total number of products. They could be used while growing your business but in reality the $25 monthly fee is quite low.

To continue my Weebly vs Shopify comparison, the cheapest Shopify plan costs $26 per month when paid annually and adds 2% transaction fee if you use an external payment gateway. Which you might very well need to do, unless you live in Canada, Australia, USA or Ireland.

Another cool feature of the Business plan is the possibility to define the sizes of your shipping boxes. Many popular carriers base their fees on box size. Once the dimensions of the boxes are specified, you can connect the backend of your store to carriers like DHL, UPS, FedEx and USPS. This would allow your shop to receive automatic updates on their fees and add them to the final price of the products.

The Performance plan includes abandoned cart emails, gift cards and email campaigns but its monthly fee is a bit steep already.

Weebly support

In this Weebly review I already mentioned how useful their support centre is. Indeed, it has a lot of handy information published there, as well as video tutorials and webinars.

Mostly all aspects of webhosting in general and Weebly’s functionality in particular are covered in neatly organized sections.

You can also send an email to and chat with the Weebly support team, who are rather quick and knowledgeable.

If you opt for one of the two biggest plans – as you should, if you have serious intentions to run a proper online shop – you will be entitled to a high-priority phone support too.

Conclusion

Weebly is a versatile platform with great many features and unrivalled ease of use. Its ecommerce solution also boasts these characteristics, making it suitable for small to medium businesses.

Of course, it has its limitations, but the Business plan holds its ground even in the strictest of Weebly ecommerce reviews.

FAQ

Q: Can I use Weebly shopping cart with the free plan?
A: No. You can set it up but it won’t function until you upgrade.
Q: Is a domain name included?
A: All paid plans provide a domain registration.
Q: Are there Weebly store fees?
A: Yes, 3% of each transaction go to Weebly with their Starter and Pro plans. Business and Performance plans waive this fee off.

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