15+ Ecwid Updates That Simplify the Life of a Busy Business Owner

Posted 2 years ago by Anastasia Prokofieva

Calling all savvy business owners out there: are you ready to make your life easier? Your favorite ecommerce platform has released a set of new tools that will make managing your online store feel easier and more straightforward than ever before.

From better order management to seamless omnichannel selling—and the ability to manage your store on your phone like the cool kid you are—Ecwid is bringing a better seller experience straight to your (virtual) door. Keep reading and learn how to simplify your business routine.

Manage Orders with Ease using Custom Statuses

Order management is a big part of any business owner’s routine—as such, they take up a lot of time. Creating custom order statuses can help you be more efficient with your busy schedule.

Set up custom payment and fulfillment order statuses to make fulfilling orders easier. You can create up to six custom statuses: three custom payment statuses and three custom fulfillment statuses. That’s in addition to the default order statuses you’re already familiar with.

For example, if you’re shipping orders, you might want to add statuses like Ready to Ship or Shipped Separately. If you offer an in-store pickup option only, you will find it more convenient to use statuses like Picked Up.

When creating a custom status, you’ll see a list of both custom and default statuses that exist in your store in the preview

Custom order statuses have other cool perks:

- If you run a multilingual store, you can translate custom order statuses into as many language versions as you need.
- You can filter orders by custom order statuses to fulfill orders faster.
- Assigning custom order statuses is available on your desktop and Ecwid Mobile App.

To keep customers updated about their orders, you can send an Order status changed email automatically when a custom status is assigned to an order. You can also opt out of sending notifications if it makes more sense for your business.

Learn how to create and use custom order statuses in the Help Center.

Spend Less Money on Payment Gateway Fees

Payment gateways charge processing fees, which can get costly for businesses. Luckily, our new setting allows you to offer convenient payment methods to customers without losing too much on processing costs.

Now you can add a payment method fee when setting up an online or offline payment method in your Ecwid store. A fee can be created as a percentage or absolute value.

On checkout, customers will see if their chosen payment method has a fee. This way, they can choose to pay with a different method if they’d like to.

The payment gateway fee is added to the order’s total

Check out the Help Center for instructions on adding gateway-based fees at checkout.

Important: Please note that some countries and payment providers don’t allow charging customers the processing fee. Before enabling a payment method fee, make sure that it’s legal in your country and that the payment gateway allows it.

Grow Revenue with Flexible Subscriptions

With Ecwid by Lightspeed, you can grow your recurring revenue by offering subscription products and services in your store.

To make subscriptions easier to manage, we are introducing a couple of updates to the subscription tool:

Sell Subscriptions with Lightspeed Payments

While you can use Stripe to enable recurring subscriptions for your store, you now have the option to offer subscriptions with Ecwid’s native payment gateway, Lightspeed Payments.

You can set up and manage Lightspeed Payments straight from your Ecwid admin, which simplifies payment management. Check your balance, payments, and payouts on the Finance page without bouncing to another website.

Available for US sellers only, for now.

Learn more about the benefits and setup process of Lightspeed Payments in this article:

Set Up Subscriptions as You Need

With the latest update, you have access to even more settings for subscription-based products or services in your store. Some are:

Another billing frequency to choose from—every six months.
Subscribe & Save prices for product variations.
Different One-time purchase price for each product variation of a subscription product.

One-time and subscription prices change depending on the product variation

Check out the Help Center to enable subscriptions for your online store.

Spend Less Time Managing Taxes

A tool that automatically calculates taxes for you is a true life-saver for a business owner, as you don’t need to calculate taxes on your own. And potentially even more exciting, you don’t have to keep track of tax changes in your country and adjust them manually either. All tax rates automatically update when a local authority announces upcoming changes in its sales tax rules. You don’t even have to think about it!

Check out the latest changes to automatic tax calculations in Ecwid:

Automated Taxes Are Enabled for Indian Sellers

Indian business owners, we have great news for you! Your Ecwid store can automatically calculate a precise tax rate specific to the customer and store location. You can also set non-standard tax rates for different items in your product catalog, like increased, reduced, or zero rates.

See the full list of countries eligible for automatic tax calculations and learn how to set them up in the Help Center.

Updated Tax Calculation for the EU

The tax calculation for online stores in the EU has been updated to provide more accurate sales taxes. When products in an order have different tax rates, the sales tax on shipping is calculated based on item prices rather than the weight of products.

Learn more about EU taxes in the Help Center.

Save Time Managing Your Store on the Go

Ecwid Mobile apps for iPhone and Android allow you to run your online store on the go. With our recent updates, the app simplifies managing your products and orders like never before.

Here are some new things you can do with your Ecwid Mobile App:

Quickly filter orders on mobile. Filter orders by payment and shipping method, carrier, fulfillment type, pickup or delivery date, and more. Display orders with or without tracking numbers, those with a specific discount coupon applied, or orders with customer comments and staff notes.
Save order filters for frequently used searches. For example, you can save a filter showing local orders that have to be delivered in a week.
Manage product catalog translations on the go. With the Android app, you can now add translations for product and category titles, descriptions, attributes, SEO metadata, ribbons, and subtitles. Note: iOS users, your apps got this update some time ago, so check it out if you missed it.
Set up out-of-stock settings per product. When editing a product with the iOS app, you can set up out-of-stock settings for it in the Stock Control section. For example, enable pre-orders, hide it from storefront view, or show it in the catalog but prohibit purchases.

Filtering orders using the Ecwid Mobile App

Make sure to download Ecwid Mobile apps for your iPhone or Android so you can manage your online store wherever you are, whenever you want.

Manage Pre-Orders Effortlessly

Pre-orders are invaluable for growing your revenue. With pre-orders, you enable your customer to buy a product even after it reaches zero stock. This way, your customers won’t miss a best-selling product and you will grow sales for items that are about to hit the shelves.

Here are a couple of new things that you can do with pre-orders:

See all pre-orders at once. By filtering pre-orders, you can stay on top of what products you need to stock. Just go to the Orders page and click Pre-orders.
Enable pre-orders for products and their variations on the go. The iOS app lets you quickly enable a pre-ordering option for out-of-stock products and variations.

Filtering pre-orders on the Orders page in Ecwid admin

Learn more about pre-orders and enable them in the Help Center.

Sell on Hundreds of Sales Channels at Once

Selling on hundreds of marketplaces and sales channels at once sounds like a stretch… Unless you have the Koongo app! List, sell, and advertise your products across over 500 channels and marketplaces, like Amazon, eBay, Wish, Zalando, Miinto, and many more.

Your inventory and orders are synced automatically on a number of marketplaces. That way, you don’t have to worry about updating the catalog manually on each platform. You can promote your products in multiple places at once without spending too much effort. A surefire way to increase sales if you’re a busy business owner!

Learn more about the Koongo app and see their full list of supported sales channels in the Ecwid App Market.

Simplify Order Fulfillment with Order Quantity Limits for Products

Order quantity limits come in handy when you have specific requirements for how much customers can order. Our updates have simplified the process for setting the minimum and/or maximum amount of a product that is available per order.

For example, if you make items to order, you may want to specify that a shopper can buy no more than what is manageable to make at a time. Or, if you’re a wholesaler, you can specify that customers have to buy a minimum amount per order.

Order quantity limits can be applied to products and their variations. Pro tip: to save time, set order quantity limits in bulk!

If a customer tries to add to the cart more or fewer items than specified, they will see this message

Learn how to set order quantity limits for products in the Help Center.

Make Your Product Descriptions Easier to Read

Product descriptions are one of the main things customers consider when shopping in your online store. That’s why you want to provide as much information about a product as possible while not overwhelming them with big chunks of text.

Now, you can divide product descriptions into sections that can be expanded or collapsed with a mouse click or a tap. Here’s how to do that.

Customers can click on each section to see the details

Build Trust with Customers by Giving Them More Control Over Cookies

If you sell to online shoppers in the EU, your website must ask your visitors for permission to use cookies. Your online store has been updated to comply with the recent changes to the privacy law.

Your store visitors can either allow all cookies at once or give their consent to certain types of cookies:

Essential: Mandatory website cookies; for example, security cookies.
Analytics: Optional cookies that are used for analytics and internal store statistics.
Personalization: Optional cookies that improve a visitor’s experience on the website.

Your store visitors can also revoke their consent at any time in your online store’s My Account section or the Cookie Settings section in the footer section of the Instant Site.

Customers can choose what cookies they allow to use

Learn more about a cookie notification banner in your online store in the Help Center.

Save Time Exporting Custom Checkout Fields Data

When you need a list of orders with their details, you can use the export tool in your online store to download a CSV file with orders’ data.

Now you can get even more details about your orders. When you export order details as a CSV file, it will also provide you with data that customers entered in custom checkout fields. For example, delivery instructions, special requests, or tax information. This way, you can get additional information about the order in bulk without checking orders one by one.

Learn more about exporting orders in your Ecwid store.

Get a Deeper Insight into Your Marketing Performance

An order details page has lots of important information, including where the order came from; for example, through a Facebook ad or newsletter. The recent update made these insights even more valuable!

Not only can you now know the source that led to the purchase, but you also see all the marketing campaigns a customer interacted with before placing an order. Perfect for understanding which of your marketing campaigns turn people into customers.

Learn more about tracking the source of orders in the Help Center.

Power Your Store with New Apps

The Ecwid App Market has dozens of apps to customize your online store to your business needs. Browse these new apps to improve the shopping experience in your store and simplify your business procedures.

For example, check out these new apps for optimizing your store navigation and catalog layout:

If your store has a lot of product categories, help customers browse the catalog faster with Subcategory Preview.
If your products have many options, you might want to optimize them with Advanced Product Options.
Make it easier for customers to choose the right product by showing multiple photos of an item on the storefront with Product Quickview.

With Subcategory Preview, customers can view subcategories by hovering over a product category

Drive customers’ attention to offers and deals with new marketing apps:

Grow your email list or drive engagement to your deals with Promolayer popups.
Encourage customers to buy more products to get free shipping with the Free Shipping Bar app.
Use Planetree to help shoppers positively impact the environment by funding tree planting with their purchases.

Using the Planetree app to get customers to donate at checkout

Connect your online store to accounting services:

Sellers from the Netherlands and Belgium, sync your online store with the Exact Online accounting service to simplify your life.

Or, add some new regional and digital payment options:

Offer your customers convenient Buy Now, Pay Later options with Partially Payment Plans.
Let customers check out faster in your store by paying with their Revolut accounts via the Revolut Pay app.
Let customers pay directly into your bank accounts with EchoPay.
Accept Bitcoin payments with IBEX PAY.
Sellers from Armenia, get paid in your online store with ArCa.

Stay Tuned

Make sure you don’t miss new tools that simplify your day-to-day routine. You can find more information about tools and updates here:

To keep track of product updates, events, and relevant company news, visit the News section of your notifications dashboard in your control panel (a bluebell on the bottom right of your screen).
For the entire timeline of updates, big and small, visit the Help Center.
Peek into the What’s New tab in your control panel to enable tools that require manual activation.
Subscribe to the Ecwid Blog newsletter to be the first to know about the most exciting tools.
Bookmark the Ecwid Updates section of the blog.

Do you know how to make an ecommerce store work better for you and thousands of other merchants? Need help to fine-tune your Ecwid store to your business’s needs? Don’t hesitate to contact our Customer Care team with questions—we’re happy to help!

About The Author

Anastasia Prokofieva is a content writer at Ecwid. She writes about online marketing and promotion to make entrepreneurs’ daily routine easier and more rewarding. She also has a soft spot for cats, chocolate, and making kombucha at home.