Hosts Jesse and Rich spotlight the recent significant Ecwid updates intended to
Show notes
- Instant Site — themes and new site builder
- WordPress Version 5 (Gutenberg) integration
- Snapchat integration
- Pinterest integration
- Facebook Messenger and live chat.
Transcript
Jesse: What’s going on, Richie?
Richard: What’s happening, Jess? It’s that day again. Let’s rock it.
Jesse: We’re gonna rock it today. It is really the Jesse and Rich show today. We do not have a guest. I think that’s kind of liberating. We don’t have to integrate anybody’s audio. We just talk.
Richard: It’s cool. Although we love guests.
Jesse: Yes. Did that sound mean to the guests?
Richard: No, no, no. I think the real reason we don’t have guests today is just a lot of updates, a lot of stuff going on in Ecwid. We want to make sure people are on the loop.
Jesse: Yeah. I think this is a good opportunity because I am assuming everybody does not read every single email and every single update we send to them in their control panel, which pains me and it pains our content team that they don’t hang on every word that we send them. But yeah, sad but true. If you haven’t been reading every single email and haven’t done all the things we told you to do, this is your opportunity to catch up, and hear the highlights of the things that we’ve done over the past few months. Some of these things actually haven’t been released. I usually know what’s going on in the beta programs or what’s coming. Sometimes I jump the gun on a few things. It’s happened before, but hopefully I don’t do that today. This is all stuff that depending on when you listened to this, it’s either available or super, super close. Richard, just me and you today. We talked on the phone about
Richard: Yeah. This will be a piece of cake.
Jesse: All right, the first thing I wanted to talk about here, so everybody knows what Ecwid is. It’s an online store builder. We have
Richard: Hey, sounded excited to me.
Jesse: All right, good. Good. We don’t have to edit this out. (laughing) A couple of things with the Instant Site. There’s now a whole bunch of different themes included. That means when you are ready to start building your store, you want to revamp your store. So people listening to here probably, maybe you want to revamp it. There’s a bunch of themes included. With a theme that means it’s the basic structure is already there. You’re not building from scratch. Like when you are going to do a word doc, it’s not blank. You just edit the things that you want to change. So a bunch of themes included. With that you can update the fonts, you can update the pictures, the calls to action. All the texts on the page, of course. Basically it’s opening up a whole new possibility here for building your basic starters. We used to call it the Starter Site. Now it’s the Instant Site, cause this is meant to be a really fast way to start building your site seamless. I definitely want to encourage people to check this out.
Richard: Yeah, that’s great. It’s more or less all one page, right?
Jesse: It’s all right there. I think there’s this idea that, “I need these super complicated themes” and blah, blah. You really don’t, depending on where you’re at in the journey. If you’re just getting started, did you really want to pay a web developer to build a site for you? Probably not.
Richard: Probably not.
Jesse: Yeah. You just want to start selling some stuff. And there’s a lot of places you can sell stuff. You can sell it on Instagram and Facebook and whatnot. But, I would say anybody that even if they say, “I just want to sell on Instagram.” Okay, great. You should also have a site. This makes that process as simple as building your Facebook profile, if you will.
Richard: Yeah, I mean that’s more or less. Think about it. We talked about the state of the Internet, are people really hanging out on web pages? Sometimes when they have to, but they’re mostly hanging out on Instagram and Facebook and Google. And this is a way that you can have a hub that can bring them back to your place and have all your products and whatever it is that you want to describe on your website. But we’re really acknowledging that most people are hanging out on social and looking for things. And then you just want to have a place that you bring them back. That’s your own that you control.
Jesse: For sure. And this is that home base. You should be working on your Instagram profile and your Facebook profile and having the shoppable posts and things like that. But where do those things go? They go back to your site. And so for those people out there, and I talk to people at
Richard: Yeah, I’m super excited. This always fires me up and we talk about it in various forms. It comes down to friction. There’s a lot of people who would love to have their own business, but there’s a lot of things to do. The sooner you can get something up, start testing the market, make it real easy. There’s just less, things you have to actually focus on and then you can do what’s important. We’re going to go over a couple of other things here, but part of why we mentioned this is just the state of the Internet. Internet right now where they’re hanging out on Instagram and hanging out in these places. If they’re there and you can set up super quick a site and you can test and you can sell on Instagram now and you can sell on Facebook now and it took you a day maybe to set that thing up. You might actually be into the
Jesse: Yup. This is just like a super fast on ramp to it. It is no cost by the way to do, do a full Instant Site with your own products. This is free, you get in, you log in, pick a theme. Don’t obsess over it that much. Change the words, it’s going to say something like “My awesome store”, whatever. That’s not the name of your store. I get that.
Richard: It’s funny you said it’s actually free. I knew it was free when I said almost no cost. It’s amazing how much people automatically assume I’m talking about money. I just meant the cost of your time.
Jesse: Sure.
Richard: Right. So a day and you literally could be… If you don’t have a Facebook profile, you don’t have an Instagram but you don’t have any of these things, in one day you can be up and connected to those things and be ready to go.
Jesse: Yeah, and I think we could do a challenge here. Maybe we have people time themselves. I know that you can do this in five minutes but let’s just say a day, so you can obsess over some pictures and videos and stuff like that. You have these themes and there’s a bunch of stock photos. You have thousands of stock photos you can choose from. The better thing is you should have your own photos, right? If you have, take a picture of your workshop or maybe a little more of a lifestyle. It depends on the product. You should have your own product. Even better would be to take a video so you can have a video in the background of your store. Your front page be a video in the background with text on the top products below About Us sections. Really everything you need to get started selling online. Hopefully, if you’re listening out there, you’re thinking, “I think I should check this out” and you should. Okay, that’s good on Instant Site. We previously have talked about some other updates we’ve made on, more on the shopping cart functionality. We’ll call this the way the products are displayed. So that was updated maybe six months, a year ago. This in a combination where now there’s an Instant Site theme and now the way the products are displayed, so you can choose, do I want two across, three across, one, do I want drop shadows? Do I want to show the price on top of it? Like a ton of these different options that are all available by clicking a button. There’s no coding with this Instant Site. So don’t freak out about code. You can make all sorts of pretty cool customization without having to worry about code. Kinda on that same thought of the code free world, we’re going to go into a little bit more. This is not for the people who are just getting started. This is all like a more advanced level. There’s a ton of Ecwid customers that are on WordPress. So WordPress like Rich, how many? I mean WordPress is pretty dominant.
Richard: I don’t know the exact hard stats right now, but I know over 50% of the sites on the Internet.
Jesse: Yeah, it’s a ton.
Richard: I want to say it’s closer to 70 but I know it’s over 50 for sure.
Jesse: I’m willing to bet lower. Maybe we can bet lunch on the over under here. So, all right, I’m going to go up. We’re shaking on this. I’m at an under on 50 but it’s pretty high though. Either way, I’m gonna look it up while you’re talking. All right. I’m betting the under, but WordPress is the dominant platform on the Internet. That is where a lot of the developers work in WordPress and so WordPress did an update. I think they are on WordPress version five right now. And the code name for this was Gutenberg. So you don’t need to follow all the things, all things WordPress, but just to let you know that they have made a big update to make it more of a code free back end, which means there’s a concept called content blocks. You can move things around very easily without being a developer to arrange your store. Maybe you’re using a theme and WordPress, maybe you’re not, maybe you just want to move things around. I know that sounded maybe a little confusing, but for the developers out there, they’re like, oh yeah. Gutenberg’s awesome. It allows to mix and match your site however you want. So what does Ecwid have to do that? That’s probably the dominant platform in the Ecwid world too. So a lot of people are on WordPress, and we’ve made our platform, I would say I would call them Gutenberg friendly. Maybe. I don’t know if that’s a term out there. We’re going to start to coin the term. We are Gutenberg friendly. That means when you are in the backend of WordPress. And by the way, if you had never been in the back end of WordPress previously, like there’s a lot of code there, you can very easily break your store. I’ve broken a lot of WordPress stores in my day or WordPress sites. So making it code free is a huge thing. The content blocks for Ecwid means your design possibilities are limitless. So if you want to have like “Here’s my top product”, you want to have just one product card, you can put it in there. You want to have the search in your header on the blog, where maybe you didn’t have it in the blog before. You want to have the shopping cart in a certain area. Basically, whatever possibilities you have are now a possibility. Rich, we were talking about this prior, this isn’t the main reason, but let’s say you have a really long blog post. What’s a sample blog post here?
Richard: I think I get where you’re going here. Views. You’re talking about how you’re doing a fishing trip and you talk about all your fish and chips around the world, but you decide, one of the things I love to do is I have these lures and all of a sudden you’re like, “I got all these followers on my blog about my efficient chip, and they’re fishermen. I want to start selling some lures.” You can take these blocks and either put a picture right there to your product page or maybe a category page. It has all your different lures. Is that what you’re referring to?
Jesse: That’s what I’m getting at it. The possibilities are limitless. So anything in WordPress can now be moved around by using this content block, a functionality. There’s no code. For people that are developers, it’s not like an
Richard: Oh, that’s great. By the way, as we were talking about this, it looks like I’m getting your lunch. There’re various stats, some are getting pretty close to mine, but it looks like maybe everyone’s building these Instant Sites we were talking about earlier. Now that’s starting to outweigh WordPress.
Jesse: All right, good. I heard that, free lunch, alright. Pretty launch on Rich.
Richard: But there’s still a lot.
Jesse: There is a ton now.
Richard: It is for sure the dominant platform. Just so everyone is aware, Ecwid is now Gutenberg friendly, has been for a while. It’s built into WordPress. Feel free, let your imagination run wild on WordPress. All right. Talked about a couple of different things with the website side of things. Now let’s talk about other platforms. As we mentioned, websites should be your hub, but that is not the Internet today. Rich just put his phone in his pocket. Internet is actually on your phone in many ways. Don’t think just websites and just desktop, think other platforms and mobile phones. One of that we have just introduced, I’m hoping this email goes out next week, and I’m not jumping the gun on this, but we now have a Snap integration. First of all, Rich, you’re not younger than me, but let’s say what Snapchat is for the older folks out there.
Richard: It’s just like a lot of these platforms, but before we get into what Snap is, let’s go back to why. Why did Jesse say, this is what’s going on the Internet right now is because this is where people are hanging out and we don’t know where your market’s hanging out. Your market might be hanging out on Instagram, your market might be hanging out on Facebook. And market might be hanging out on Pinterest. Your market might be hanging out on Messenger. WeChat, Snapchat, so now I’m going to go into, to Jesse’s point, for the most part, younger people are hanging out on Snapchat now. Just like everything in life, there’s always pretty much an exception to the rule. I’m sure there’s someone crushing it that’s an older person, maybe even older than us on Snapchat. But for the most part a younger demographic and whether it’s a video or whether it’s a picture, you’re doing something to stick with the theme of the name they have. It’s like here’s a little snapshot of my life. There’s a little bit of behind the scenes. It’s usually shot and behind the scenes, and they have a limited lifespan, and they’d disappear. Now there are other things that are going on.
Jesse: By the way, it is where Instagram Stories came from. The kind of stole it from Snap.
Richard: Yeah, they’ve stolen a lot of stuff from Snap. Once Snap said, “No, you can’t buy us.” They’re like, “Okay, well we’ll just start copying all the other stuff.” Sure. But the reason why I went back and started at the beginning that is there are different markets that are hanging out in different places and it’s still growing. It’s not as big as Instagram, but it’s still growing. There’s still a huge market there. So we’re not necessarily saying everybody, now that there’s this integration to Snapchat, that everybody’s supposed to start doing Snapchat. But if your demographic is a younger market and you think they’re on Snapchat, there’s now a way for you to be able to see if it’s worth your time to play on Snapchat. And how does that exactly work?
Jesse: Yeah, so the integration is a pixel integration. We’ve been talking about this pixel. Everyone’s like, what the heck is a pixel? Why don’t I just define what a pixel is? It’s a tiny little bit of piece of code that you integrate. You put in your website and it basically tracks, attracts people. I guess the short answer might sound bad, but what that means is that if you install the Snap Pixel, for instance, and by the way, when I say Snap Pixel, that means you’re clicking a button and putting in some credentials. There’s no actual placing of the code here. That’s what we did. We made that part easy. I should make sure I throw that in there. But what it does is that you might already be getting traffic from Snapchat and you would have no idea. Maybe you’ve installed Google Analytics properly and you’re looking there. Great. You should be doing that too. Let’s be honest, or you’re not looking in the right place. What the Snap Pixel does, it allows you to very easily see, who’s coming from Snapchat, how many people are coming. And then more importantly, for ecommerce store owners who’s buying, the whole goal here is to sell stuff, right? It’s not just to get traffic. You want to sell stuff, in order to track that properly, you need the pixel going further. That’s just tracking. That’s free. That’s just knowing the information longer term. If you ever have any designs on advertising on these platforms, so if you advertise on Snap, you need to have the pixel. You could do without it. Please don’t do that. Please don’t ever advertise on anything unless you properly install pixels and tracking. This is what pixels do. They allow you to track, track traffic and sales and help you advertise in the future. And even if you think you might advertise, there’s a tiny chance, install the pixel now.
Richard: Yeah, of course. We can make a crude analogy where it’s like you have kids, should you have started taking pictures of your kids when they were first born? Or you thought about it three years later and you wish you had pictures of your kids. It’s about information that you can’t go back and get later. It’s stuff you can’t go back and get after the fact. So to Jesse’s point, yes, you can advertise without them, for years and years and years. This is how traditional advertising work. Like you’d put a commercial on TV or you’d put a commercial on the radio or you’d put flyers out and you’d say, “Well, I guess it looks like more people are in the restaurant than there was last month.” But there was no real tracking unless it was “Hand this flyer to the waitress” or “Give us this code when you come in.” But now you can actually go try some advertising and you’re not going to know exactly necessarily all the information about this person. But you will know, “Hey, we put time into Snapchat and it looks now like 17 sales came through from Snapchat, and we made $587.” Now I don’t know what your margins are. I don’t know what’s going on. But you now can make an educated decision looking at the data. Like if you spent 3000 hours on Snapchat, that might not necessarily be good. But if you spend a few hours, like you might want to spend a lot more time on Snapchat. So back again to Jessie’s point, this is a way for you to track whether you spent your time, effort, and energy on these other platforms that actually drove back sales to your business.
Jesse: And even going a little further on Snapchat, there are all sorts of very cool stuff going on there that Instagram will probably copy the next year. If you’re not on Snapchat, eventually, Instagram will copy it you’ll get there. They’re probably more advanced on AR, like this face app thing that went around a couple of weeks ago, here’s you in 20 years. Snapchat’s been doing that for a long time. Everyone in Snapchat is probably like, “Oh, you guys finally caught on, we’ve been doing this forever.” It’s basically AR. Maybe not AR, anyway, I won’t get into it. The AR stuff where you hold up your phone and there are things that are interacting in the real world.
Richard: You’re right. Both of those are AR, which is augmented reality. It’s not VR.
Jesse: Correct. It’s not VR. They got the geo filter,
Richard: Okay, so let’s just stick with the …
Jesse: Going in deep here. Everybody, just hang with us.
Richard: You’re that fishing guy again and you got your fish and blog and you just went to a fishing conference, a fishing boat show or something like that. There are going to be people going around, and taking pictures, and they’re going to go on Snapchat, and they’re going to look for these filters that go over their pictures, and they’re going to send it to their friends, or they’re going to leave it on Snapchat. You could literally say, I want to place an ad, or I want to make this filter only available for people that are in this square footage of this conference. So you don’t have to waste your money everywhere else where there might not even be fishermen, middle of the desert or whatever. But right now on this day or two days or however long this is, there’s going to be a bunch of fishermen here and you want to market to people. You do this. You could show one of your lure, but the
Jesse: And getting back to the demographic. Probably better for you if you sell surfboards and there’s a surfing competition. Always think of your demographic. If you’re selling to younger people, people who are a little more technically capable. This is the cool kids, right? This is potentially an option for you. And whether it’s
Richard: And there is a lot, a lot of people on Pinterest and back again to your point earlier, if you think your product is highly visual and or people could be displaying the use of your product or an example of what it looks like when they have it in their home or just whatever. If it’s a visual product, you should definitely most likely be playing there. And again, go back, listen to the last podcast and check that out if you want to go deeper dive. But the theme here again is that people are playing all over the Internet. We don’t know where your individual market is. But Ecwid is giving you the tools and one of these tools is this tracking pixels and obviously to your point there, to the product catalogs and that’s huge. There are millions and millions of people playing on this platform called Pinterest. If they can find your product catalog while they’re scrolling through that particular thing. Again, we don’t know what exactly you sell right now, but you can now see. “Wow, look at all these sales that are coming from Pinterest”. And if you don’t have these tracking pixels in place, you might be playing in the wrong playground.
Jesse: Yeah, you might be spending a whole bunch of time with your Facebook post which by the way, if you’re not spending ads on Facebook, people probably aren’t seeing those. Where you could be spending a little bit of time on Pinterest and just going to leave you with this. Pinterest traffic is generally way more valuable than any other traffic for an
Richard: It’s interesting you say that cuz they’re either ready to buy now or it’s something they aspire to buy. It’s in some ways unlike a tweet or Instagram posts or definitely a Snapchat that dies quick. These pins live on. sometimes they’re just like “I want to get this one day” and now they can come back. They’re either wanting to buy now or they want to buy this someday, but it’s definitely the visual, aspirational “I want this.”
Jesse: Yep, I agree and our previous guest Kim kind of disagrees a little bit, listen to more on that discussion.
Richard: Everyone doesn’t agree with this?
Jesse: They should but yeah, there’s a lot of projects that will work there. For sure visual products, apparel, very niche things.
Richard: So okay, you still should go back and listen. I don’t think she disagreed with us as much as she expanded upon that idea.
Jesse: Totally agree. I think she was trying to expand our thought process there. So anyway, the bottom line is to try it. If you think it’ll work for your product. I think it’s like a hidden gem out there in the Internet world. You have the tools, you just need to spend a little bit of time integrating them and then report back to us. Like if you’re crushing on Pinterest, let us know. We’ll bring it on the podcast.
Richard: What else we got?
Jesse: Next one we’re talking about. So this one is where we may be jumping the gun on this cuz I see the emails before they get sent, so don’t get mad at me if this hasn’t been released yet cuz that happens sometimes. Facebook Messenger. So Facebook Messenger is like this huge hidden platform where most people think it’s just a chat with your friends, like a texting platform but it is massive. Facebook Messenger is massive. What we have integrated right now is fairly limited. What we have integrated is the ability for your store to get that live chat symbol in the lower
Richard: I think maybe you meant it’s very focused on what it is. You’re trying to get done. It’s not limited. You should have live chat on your site. People are coming to your site and not everyone wants to call the phone number up in the corner. Not everyone wants to write you an email. They’re Usually probably going to leave. They’re either finding what they want or they’re bouncing pretty quick. But to Jesse’s point there, now with this integration, with Facebook Messenger, it has a little icon. If you don’t know what it is, you’ll start to see it more but most people know that and someone clicks on that. And now they’re actually in your messenger platform. Unlike a live chat that isn’t using Messenger if they close that browser, they leave, that conversation disappears. But this conversation lives on. maybe they did in the middle of the night and then they closed. I know everybody’s dream to make money in the middle of the night, and eventually, you will but you still see that and you can answer in the morning.
Jesse: And even better. The customer will now see the response because it now lives in their messenger. For the live chat companies out there, they got to be a little bit scared about this because yeah, live chat is great. You should have live chat. The problem with it Is that as soon as somebody close that browser, it’s gone, disappeared. You as a merchant, if you’re not on it like 24/7, you’re missing out on an opportunity. when you have a messenger live chat widget, which is essentially what we have implemented here, you can now answer later. I have this on a site, people have questions all the time and sometimes I can answer right away. Sometimes it’s 5 hours later and the conversation stretches over a couple of different days.
Richard: But it’s way better than they disappeared and you can’t get back in touch.
Jesse: Way better than disappearing and way better than having no idea what the question is. If you listened, a couple of times ago we had Andrew Warner on. His basic message was to talk to your customers, you don’t know what they want. But yeah, you launch the site, people aren’t buying. Why aren’t they buying? you have no idea.
Richard: That’s a great point, Jesse, I didn’t really think of it this way, but it makes sense. There’s
Jesse: For sure. It’s kind of like, why would she want this information? Why won’t you want a live chat? I can tell you that. You’re going to get some dumb questions too. So don’t prepare yourself for it. You’re going to get a lot of questions. Like “what is the price of an ax?” It’s right on the site. How do you not know? Ok, you just tell them the price. And then you see the sale come through a couple of hours later. That may be a bad example, I just wanted to prepare people that you’re going to get some dumb questions. That’s fine. Like just deal with it.
Richard: And the real question. You know me, trying to always stick up for everybody. It’s not that it’s a dumb question.
Jesse: I think it’s a dumb question. I’m just going to go on record as a dumb question.
Richard: But I’m just saying look at it from this perspective. You’ve been working on your site, you know your business, you’ve been updating it over and over again. They might have just found you for the first time. It might be below the fold. They might not know it. In your mind, it seems like a really super obvious question. I know where that is, but it’s also cuz you’ve been spending time on your baby that whole time. So whether it’s a dumb question, whether or not a dumb question, it’s an insight as to what people are asking, who knows maybe that’s why there’re so many books for sale like books on Dummies stuff. (laughing)
Jesse: Very likely. Let me be on the positive side of that. I do see a lot of dumb questions to come in, the questions that I think are dumb, to put that in quotes. Now if I see multiple questions about the shipping price where I’m like “Man, that’s right there”. If I get like five or six people asking about the shipping, maybe that’s
Richard: Maybe you’re the dumb one. (laughing)
Jesse: Maybe, right? This is information to learn.
Richard: The thing is, information helps keep you from being dumb.
Jesse: For sure, and selling more. I’m not trying to tell these customers that they’re dumb. I’m very nice on a live chat, by the way.
Richard: You would never actually say that to anyone, do you? This is a dumb question.
Jesse: I’m very nice, but I get frustrated when the kids want to go play and I’m like, “Well, this person is asking this question for the 20th time. I’ve answered it all week.” Take that information and try to use it for good, say, I’m so sick of answering this question, my kid wants to go play. I’m going to change my header. And the headers now going to say what shipping is or where I’m located or the phone number. Whatever question is coming to you more often than you think it should be, figure out a way to answer that. Now Messenger too, maybe the question, you can answer it with the video. You can pop a link to a video in there. So whether it’s a YouTube video you made or it’s a video that shows how to check out. It could be so many different things. I wanted to lead into we had a bunch of a podcast we’ve done on chatbots. So that’s what I meant, this isn’t chatbots necessarily. This is really going to start off with live chats, you start to talk to your customers, interact with them on messenger. That is awesome. Now if you are interested in chatbots, this is the first step in that. Of course, I’m interested in that, I would like to go ten steps deeper on this. Let’s just hold off on that. You can listen to a couple of different podcasts on chatbots and go further, but they generally work on messenger and this is basically messenger in your store. It is going to be so slick, it’s going to be a couple clicks to get it on your store and then you’ll be able to talk to your customers
Richard: We will close out going back cuz we’re nice people. We want to help you. The only dumb question is the question that you don’t ask. Get on support, write us emails, fill out the form and get on and ask questions. The reason we want to talk to you about the pixels and on Snapchat and on Pinterest and let you know about this is because the only thing that is dumb is to not pay attention to what’s going on. The rest of the stuff is just information and use that information to your benefit. Learn from your customers. I mean how many generations does the older generation think the younger generation is doing something stupid. We’re just in the new version of that. People do it all these crazy things online. Know your business, know what’s going on. And again, the only real dumb question is the question you don’t ask.
Jesse: So true. I think you’re calling me out there secretly and that’s fine. I appreciate it. Here’s what the thing I like about this podcast is here’s what we did not talk about today. We didn’t really talk about selling on Facebook and Instagram, we did a little bit. I guess we can talk about Google shopping or YouTube. Those are kind of the big dogs out there that we’ve talked about a lot. They may work for you, they may not, but we want to keep giving you these tools. So these are new tools that are available. There’s an updated website, WordPress integration, Snap integration, Pinterest and now Facebook Messenger. Think of that as just that’s like live chat on steroids all tools that are available. We keep adding these new things. I know you’re reading every email course, but now you have it from Rich and Jessie. Rich and Jessie Show here.
Richard: Is it time for me to go to a Snapchat for my answer to the WordPress themes? I’ll go buy you lunch now.
Jesse: I think that’s fair and I’ll take a picture of that and put it on Pinterest and see if we can drive traffic to the rest. All right guys sell all sorts of new ways, start building your store. Get out there, make it happen.
