Add a Google Sites Ecommerce Shopping Cart to Your Site

The Best Way
to add ecommerce
to Google Sites

Although you can add Ecwid shopping cart to your Google Sites website in several ways, some of them might not match your expectations and can influence your customers’ shopping experience. It happens due to the way Google Sites work with embeddable code.

Embedding a store as code into a page
(not yet the best way)

You already know that you can add almost any code to your website using the “Embed code” tool. But what you didn’t know is that Google Sites block some important functionality of the Ecwid store, which results in a poor shopping experience. Plus, your store will be locked and limited with container borders. If you don’t stretch it enough, the frame will have its own scroll.

All the above will result in several disadvantages:

• surfing the store, the URLs don’t change. So the store will keep working inside the frame while you will stay on the same page.
• customer account issues. Your customers will face the inability to log in to their customer account.
• the cart reset. The cart may “forget” what a customer put into it while browsing the store in different tabs.
• blank pages. Sometimes, your customers may see blank pages popping up in a new tab.
• not enough space. Your store will be displayed in a frame. The frame has its borders. Although Ecwid will do its best to resize to fit into the frame, sometimes it won’t be possible. You will need to scroll down or sidewise inside the widget to see the full picture.

It’s important to understand that this behavior does not mean that Ecwid or Google are bad solutions. This is just an embedment limitation that Google and we are working on together.

Embedding a store as a page
(almost the best way)

Google Sites let you embed the code as a full-size page. It’s still iframe, but it’s not has page-size borders. So it always displays the whole content of your store.
Adding your store to Google Sites as a page solves some issues from the previous part, but some of them remain.

• the URLs won’t change. If you don’t care about SERP visibility of your product pages and totally rely on content pages created with Google Sites, it’s not a problem for you.
• customer account issues. Your customers will face the inability to log in to their customer account.
• the cart reset. The cart may “forget” what a customer put into it while browsing the store in different tabs.

Aside from these issues, your store will work as expected and your customers won’t feel uncomfortable browsing and purchasing your products.

Instant Site and subdomain
(the best way!)

What would you do if you met a brick wall? Correct, you’d walk around. And that’s exactly what you can do to marry beautiful solutions like Ecwid and Google on your domain.

Link to Instant Site

All Ecwid stores have free storefronts (Instant Site) accessible from the web. In addition, they have indexable URLs and are fully functional. And this is a place where you can send your Google Sites visitors right from the main menu. Add a link to your Instant Site with the word “Store” and offer your visitors to shop in a dedicated section.

Linking the store that doesn’t belong to the same domain as a website is common for many businesses. People see that your official website is sending them there and treat it as a legitimate place to make a purchase.

Place Ecwid Instant Site on a subdomain

But if you believe that your customers need another reason to feel safe with you, placing Ecwid Instant Site on a subdomain is definitely a way to consider.

Perhaps, this is the most widely used way the big brands use to run e-commerce along with the main website. The web address “store.brand.com” won’t scare away cautious customers and will gather your entire business assets under one roof—your domain.
Although both (adding as code and as page) ways to add a shopping cart to Google Sites have pros and cons, we recommend the second variant. And there’s a handful of reasons for that:

• best shopping experience. You’ll avoid unexpected errors and limitations.
• you’ll control the layout. Instant Site looks amazing and can be redesigned to match your business needs.
• SEO boost. Instead of working in a frame, your store will have its own navigation. All your products and categories will have their pages accessible from the web and indexable by Google.

But you may ask, “Why would I need Google Sites if Ecwid’s Instant Site is so good?” But don’t hurry. Your Google site can win you lots of traffic if you continue creating limitless pages linking back to your storefront. They can be a part of the main navigation and can be hidden as well. In fact, you can create a universe of landing pages with Google Sites and generate free traffic for your store.

Try all the options to find the one that works for your business. And we’ll be here to help.