Not Perfect, But Hardworking and Very Very Good

Hey @crackedvesselcom1,

Thank you very much for the feedback! We’re happy Ecwid works well for you.

Can you please elaborate a bit on the two issues you outlined?
1) Shipping setup
2) Search function

What are difficulties you had with them? We’re working on the shipping options configuration in the store control panel now so we’ll keep your feedback in mind.

Thanks,

I’ve spent countless chat sessions and emails with your tier 1 and tier 2 people talking about shipping, but I’m happy to detail it here in case my feedback hasn’t gotten to the right place.

1) Calculated shipping shouldn’t be global. Setting up calculated shipping should not mean I have to offer it on every product in my catalog. I should be able to override it with a flat rate, which is not how it’s currently set up; even if I do a flat rate, as long as the product is within the weight range of the calculated shipping, BOTH will appear on the product and there’s no real way to stop this, except with an annoying workaround. That workaround? Well, I sell furniture, and I obviously can’t have people choosing FedEx to send it, so I have to create a Custom Table and list the weight of each piece as 200 pounds and the size as 100 x100 x100. This puts it outside the size parameters of FedEx, eliminating the calculated option. Then I have to suppress the weight in the shopping card with css code. That’s OK for me, but for someone whose customer actually needs to see an accurate weight, this solution might not work. I don’t understand why I would ever offer a flat rate AND a calculated rate, and why, if some customers need that, they couldn’t just tick both boxes.

2) I can only have one calculated shipping table. I sell books. They are eligible for Media Mail, and they are the only thing I sell that qualify for that rate. But if I add Media Mail to the calculated table for those items, it gets added for everything. Which means a customer can choose this very expensive shipping method for any purchase they make, even though I can’t ship it that way. And yes, I can put a note on the checkout page saying the item isn’t eligible but that’s an inelegant solution and puts the burden on the customer. My solution is again the custom table; I list all my books as weighing 100 pounds, and again, being 100x100x100 to avoid FedEx, and ship at a flat rate of $4. The single table also means I have to offer every product to international customers or NO products to international customers. Let’s say I have 200 items on calculates shipping, and I’m comfortable with shipping 195 of them overseas, but 5 of them, I’d like to sell domestically only for whatever reason. I can’t remove the international options for those products without removing them from ALL products.

3) The estimated shipping is not necessarily the lowest shipping. I use USPS and FedEx in my calculated shipping. Up to a certain size and weight, USPS is the cheapest option, but then Fedex becomes less expensive. I of course can choose which one to list first, but not product by product, only globally. Which means for half my products, the customer is seeing a more expensive option when they look at the item in their cart. I have a notice saying “The estimated shipping might not be the lowest” but again, the burden is on the customer to check, and that’s never a recipe for sales.

SEARCH FUNCTION – Searches disabled categories. I have “store only” categories for my physical store, which I access when using the POS app. I don’t want online shoppers reaching into those buckets. My workaround is a “store only” graphic and an explanation of why they can see it but there’s no info on the product except a price. I’m not a fan of workarounds because it means I have to work AROUND something that should be functioning better. Search should be able to exclude categories.

Well, I guess I can edit my review but not my reply – I meant “inexpensive” not “expensive” when talking about media mail above.

Hey, while I’m speaking my mind and have your ear, I’m going to also address the eBay integration problem. When something sells, whether on eBay or Ecwid, it should be automatically REMOVED from the “sent to eBay” list so eBay doesn’t have a chance to relist it. I know they’re not supposed to if it’s got zero quantity, but currently they are, so why not help them and me out by simply removing it automatically so it doesn’t update? At least Ecwid would be taking care of its side of the integration, though I know you can’t do anything about eBay’s side.

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

Please see my comments below.

1) Different shipping options for different products.
This is a problem we’re working on right now. Shipping options in Ecwid are powerful enough to cover most small-to-medium stores. However, when there are completely different kinds of products within the same store, it’s tricky to set the shipping right. For such complicated situations, Ecwid now offers table-based rates as a workaround — as I understand, you’re using that. Anyway, as I said, we know about the problem and we’re going to add shipping options per product in the future updates.

2) Estimated shipping message.
The estimated shipping/tax is usually working good — even before entering shipping address, the customer can see what shipping cost is going to be (Ecwid tries to detect the customer location by IP address). But again, in case of complicated shipping setup and per-product workarounds, it can mistake. I’d recommend hiding the estimation block on the cart page, if you feel it can confuse customers.

3) Search function and disabled categories.
The search widget currently looks for all enabled products in the store. It cam be customized though — to include products from some specific category only. In your case, if you have one root category for “visible” products, you can customize search function to only look in that category. It can be done by adding a “category” and “withSubcategory” parameters to the search URL on-the-fly. This will probably require developers skills so I’d recommend hiring a developer. Documentation on filtering search results using the URL parameters: https://support.ecwid.com/hc/en-us/articles/207807925-Product-Filters-API

4) eBay and relisting products.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? Do you mean that all of your products are one of the kind (qty=1) and as soon as one is sold, it should be not available? If not, why do you want to stop listing when it sells and why don’t the defaul inventory management fucntions work for it? If something is out of stock but keeps available on eBay or anywhere else, that is surely not normal — we will investigate and fix that.

Thanks,

I’m sorry this reply is so incredibly late; I didn’t see you had responded to me. I’m going to answer these in a different order, based on my continuing priority.

3) Thank you for the suggestion regarding the search; I did look over your solution, and maybe I could find a way to make it work, but I’m guessing I’ll probably end up with 20+ categories and many many subcategories by the time I list all my products, and all I’m trying to do is exclude 2 categories from search. I’d have to create a URL that includes every possible category and subcategory, leaving out only the ones I want to restrict, because I’m not looking to offer the customer search limitations which is what this is designed to do, I’m looking to include everything on the website and nothing that ISN’T on the website. Even putting a product in NO categories doesn’t stop search from finding it, and you don’t even have a “draft” mode for when I get halfway through a listing and realize I’m missing a key piece of info: I have to decide whether to delete the whole thing or let it go without whatever is missing. Your largest WordPress competitor, Woocommerce, offers a simple solution right down to the individual product with a very neat little toggle switch on the product page that allows removing that item from search. I don’t need anything anywhere near that sophisticated, but why is it not possible, especially if you are offering a point-of-sale option, to restrict the visibility of a category? I would think I’m not alone in wanting to have store-only items, or a draft mode for that matter. This is one of the reasons I haven’t really gone wild with publicizing my online shop yet. It’s a problem I really need to solve. I honestly don’t feel the onus should be on me to hire a developer for something that should be so simple. I have tried to install nearly every third party search option on the market, but most don’t work because the products are not individual pages. I found an offsite search that will work but it’s pulling the customer off my page to search, and that sets up a situation where the customer could be lost.

2) You may feel the estimated shipping is “working good,” but as I explained in my previous post, I need to offer 2 shipping methods, USPS for smaller items (it’s the cheapest option for smalls) and FedEx ground for larger (it’s the cheapest for bigs). Your system requires me to choose ONE of those to list first. So someone buying a piece of pottery sees estimated FedEx shipping, and it’s very high. Well, if they actually go to the page where the purchase is made, they will see USPS listed at a lower price BELOW that, but many people are already scared away by the high shipping price given in the estimate, and have decided not to buy. they never get far enough to see the cheaper option. You see what I mean? This is not a “complicated” shipping situation. It’s simple. The estimated shipping should be the lowest possible option that customer will be offered at check out. Period. Offering them anything else makes no sense. Your system is very sophisticated; it surely must be smart enough to detect which shipping method is cheaper. So why do I have to choose one option to list first? The system should be choosing, based on price.

4) Yes, I sell vintage and all my items are one of a kind. They should not relist when the one available item is sold. When it is out of stock, it should not relist. I keep products “enabled but out of stock” so I can list them as “sold,” because I want to have a gallery of sold products to show. I change the category to “sold” and the price to “$0.00.” When it relists on eBay, it ends up relisting as costing $1. Ebay should not list it with 0 available, but Ecwid should also be removing it from the eBay list once it sells on eBay. This isn’t happening, so Ecwid is resending it to eBay. The main problem is eBay, which should not be listing zero quantity items, but Ecwid could solve the problem by automatically removing the item from the eBay list. I do this manually, but it’s often too late: Ecwid has already resent it.

1) Glad to see you’re working on this.

Hi there,

Ecwid Team is here.Thanks for your reply.

1. Hidden Product in Search Results

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us on this functionality. Currently we are thinking on how we can improve this and make the hidden products/categories feature better.

For now, if you want to hide certain products from your search results, you may try the CSS workaround.

If you add this code to your active CSS theme in Ecwid Control Panel >
Design:

div.ecwid-productBrowser-SearchPage td.ecwid-product-id-PRODUCTID {
    display: none;
}

The product with the product id you set (instead of the PRODUCTID part of the code) will be hidden from search results in your store (How to obtain product ID).

2. Shipping Options

As I can understand from your post, you want the shipping methods to be sorted automatically, so that the cheapest shipping method is displayed the first.

Currently, we allow you to manually sort your shipping methods in your Ecwid Control Panel > Shipping & Pickup > Actions > Sort. However, there is no built-in feature that will allow you to sort shipping methods automatically — I’m sorry. I will share your feedback on the topic with our Product Team, so that they know about the interest in the feature.

For now, if you want to implement this feature in your store, it is possible to do this by a custom application based on our API (https://developers.ecwid.com/api-documentation/). Our API allows you to expand the functionality of your Ecwid store in case you need a feature, that was not implemented yet.

If you want someone to develop the app for you, you may consider the development by our Customization Team. You can contact them using this form — https://ecwidcom.typeform.com/to/vIlijv and they will write you back to discuss the details.

3. Ebay

The thing is that our integration with eBay works this way: when your product is out-of-stock, the product is not deleted from eBay, it is quantity is also set to 0. Customers are not able to find and purchase such products. This is implemented to let our customers relist products on eBay when the quantity is above 0 once again without any problems.

Sincerely yours,
Ecwid Team.