Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Dear Qualiteam Customers,

F-Cart, LiteCommerce, X-Cart – our company has been creating e-commerce solutions since 2001. Our products have evolved, but they are all generally based on the same concept: commercial open source PHP shopping cart software. Today, we are opening to the general public our fourth generation e-commerce solution: Ecwid.

There are seven key advantages to Ecwid:


* It's SaaS
* It's free
* It takes minutes to add to your site
* It supports drag-and-drop
* It has AJAX everywhere
* Upgrades are seamless
* It requires little to no technical support

We have been working diligently on a solution that would make running an e-commerce store as easy as possible. We pursued the goal to minimize cost of ownership and maintenance expenses. We wanted it to provide a unique experience to online shoppers and increase customer conversion for our clients. We have spent nearly one year working on Ecwid. Now, as we are ready to unveil our product, we want your feedback. Please have a look at Ecwid and tell us what you think of it.


You can access Ecwid at http://www.ecwid.com.

To help you to get acquanted with Ecwid, our staff will be active on the Ecwid forums: http://www.ecwid.com/forums.

And finally, one important statement: Ecwid is not here to replace X-Cart. Ecwid is designed to make life easier for those who want to avoid PHP hassles. Ecwid makes it possible to create a web shop and start selling in half an hour. It requires little to no technical knowledge. But X-Cart still remains the choice for people who need the power and flexibility of an open source PHP application. We have a dedicated team working on X-Cart version 5, so stay tuned: we have more surprises in a box for you.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Looks good. Need to spend sometime this weekend.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Looks interesting!

I still remember F-Cart ;)

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Looks interesting... could be used perhaps on smaller sites as an alternative.

Just wondering if I am right in my understanding that SEO has been 100% ignored, with all the ajax that is present?
OK - just read your FAQ there... seems that somehow the mobile version is supposed to overcome the SEO issues :) - ummm... guess some users will believe this :)

Wondering how this new e-commerce release fits in with the strategy for X-Cart i.e. what is the strategic direction for them both (can we be assured that X-Cart will not also go ajax for pages that should be indexed)?
Just wondering what is the driving factor behind this new release - marketing, mod earnings?

Thanks in advance for a reply - Asiaplay

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Hi rrf,
Great to see you on forum after a looooooong time :)

The first impression of ecwid reflects me a FAST STORE SETUP.

Any one who would like to start selling stuffs quickly without much knowledge of codeing would sure love this unique concept.

As mentioned in the demo video it's really took me just 5 minute to start the store without manual :).

What about other payment gateway integration ?

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

This looks like a very cool, fast, easy way to get a store up in minutes. Like the iphone, this store needs no instructions. Very flexible, standard payment processor, shipping, etc. Doesn't seem to have complex config; eg, I didn't find a way to create required options or error messages to go with them. But for a simple store, my first impression is that this store is a dream.

For example, if you have a client with a few products, you could literally have this set up in existing site in about 5 minutes. If you want to customize the template, then it would take longer, but really, this thing is easy and FAST.

Regarding SEO, there is a mobile version of the store that can be loaded in mobile phones or ANY html browser, and this can be searched by search engines. There is an option to load this store on a subdomain on your site.

If money and speed are a bottom line for your client, this tool might be the answer. Of course, there is a down side: with this tool, your client probably won't need you :) :(

Also, sounds like there will be a paid version; maybe that will come with more bells and whistles.

Note: I was able to add this to a Joomla website in 5 minutes, and no formatting required.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

I like the promotional tagline "PHP always was and still is the way to go if you have a bunch of geeks constantly modding your site." http://www.ecwid.com/events/454-454.html

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Congratulations to Quality Team for a job well done.
The cart looks very promising!

May be it is just me, but the name "ecwid" needs rethinking from a branding/marketing point of view. I can instantly understand and remember X-Cart or LiteCommerce, but Ecwid not so much.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Liking the look of this. Be interesting to see if anyone gives it a try...

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Guys, thanks for your feedback.

Yes, it's been quite a while since I was active on forums and I must say I miss those times. The good thing is that from now on I am going to spend more time on forums. With the help of the other top management, I was able to organize my job in a way so I can spend less on bureaucracy and spend more on actually managing our products.

I want Ecwid community to grow, so I grouped some of the answers to the questions and posted them to Ecwid forums:

http://www.ecwid.com/forums/showthread.php?p=64&posted=1#post64

More answers to follow, it just takes a lot of time to answer all of them. It's because the product was a kind of "secret one", so even many of our 140+ employees are surprised and want answers :)

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

This question is not related to Ecwid so I'll go ahead and answer it here.

Well... I am not the one who manages the development of X-Cart. There is a dedicated team for that and I decided to not interfere with their job, as having several managers on the same project is counter-productive.

I do know that X-Cart developers are impressed by Ecwid, and they do want to add some of the Ecwid's features to X-Cart. I just don't know the details. But our director of marketing knows more than me on this topic. His forum nickname is Xplorer.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Thank you Ruslan, this in a way answers the question.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Looks promising but to stress the point Paul made; Who came up with the name Ecwid? How can I get some of the same weed he was smoking?

:-D

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Happy to hear that there are two separate teams - it is good to know that both products have unique teams and do not canabalise each other for time and resourse input.
Really was looking for assurances that X-Cart doesn't loose emphasis within the company as a core software solution - sort of understand this to be the case (and hope indeed is the outcome, as know ECWID will not meet our own e-commerce strategy requiremets, even though will match some ecommerce users well, for sure).

Thanks for your answers on the business model for ECWID as well - it helps to understand what drove this and get a feel for how things will develop with that product.

Cheers Ruslan - Asiaplay

PS: have to admit that I agree that ECWID is not a great name in English for this product - sounds a bit strange (now I guess it is meant to suggest Easy widget, but I missed that when first saw the name and took me awhile to guess that from the name, what the product could be about, while the name feels cold and dead to a degree - know that last comment is subjective, just not sure how to explain that clearer) - perhaps worth coming up with a new brand for it.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

As long as there's demand for PHP shopping cart software, we will be committed to keep X-Cart as the best PHP shopping cart software on the market. We are working on official release of 4.3.0, and work on X-Cart v5 is in progress as well. We also work on another PHP product, a kind of add on to X-Cart that will make it match PA DSS requirements.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

As for Ecwid, I just believe that Ecwid is the way to create very efficient, fast and convenient web stores. It's a way to increase reliability and reduce overhead. Of course, Ecwid might currently be perceived as a solution for smaller stores. And it is good for small stores indeed. But the insides of Ecwid are so performance optimized that they actually match demands of high-volume stores as well. Ecwid might currently lack some features that are needed by bigger stores, like product suggestions, upselling and manufacturer tracking. But sooner or later, we'll add it to Ecwid or will just make it possible for 3rd party developers to expand Ecwid with modules.

And we're talking about "sooner" rather than "later". We use AGILE development methodologies with Ecwid. We are focused on delivering new features every 1-3 months.

As for bug-fix releases of Ecwid, there was already one. All stores have recently been updated to fix the bugs discovered in the first day of operation. It's just... Ecwid's updates are seamless. Our tests show that even users who have something in the shopping cart at the moment when update happens, proceed to checkout without knowing they are buying their stuff in a store operated by newer software version.

And... I have to get to it: the name. :)

Well... it's awkward, I must admit. And the name was my choice. The logic behind choosing this name is simple: it was one of a few SHORT domain names available, not grabbed by the cyber squatters. These bastards are everywhere, and even "megacartpro.com" (sic!) is taken. We have a company policy: never pay anyone who creates a problem then asks money to fix it. No positive response to blackmail, hackers threating to attack, etc... And I believe that cyber squatters are just this case: they grab a domain they don't use, then ask you to pay hundreds and thousands times more to be able to have the domain. I believe that if everyone would followed the same policy of not buying from cyber squatters, they would be gone already. Well, I do follow this policy.

So I decided that nowadays, as most domains are taken (though only a tiny part is actually used), what matters is to have a short domain name, not neccessary meaningful. It's about how long it takes you to type it, not to pronounce it. So, E-Commerce WIDgets (ECWID) was the choice. At first it sounds awkward, even to a Russian ear. But it's easy to type and easy to remember once you know the abbreviation. And there is one more thing about it, first reported by our US tech writers: once you start using it, you fall in love with it :)

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

That was well... um... Electronic Commerce weed. Better known as "EC weed" :).

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Funny, now I think this would be more memorable and easier to remember.
Personally, I don't think they were smoking something funny, but rather having alphabet soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the last 8 months while playing Scrabble in their spare time.
My understanding is that Ecwid is for the non tech market and they won't know what a widget is or even make that connection, nor should they.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!

Cheers mate :-D

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Hi it's great to hear from you and know that you are pursuing another "truly open source" project that will easily integrate with tools like Joomla!. However, the Ecwid site was so slow in loading for me I was not able to spend much time reviewing it - is this just because of traffic vs resources? One of the biggest complaints I get on LiteCommerce is the slow processing during checkout etc - I would not want to put my clients in another "slow" site. Looking forward to seeing this project advance.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Thank you for your feedback. Low response time is of very high priority for us. Ecwid is designed to be fast, and we want to keep it this way.

I am trying to reproduce the problem you mentioned, but with no luck. Can you please provide more details: on what pages did you experience delays ? Please provide us with the page URL. Is it still slow for you now or were the delays momentary ? If it's working fast now, the date and time of that moment when you experienced delays would also be very helpful. Please send it to me by private message along with your time zone. Include name and version of the browser you use.

Ecwid web site consists of many third party web applications like the CMS, forum software, bugtracker software and ideas tracker. Though they all worked fast enough according to our experience, any of them migh have affected the speed. In order to experience pure Ecwid speed, you can just add Ecwid to your site and see for yourself.

Alternatively, you can create a file named demo.html on your local PC and populate it with this code:


... then open this file in your browser. The file has Ecwid widget code in it and you'll be able to experience Ecwid performance unobstructed by other web applications. Don't be confused by the fact that the file is on your local hard drive: this is what makes Ecwid fast. All User Interface is at client-side in Ecwid, it's running at the client PC and only makes server connections to fetch product data.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Your feedback helps me to understand that this may be a client side issue on my system. I went to the site today and did not experience such slow load times. I will set up an actual demo for myself and get back to you. This looks very promising! I am glad to read further that you are not planning to keep it for "small" stores - We need something new and refreshing for all ecommerce levels!

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

On the demo, it's not possible to drag items onto the bag if you scroll down too far (ie. the bag is out of sight).

So you might want to think about having the bag scroll up and down the page with you.

The system itself looks promising, but not all that great in terms of SEO.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Hi Phil,

Report that on http://www.ecwid.com/bt/ if it's a bug or use http://ideas.ecwid.com/ to report an enhancement for Ecwid

Thank you for taking interest to Ecwid anyway

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Alex, from the looks of your avatar you've been putting on weight! :lol:

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Did you know that Alex's nick 'ambal' means in Russian a 'big strong guy'? : -)

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Is he the bouncer then for Xcart?

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

I'd say a "brute" or "bruiser" would be an adequate translation :)

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Generally - yes, this is the way to make Ecwid what you want it to be.

But there is no need in reporting on drag and drop thing right now as it has already been reported by customers and the code that allows drag and drop to scroll the screen is even coded in already. Now it's waiting to pass the in-house testing and then it will be released to public. That will be Ecwid 2.0 and servers will be updated with it in about a month.

Аctually we knew about this issue before releasing the first version, however we have released Ecwid anyway. We do not consider it a bug because it does not prevent customers from ordering. You can always order a product without drag and drop, in an old-fashioned way. We were not sure if customers would expect drag and drop to scroll the browser or not.

One key difference between Ecwid and X-Cart is that in Ecwid team we are focused on very short TTM (time-to-market). We believe that shipping a good quality product right now is much better than shipping an excellent quality product a year from now.

There are always zillion ways to improve a product. Trying to implement all of them extends time of estimated release to infinity.
In Ecwid, we want to make sure that we focus on improvements considered important by customers. We think that it's better to get feedback from customers and then make the product go the way customers want it to go.

Unlike Ecwid, X-Cart is a PHP software and you can't update it every month. That would be too expensive to customers even if the updates are free. That's why X-Cart team groups updates in much larger chunks. But this, unfortunately, adds what I call "being in darkness": working on a product without customer feedback. This way, resources may be spent on improvements that are never actually used by customers. Study by Standish Group International shows that 45% of software features are never used by customers.

For example, we do want to implement Coupon support in Ecwid, Discounts and Paypal Pro support. I also think that support for Zoomify would be nice. Many of our testers insisted that this idea is a must have.
We could spend our time on implementing all my ideas or the things that our testers considered a "must have". But instead, we made it possible for customers to have a look at the product earlier - and tell us what improvements would benefit more customers at a time.

That was on "scrolling on drag&drop" topic.

Now, to the SEO: there is SEO support in Ecwid. You can have mobile store, which is pure HTML, and you can even have it at your URL like mobile.yoursite.com. Not only it's easy to use from mobile phone, but also it does help SEO. We will add more SEO features - as soon as customers suggest something like "have product name in mobile version URL". And we will implement it then.
Right now, Ecwid has SEO capabilities, and you can find products in the mobile store by using Google. The nice thing about our Ecwid SEO support is that it's already there and we can improve it futher. I believe it has a good potential: mobile version focuses on pure meaningful content. You can search for "ecwid t-shirt" and you will find it. The only thing that obstructs the way is "ecw t-shirt" suggestion, but this will go away as soon as Google bases update with "Ecwid" as a new word.

We have one big problem though: we have a product in our pre-defined base: http://app.ecwid.com/jsp/58007/simple-store#ecwid:category=94019&mode=product&product=16 2052 and I must admit it's pretty hard to find this nice green fruit in Google by its name.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

I want to add one more thing: I do believe that low TTM is the way to go for any software product. We have it in Ecwid, and I think we should also have it in X-Cart. Though I have promised myself to not interfere with X-Cart development (in order to speed up the development by not interrupting them), I will stress out the advantages of low TTM to X-Cart marketing & development.

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

I think there is a balance to be found with a system like x-cart, but a much quicker ttm for x-cart would be appreciated :)

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Thank you, guys,for discussing my nick and my avatar.
But let's keep this thread "Ecwid-related"
"Ambal-related" questions are welcome to be discussed at http://www.facebook.com/alex.mulin

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Anybody here using Ecwid with Facebook? I'm sure it can be done but so far I'm not having good luck. I understand FBML is based on Cold Fusion which I know as much about as I do quantum physics = 0!

Any ideas here?

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Sure it is possible. Please check this thread: http://www.ecwid.com/forums/showthread.php?t=150

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Also: How to integrate your Ecwid shopping cart with Facebook

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Just checked out ecwid. Very slick. Have to say that I wouldn't want to give up all of the customizability of X-Cart, and the SEO tweakability - I love that.

However, I can say that the Ecwid admin interface is VERY cool. It would be nice to have all that ajax interface in the admin area of X-cart, but leave the customer front end with all the html/css options that are now available.

Marie

Re: Fourth generation e-commerce solution by Qualiteam
 

Very interesting product but I'm with whoever said you should change the name. Ecwid is barely pronounceable let alone memorable. It should have a simple, easy to remember, catchy name (think Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Snuggie (haha!))