Weebly isn’t quite as flexible as Wix, nor quite as sophisticated looking as Squarespace but what sets it apart is its clear and simple user interface. With over 600,000 subscribers this user friendly option now accounts for a significant slice of the website platform market.
Weebly has all the features you need to get your website up in no time, whether it’s a personal site, or an online store. Its ecommerce features would work well for online stores with smaller inventories.
Weebly’s ecommerce plans start at $12.00 per month (when calculated annually) for the Pro Plan. This price goes up to $25 per month for the Business Plan, and $38.00 for the Business Plus Plan. All of the plans include a free domain, $100 worth of Google Ads credit, free SSL security, unlimited storage, custom domain name, and a site search feature.
When it comes to eCommerce-specific features, all plans feature a shopping cart, the ability to accept payments through Square, and the ability to accept payments through third-party payment providers. When you move up to the more expensive plans, you’ll get things like inventory management, gift cards, shipping calculator, and integrated shipping labels, as well as some marketing analytics features.
These prices are actually super competitive considering what you get, and they even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee in the unlikely event that you’re not completely satisfied. So, you’re really getting pretty good bang for your buck.
One thing people often overlook when it comes to starting a website or online store, is the cost of hosting and storage. Luckily, with Weebly, hosting is included in the price. As an added bonus, you don’t have to concern yourself with maintenance, storage space, or security because Weebly takes care of this for you, no matter which plans you choose.
Weebly offers around 70 themes in total with about 15 of them classified as “Online Store” worthy. Though Weebly themes are on a par with Wix and not quite as good as Squarespace, all of them are responsive, which means they’ll work well on mobile devices. And this is especially important in today’s day and age, as customers are increasingly using their phones to browse websites and online stores.
It also features a drag-and-drop website editor that means you can click on any element on your page and move it around as you wish. You can also add new elements by clicking on the specific element on the left and dragging it over to your view window. When it comes to mobile-friendly sites, the system automatically creates a mobile-friendly version of your site when you design it using the website builder.
The entire system is pretty intuitive, but there aren’t a lot of features which means you’re limited to somewhat basic functionality, although it succeeds in keeping things simple.
When you choose to run your online store on Weebly, you have the option of accepting payments through three payment gateways. These are Stripe, Square, and PayPal Express. They all integrate directly with your site, and you’ve got everything you need to accept credit part payments from shoppers globally. Keep in mind that there is a cost involved in accepting payments through these payment gateways.
Weebly’s shipping settigs are also easy to set up and intuitive. You can set shipping rates based on a number of different criteria’s which you can see below.
The region in already populated based on your location, so as an example they’ve included the 6 States and 3 Territories for Australians. If you want to configure different rates for different States, just separate it into its own region.
All major website builders handle SEO relatively well these days and Weebly is no different. They have the regulation features which will all help you to rank better in Google:
Although it provides you with this functionality, Weebly’s own code within the templates are not the best to achieve high rankings, so if you want a website builder that’s optimized for SEO, there are others like SquareSpace that do a better job.
As we’ve said before, Weebly comes with a basic inventory management solution that allows you to manage your inventory, your supply, show the number of items remaining, and boost buying behavior. Although this is useful, it’s not really suited to bigger inventories, and there you’ll be better served by looking at another product.
Weebly also offers abandoned cart recoveries, display, and merchandising options, and other eCommerce features.
Weebly comes with a complete suite of analytics tools that allows you to track the performance of your website or online store. These tools allow you to easily track how many people visited your website, which pages they visited, which search terms they used to find your website, and which other websites referred visitors to your website.
Also, these statistics are calculated in real-time, so you’ll always be up to date on your website’s performance, and using these figures, you’ll be able to see where your site is lagging and where you can improve.
On the more expensive plans you get features like lead capture and contact forms, pop-up notifications, advanced site statistics, advanced Ecommerce statistics, and integrated email campaigns. This makes marketing your business a lot easier.
It also has a form builder that you can use to create surveys and forms to gather information about your customers. To build the forms, you select the element you need from the form elements provided, and you can customize everything to suit your needs. Once these forms capture information about your customers, Weebly stores the information and sends it to you via email.
Weebly also has an integration that allows you to sell on Facebook and Instagram Shops. If you wanted to start selling on Amazon, eBay or Etsy, however, it’s going to be more of a challenge with no direct integrations for such Marketplaces.
Weebly have an integration which allows you to sell on Facebook and Instagram Shops. If you wanted to start selling on Amazon, Ebay or Etsy however, its going to be more of a challenge with no direct integrations for such Marketplaces.
