Many website owners want to make a little money from their site. If nothing else, just enough to cover the cost of web hosting and other minimal costs. There is a lot of ways you can make money, but adding a store can be a good money-maker. Ecwid offers a quick and easy way to give it a go

There are many ways to configure your store. Whether it be with your own products, affiliate products, or being a reseller where you have inventory in your possession. Below is a basic run-through of the features.

Signing up

If you don’t want yet another set of account credentials to remember, you can use your Google, Facebook, Twitter or other login information.

Copy and paste ease

To add a store to your site, copy the HTML code from Ecwid and paste it into the appropriate page of your site. If you have a WordPress site, you can create a new page, name it store and paste in the code. When you hit publish, you have your coding all set.

Change the look with a custom CSS theme

The store itself is transparent, so it will mimic the colors of your site. If desired, you can change the look of the store to better match your site. A little bit of custom CSS is all that’s needed to tweak the store. The font and font color would be a good example of something you would likely want to change.

Mobile version

Ecwid offers a mobile version of their shopping cart code. If you are on one of the paid versions, you can use your own URL. If you are on the free version, you will have a URL like this: “YOUR_STORE@ecwid.com”

Minimum and maximum order

A lot of people entice the potential buyer with free shipping. To receive this perk, many times you will need to purchase items that add up to a set dollar amount.

You can set a maximum order amount if you are uncomfortable with people buying a large amount of your products. If you limit your products, say 2 per order, you can easily set the max order price.

Where you ship and with who

If you input the address you will be shipping from (not displayed to the receiver), the purchaser will be able to see real-time shipping costs. There is a long list of possible shipping companies and ways to ship.

You have the option to pick the shipping options you want to use. For example, if you only wanted to ship UPS overnight delivery, or standard ground shipping, you can pick just the one option.

Take payments

Choose payment type and give any special instructions. You have a list of 12 ways to take a payment; Google Checkout and PayPal are among the most common. If you have a merchant account through your bank or a different service, you can accept credit cards.

Admin area

Most of the screen grabs have been of the admin area. It is really easy to navigate through. You can easily jump from sales to shipping. Adding products, viewing customer information, making the product available or even closing the site for maintenance is a few clicks away.

Conclusion

If you are looking for an easy way to add a store to your site, this is a great place to start your search. If you are using a payment service like Google Checkout or PayPal, the customers are directed to the 3rd party site for payment.

It is free to log in and try it out. There are a lot of options I didn’t list. It is well worth taking a look at.

What are some other options to easily add a shopping cart to a website?

Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.

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