Show HN: Weebly 4 – Websites, eCommerce and Email Marketing
weebly.com
weebly.com
Here are some cool things you might not notice: - We were born pre-AWS and actually run our own data centers, have an ASN and manage our own network, host 2PB of data that is geographically replicated in near-real time, and have successfully defended against 200Gbps+ DDoS attacks.
- We’ve put a ton of care into bringing all of the pieces together (websites, ecommerce, email marketing) in a super integrated and seamless way. Check out, for example, how you can customize all of the store emails with Weebly Promote (email marketing), when you send out an email campaign you can automatically track sales generated from that email, how we automatically import and create smart groups -- like frequent customers who haven’t purchased recently -- or how we will even recommend pre-created emails based on actions you take adding new products, putting products on sale, etc.
- The eCommerce platform has been significantly upgraded, with things like real-time shipping (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL integrations), abandoned carts, gift cards, a re-built tax & shipping engine, a new store front & checkout, bulk editing and power seller features, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff.
- Check out the apps for iOS and Android. It was pretty hard engineering work to get a full live editing experience with a fast, native UI that need to ultimately render down to a slow WebView (no one else that we’re aware of has been able to pull this off like this).
- We’ve built a web code editor (similar to Mozilla Thimble from a few days ago) that’s pretty nifty. Create a site, then go to Theme>Edit HTML / CSS (screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...)
- Here are some of the cool new themes: https://highpeak-theme.weebly.com/, https://verticals-business-slick.weebly.com/, https://pathway-financial.weebly.com/, https://urbandine-business.weebly.com/, https://jaysims-oasis-merch.weebly.com/, https://oikos-test.weebly.com/
Our ultimate goal is to create a platform that small to medium creators of all kinds can use so they can focus on what they love doing, and less on the business of running their business. Imagine all the time spent learning from awesome people like patio11 -- what if we could make the whole online side of running your business a whole lot easier? That’s the dream, this is the first step in that direction.
Happy to answer any questions and would love your feedback!
This looks pretty fantastic! Well done on getting this together and launching! I think we should always congratulate folks who get to the launch phase, no matter their size/age. :-)
I have a friend that reached out to me about setting up a website for her business that she's starting with some friends. I was originally going to suggest Shopify to her, especially since we're in Canada.
I went to your pricing page, and saw that you have more plans, present them in CAD, and are more competitive than Shopify. Am I to assume that means that this is open to Canadian/international customers?
Also, Shopify shows their transaction fees, which seems to be broken down by credit card type. You show your Weebly transaction fee, but then say this is on top of Stripe/PayPal's fees. Perhaps it might make sense to provide details and/or a link to their rates so a customer can evaluate it?
Finally, Shopify has a 14 day free trial that is compelling to "casuals" to try and evaluate before they jump right in. I know that would be appealing to my friend. Is there an equivalent option from Weebly?
Those are the questions I had for now, without diving too deep into the actual platforms. Ultimately, my friend is completely non-technical, and I don't have the time to support her regularly, so a solution like this that's mostly hands-off is perfect. Kudos!
Yes, Canada is a very important market for us, and we think our ecommerce platform with Weebly 4 is incredibly competitive with Shopify for most non-enterprise use cases.
We have a couple big advantages over Shopify: first, the content customization side of things with a WYSIWYG editor -- it's awesome for people who aren't technical, and saves you a lot of time if you are -- and second, deeply integrated email marketing.
I'm obviously biased, but I think overall it's a much more accessible, affordable, and intuitive platform for most small to medium businesses.
Good feedback on the transaction fees. We actually don't charge any transaction fees on the Business plan ($25/mo), and you can integrate from any number of merchant payment providers like Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Authorize.net. I think we can do a better job of being crystal clear on what all of the payment fees are.
On the free trial -- you can try most of the features for free on Weebly, but there are some ecommerce features you need to upgrade to try. We're working on it though, and we should have it released within a couple weeks!
The main background images for each of your linked themes took a very long time to load, > 14s.
Your site was presented to me in Spanish. Please don't do this. Don't choose a language for me based on my location.
also, as previous sites don't add the chosen language in the click request, i don't see how being on hn previously is relevant.
the flip side to this is - if this is actually a big problem (incorrect renderings of language) maybe some dnn could be applied for a new start up idea! haha
Spanish speakers (in Spain at least) tend to come from google.es, which prefers Spanish-language results, or from Spanish language links and discussions.
It is wrong behaviour to choose my language based on my location.
Given, they're "similar" languages, but I would think Google would recognize "não" (no), for example, as belonging to the Portuguese language (especially since it's the only language that uses that word).
You're wrong. :)
This is what the Accept-Language header is meant for[1]. AFAIK it is sent by most modern browsers, although as the referenced MDN article explains it isn't always an accurate reflection of user preferences. I'm not sure how iOS Safari in particular sets its value, but I would imagine that it is based on the current OS language setting.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_ne...
1- In theory browser language should be the perfect way to do it, in practice as often as 25% of the time or more it's set incorrectly. Unfortunately, that means a lot of people that don't speak English end up with English content.
2- There is more than just language, in several regions we are localized and not just translated. So it's important to send specific content for the region, like prices, specific local features (e.g. payment methods), specific photography to better appeal to the local audience, local user stories & articles, etc.
3- It's especially hard with English because that is, in essence, the "default" language. If your browser language is set to Spanish and you live in Germany, we'll respect that, but it's a bit harder to do with English.
We're definitely open to input on how to handle it better... One step forward would be to bring the language selector up to the top of the page so it is much more accessible.
I just checked Facebook and Google from a newly opened "private browsing" tab and both gave me English versions.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/en
Note the "en" in the URL and "English" in the language selector in the top right of the page.
The button text and input placeholder text is not in English for me, nor is the text at the bottom of the page. Blogger, Google groups and I think other Google stuff, like Flights, is the same.
Also, @drusenko (forgot your name on HN)[Edited to add his name], it SHOULD be pretty easy to change your code to switch languages based on [Accepted-Language] and still do localization for payments/time/calendar stuff like that. PM me if you want.
Android phone in en-gb. Play Store account from UK. Download Waze while in the middle of France, get the voice indications in French. Who's the clever cookie that decided that? :-)
Love the new design. I wanted to ask you - Is it possible we can see the return of the affiliate program sometime soon with Weebly?
Thanks and best of the luck!
Specifically, we've added the option to specify if you want to include taxes in your prices. If selected, we will show a tax summary under the order total.
In addition to this, you can also add a Note to Seller field in checkout and use this to optionally collect VAT IDs if you are selling to customers that could be tax exempt. When an order comes in, the order details will display the message left here by your customer. If they left a valid VAT ID number, you can refund their order the tax amount using our improved refund functionality that easily lets you issue partial refunds.
Finally, you can specify on a per product basis whether an item should have tax applied to it or not.
Hope this helps - and as mentioned, we are working on improving this area and adding an even easier VAT setup feature inthe future!
Excellent photography is great, but many of the small businesses who are primarily targeted with these services, don't have it. And stock photography looks like, well, stock photography.
I'd love to see a service like this embrace themes that don't depend on great photography. Themes that make good use of typography and other non-image visual elements.
I love your suggestion for more typography focused themes!
Even searching for wordpress themes (of which millions exist) recently I had to ignore 75% of what I saw because they have a huge hero or full column images.
https://github.com/heyalexej/awesome-images
There are some really good sites in there that have very high quality photos free for use. My two favorites are:
Not to diminish your point that more themes need to gear themselves towards imageless content, this is just a good place to start for those working on budgets.
I use them alot, great selection of really unique shots.
I've been surprised by how important and effective email still is to most small businesses, and it's a hard problem to solve; having it integrated with the rest of your site and commerce solution is even harder. Ecommerce is a more obvious need, but has a lot more solutions available, including for non-technical folks.
Congrats on launching cool new stuff all these years later!
not too many of us still around from the W07 bach ;)
The big questions that come to mind:
1. How does this compare with hosting Wordpress. I like that with Wordpress, if some issue comes up, you can find someone who knows the innards and program what you need. Does the user have that level of access?
2. How does it compare with WIX, and the other site building competitors?
3. What if someone has built some great piece of code and I want to install some of the functionality on my site, can I do it?
It just seems that it is a closed enough system that I have to rely on Weebly engineers to do everything.
2. One, Weebly is a much more intuitive, easy to use platform, two, we have a powerful ecommerce platform built-in (Wix doesn't have this), three, we have iOS and Android apps to create or manage everything from (no one else has that), four, we have a deep developer ecosystem (over 200 third party apps and integrations, the most of any platform), and five, the website, ecommerce, and email marketing is deeply integrated, others are more a collection of pieces.
3. Yes! There are a ton of APIs to build into Weebly, check it out here: http://dev.weebly.com/. You can also just copy and paste any code you want into your site with the embed code element. And if you're just looking to showcase code on your site, check this out: https://www.weebly.com/app-center/code-block?ref=ac-collecti...
Chrome Version 53.0.2785.116 m, Windows 10
I've recently wanted to move a website off of Weebly for a friend, and it's a nightmare. Instead of simple clean markup you get all kinds of monstrosity.
Very proud of Weebly 4 and the team that made it all happen, it's both our biggest release ever, as well as our most polished!
Check out our online code editor too (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...) -- templates now use Mustache and LESS.
It's a pretty neat environment for editing online and seeing a real-time preview -- lots of people use this to learn to code. We also have a Ruby gem that you can plug into a git hook or your favorite IDE for rapid prototyping.
Really could be more prominent, at least on first page load.
Can we bring our own HTML/CSS and integrate with Weebly? Even with custom payment flows?
Weebly looks promising for that, and at $25-50/month isn't too bad.
For people more familiar with this area, what other options are there? Wordpress+shopify? And how do the fees stack up with the different options?
The email piece seems like an after-thought, once you get beyond a few hundred customers, you will need a more serious solution for email marketing.
Free mostly, paid plugins for setting it up faster :) -- emails, abandoned carts, ...
tl;dr: Webflow if you need powerful design controls without coding.
There's more info on our website, https://webflow.com - cheers!
For example, Shopify has "metafields" which allow Apps to add strings of data within a namespace/key, which can then be used in the liquid templating engine.