Blog / Web Design / Resources
10 Essential Widgets For Your Ecommerce Website.
By Zack Rutherford
Dec 7, 2014
Building an effective and engaging ecommerce website isn't exactly the easiest task. You’ve got to worry about site security, shopping carts, customer acquisition, brand recognition, opt-in forms, inventory management, and a host of other overwhelming concerns. Making your website usable for your client’s is a top concern, but the only way to do that effectively is to make sure your end is usable as well. That means customizing your dashboard and getting all the top functions and features you utilize the most at the forefront of your attention.
The quickest and easiest way to meet your needs while simultaneously addressing the most pressing concern (providing your customers with seamless checkout processes) is through the use of ecommerce widgets. In order to save you time and money, I’ve compiled for you here a list of 10 potent, powerful, and preeminent web ecommerce widgets that every online retailer should consider adding to their websites.
1. Ecwid Widget Suite.
Welcome to the lightning round. Ecwid is a turnkey ecommerce solution widget suite which allows for an easily embeddable shopping cart into any website. The name itself is short for “Ecommerce Widgets” and the service lives up to the moniker. Thus this item is actually a package deal, offering a series of six different ecommerce widgets all designed to bolster your ecommerce efforts. Individually, these widgets are simple, lightweight, easy to implement, and streamlined to give you added functionality without the extra fluff.
In no particular order, they are:
The Product Browser
The Product Browser is Ecwid’s primary widget offering. It allows users to browse through and buy products in an ordinary start to finish manner.
Minicart /Bag
The Minicart/bag widget makes the quantity of items within a shopping cart visible.
Horizontal Categories
The Horizontal categories widget is a simple left-to-right display of product categories, including appropriate tabs.
Vertical Categories
The Vertical Categories widget is the Horizontal widget’s longitudinal counterpart.
Search Box
The Search box is a simple search widget that provides a basic element of searchability to your catalog.
Add To Cart
Finally, Add To Cart is, of course, the all-important button that allows your customers to populate their shopping carts with individual products.
Though each of these Ecwid widgets is useful and valuable on its own, they definitely work best in conjunction, so consider procuring the entire set. We here at Webydo are particularly fond of Ecwid since it's a highly sophisticated ecommerce solution that’s been directly implemented into Webydo designs since 2013. This extensive widget can be implemented into virtually any CMS, including the ever prolific WordPress platform. If you’re looking for a quality place to procure an Ecwid-friendly ecommerce alternative, you can’t do much better than TemplateMonster.com, which boasts an impressive collection of premium templates for every occasion.
2. Yotpo.
Social shopping has become quite the buzzword in ecommerce circles, and the Yotpo Reviews widget cashes in on all the hype. Turning your product offerings into a sharable experience can help your inventory achieve a level of virality. One that can be a real boon to your business.
Yotpo appears as widget on each of your product pages. It allows your users to read, write, and rate. They can read what others have written about your products, write their own reviews, or quickly rate your products with a 5 star system. More importantly, Yotpo allows you to share all of these reviews across social media channels, adding validity, authority, and recognition to your brand voice.
With Yotpo’s Review Widget, you can do all of the following:
- Import existing reviews
- Easily translate your reviews into any language
- Tailor the look of your widgets to match your website’s design
- Effectively intercept, examine, and moderate your reviews before they’re posted to your site
As part of a larger service, the Yotpo reviews widget will run you $30 a month for full access to its functionality. Recommended only for larger sites with the budget to burn on social marketing.
3. Shopial.
Had enough of all these on-site widgets? Too bad we’ve got two more on this list and you’ll have to deal with them. Shopial, however, takes a different tact. How does a software that allows you to import your entire storefront onto Facebook as an enormous ecommerce widget sound?
Using Shopial, you can quickly and easily customize your shop with logos, CTAs, styling options and more. Of course this service comes with social button widgets that will post your products on major social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Shopial (like the rest of our list’s entries) is also paced with extra bells and whistles:
- Social analytics help connect your audience social networking habits to buying behavior
- A secure, encrypted, and reliable cloud service that eliminates the need for maintenance or hosting
- Internationalized language settings
- Updates instantaneously as you make changes to your actual ecommerce store
- Easy setup and excellent support
Shopial pretty much nailed it with the name. It provides a powerful way to promote your products across social media without any extra stress.
4. Shopify.
While we’re on a theme of recognizable brands, it seems like a good time to mention the Shopify widget. Integrated with secure Shopify checkouts, this widget enables your customers to purchase products no matter where they are. It’s extremely useful for publishing product related content like reviews or advertisements on 3rd party blogs or websites.
You can choose to feature a single product, an entire collection, or even a set of collections to display on your website or any other that allows you access to the HTML code. The application generates a code that can be implanted directly into the site’s HTML and creates a number of different widget types.
With the Shopify widget you can:
- Embed products anywhere on your site as well as 3rd party blogs
- Include links to product pages, shopping carts or right to the checkout
- Customize the style settings to create your own unique theme
Shopify allows you a great deal of diverse options as to the look and function of your embeddable widgets. Click the link above to download and start customizing right away.
5. WebEngage.
WebEngage is a customer feedback widget that allows you to custom design surveys and feedback forms, gather consumer data, and measure it in an extremely readable metric format. WebEngage is one of the premiere feedback gathering widgets.
It allows you to target your survey’s to specific groups of customers through the use of a “real-time rule builder,” that can single out site visitors based on location, source of referral, or cookies. The targeting feature makes WebEngage an extremely powerful tool to aid in your split testing efforts.
WebEngage Benefits:
- Customizable form creation
- Real-time statistics collection
- Multiple data reports on collected analytics
- Direct response options to customer feedback
6. ShipWorks.
So far we’ve been talking mostly about customer data and shopping cart technology in our list. This widget, however, deals with another side of the ecommerce business that’s often overlooked: fulfillment. After all, what good is an online store that doesn’t ship its products?
ShipWorks is a software service that automates all of your most abysmally tedious shipping tasks. More specifically, it collects all of your ecommerce order data and presents it in a single screen so you can pick and choose which orders are ready to be shipped in an organized and timely manner.
Not only does it collect your order info, but it also prints shipping labels and even updates multiple storefronts with shipping data. Best of all ShipWorks, can easily be integrated with any marketplace imaginable. It’s a truly massive ecommerce solution that addresses nearly every fulfillment related task imaginable. You can automate and schedule numerous repetitive or one off tasks, saving you time and money.
By starting a ShipWorks account you’ll be able to automatically generate all of the following:
- Invoices
- Labels
- Emails
- Lists and Reports
This is a very dense SaaS with easily accessible widgets that you can integrate directly onto your site. Learn more about their numerous service offerings on the ShipWorks website.
7. Shipping Easy.
Along those same lines (because we all love having options!) Shipping Easy is another Software suite with its eyes on the fulfillment side of ecommerce and a direct integration into multiple storefront platforms. Most relevant to Webydo users is its capacity for integration with Ecwid, which we covered a bit earlier on in this list.
Shipping Easy mirrors ShipWorks in many ways.
It also provides simple solutions for:
- Package tracking
- Label generation
- Automatic online store updates
- And report creation
More excitingly, integrating your ecommerce store with Shipping Easy allows you to enjoy discounted shipping rates from the USPS, and alternatively, take advantage of private carriers such as UPS or FedEx.
8. TheFind.
Switching gears a bit for this one; TheFind is an ecommerce solution for buyers as well as sellers. It works much like any other comparison shopping site, by aggregating product and online store data from all over the web and then helping buyers connect with the lowest prices and highest quality for the items and brands they want most. Where this becomes a boon to online retailers is the opportunity to advertise on TheFind’s platform.
Quite charitably, much of TheFind’s benefits for retailers are 110% free. They boost site traffic for listed ecommerce stores just by virtue of the listings, often without being reimbursed by the individual site owners. On average, participating websites see a boost in page rank of about 11%.
And they’ve also released a few helpful affiliate-style widgets to aid bloggers in their online entrepreneurship. The widgets are as follows:
Shoplinks:
This widget monetizes your editorial efforts by linking to TheFeed’s product results.
Search:
A simple search box that links from your site to TheFeed’s product index.
FindIt:
This widget links to a specific product page from within your site.
Marketplace:
A customizable link to a branded marketplace that’s specific to your website. You customize the results page and match it to your site’s content.
9. Linnworks.
Linnworks is an order, shipping, and inventory management tool that allows users to build bulk lists of inventory and advertise them on popular online shopping platforms. Additionally, it can automate your shipping processes by integrating your orders directly with your couriers.
Linnworks is truly robust, veritably packed with features and functions.
Just to name a few:
- Multi-channel software
- Stock control software
- Bulk listing tool
- Analytics reports drafted from your sales databases
- Even options for brick and mortar stores
Of course it couldn’t have made this list if it didn’t have a standalone API that allows subscribers to interact with Linnworks through external programs.
10. PayPal Donation And Single Purchase Widgets.
It wouldn’t be an ecommerce article if we didn’t mention PayPal.
The original king of online payments has its widget buttons popping up all over the place and Webydo designs are no exception. Our platform is setup for easy integration with both PayPal Single Product Purchase buttons and Donation buttons as well.
These handy widgets allow for quick and easy payment collection through the ultra-secure third party payment purveyor kingpin, PayPal.
Installation is also a breeze. All that’s required is a copy and pasting of code from the PayPal website into the HTML widget of your Webydo DMS.
With PayPal widgets you can quickly and easily do all of the following:
- Instantly accept donations and/or ecommerce payments from credit cards, debit cards, and PayPal
- Avoid any and all monthly, set-up, or cancellation fees, all that’s required is a transaction fee collected by PayPal from your customers.
- And neither are your customers required to have a PayPal account in order to render payment
Conclusion.
The goal of any ecommerce site is to remain fruitful and functional. With the help of these 10 ecommerce web widgets, and your expert direction, of course, your domain is guaranteed to do just that.
Did I miss any of your favorite ecommerce widgets? Share the honorable mentions in the comment sect.
Blog / Web Design / Resources
Brought to You by Webydo.
See how Webydo fits into your design workflow and business.
Request A Live Demo
Blog Menu
