hello, I’m designing a site for my scincare biz and I wonder what is the best way to make a store front product page- should I do a gallery like thing? I did this a few years ago when I designed a site for a client but it wasn’t a retail store.
I also plan to use either mals e commerce or an ecwid cart and I’m wondering how I incorporate each into my website?
Do I have to purchase the male e commerce action suite to put the cart and buttons at my page?
I really have no idea how this works. I’ve signed up for an account at mals e. I have found things like the shipping options to be very complicated at Mals E. I can’t tell how to choose what shipping company I want to use there or how to pick which method for pricing shipping- If I choose price by weight I have no idea where, when and what to fill in and the location is also going to affect the shipping cost.
While at Ecwid I have chosen usps and ups for shipping options and I assume they will work it out by distance and weight as I they do at their site and at ebay purchases. Is there a way to integrate the Ecwid ecommerce cart and things into a freeway designed site? Would I be able to drop there code into the html of my freeway design?
Do either of these e commerce solutions allow for a my account for customers and and email subscription list?
I’m watching your video and I’m wondering if I understand this part correctly- am I supposed to insert a new blank page into my already designed site and add these codes in there? Or do I somehow have to add them into my pages where I will have all of my products… I don’t want those sample products from Ecwid obviously…
I have another question: in your screencast, when you’re putting the first element in from Ecwid, after adding it in with the mark up you said something like “click in the wide/white space because I want to have it as an undefined height…”
I’m not sure what that means or what you did there exactly. I added the cart onto my site on my home page but it is a bit large, is there any way to make it smaller? Is that what you mean by an undefined height?
I’m watching your video and I’m wondering if I understand this part correctly- am I supposed to insert a new blank page into my already designed site and add these codes in there?
No absolutely not.
Or do I somehow have to add them into my pages where I will have all of my products…
Not somehow, but that’s the point. You insert the elements containing the ecwid widgets via Markup item into your EXISTING design. That’s the simple magic of ecwid. You can even add single products onto your page and the system works as well.
I don’t want those sample products from Ecwid obviously…
Yeah - of course not.
But sorry - I can’t make screencasts showing your portfolio (… that automagic appears, when you add your products into ECWID’s backend).
If you put an item into your workspace and give it a width and a height, such as 500px and 300px within inspector, this item will automatic have this dimension and keeps it, no matter of the true content.
But ECWID needs often much more of this above given space (300px). With an undefined height (the value is greyed out in inspector), your item will have exactly that height the “content” (ECWID widget) requires without having the overflow issue. This may cause, that parts are simply cut-off.
I see what you mean, however I just made the box around the object, quite small and it seems ok, but the shopping bag is a bit large for my website design. I wonder if I can change that.
I also just really want to put the shopping bag and an add to cart button and skip the other stuff using my design. But do I need to enter stuff at Ecwid also? I just wrote a whole description of one product there and when I put the html widget components on my page for that product, the photograpns aren’t visible an neither is the add to cart button- the button is grayed out at Ecwid. The product description isn’t visible either.
Is it possible to use just the shopping cart and the add to cart? I can’t find any code for the add to cart.
Honestly I haven’t worked with ECWID longer time, so I have to guess a lot and therefor unproven. Furthermore I haven’t ever set up a store for real, just for simple testing purposes:
The widgets you add in Freeway is all to do for the first moment.
You can’t have only the cart-functions, you always have to have related products, stored in ECWID backend as well. If you have only a handful of them, you can also put them single on the page. Grab the code (Tab HTML under article in ECWIDs backend) and put this in the same way on your page as you did with the widgets.
The basic work you have to do now is in the ECWID backend. There are a lot of settings to do, but really can’t remember correctly which they are. A good resource is always ECWIDs forums to make the functionality happen.
I have posted a question about this there also but no one has answered yet… I found a tutorial somewhere, I thought it was yours that said if you don’t have a lot of items you could just use the add to cart button… but maybe that was someone else’s. I will link it here if I find it again.
I don’t want to put all my items on one page because I will eventually have more and I have done a css menu bar at the top of the site with all my various product categories and other things… I can always expand that later if I need to also with sub categories. Although it would be simpler most likely, I think it would be too simplistic for what I’m trying to do here.
By opening my store at Ecwid, I was able to get the add to cart button and the thumbnail image to show up at my website, however a problem is that it seems to be causing the whole page to shift somehow from my other pages… it looks like the logo for my site at the top is shifting but I think it is really the whole page, I’m not sure what would cause that. I had that problem when the image for the background was different and shifting, but I worked that out. The other photo and the description I wrote at Ecwid are only visible if I put the item in the cart and open the cart though which is strange… the whole store is also visible there, do you can apparently look at other products in the cart also.
The shifting is a major problem… can you or someone else look at that and see why it might be shifting like that? I can email it to someone or post a link here…
The other stuff I think I can work around by adding a description and a larger image myself at my website…
Ahh yeahh, now I remember (but I wrote it above as well):
See the following (in german sorry) screenshot:
There, with the “product-description” is the add to bag code snippet. Copy the code for your article from there and add this to your page where the product shall appear.
The “cart” and “checkout” process then is in an overlay (lightbox) mode.
The one you posted here is what I ended up using… I had to open the store for it to show up though. There was another one- when I find that I will link it here.
I figured out that the shift is being caused by a scroll bar which appears only in the page where I put the product description for some reason… do you know why that would happen? I think it has something to do with freeway though… it only happens when the product thumbnail and add to cart button etc. are added on. I wonder if someone here can figure this out for me? I would like to eliminate it if I can.
I am going to add the rest of the products in and see if it happens on the other pages too.
Let me know if I can post the link here… so far I only have the site in my browser and at freeway- I haven’t uploaded it yet.
There are also some problems to iron out with Ecwid, such as that when I tried to purchase a product as a test it said they couldn’t ship to my area… but I have selected the whole usa and Canada and I’ve selected usps as shipping so far. So it should work. Has anyone else had that problem with Ecwid?
I figured out that the shift is being caused by a scroll bar which appears only in the page where I put the product description for some reason… do you know why that would happen? I think it has something to do with freeway though… it only happens when the product thumbnail and add to cart button etc. are added on. I wonder if someone here can figure this out for me? I would like to eliminate it if I can.
That’s what I wrote about the undefined height already. A scrollbar appears here, cause for ECWID the content is hidden and therefor is adding a scrollbar naturally.
Either “undefined height” or increase the height size of the surrounding item to be for example 1000px (or more or less or whatever to make sure that box-size and content fits) within the inspectors height field.
I am going to add the rest of the products in and see if it happens on the other pages too.
Let me know if I can post the link here… so far I only have the site in my browser and at freeway- I haven’t uploaded it yet.
You can - sure. But make sure to put your artwork on a public server (upload) to make it reachable.
There are also some problems to iron out with Ecwid, such as that when I tried to purchase a product as a test it said they couldn’t ship to my area… but I have selected the whole usa and Canada and I’ve selected usps as shipping so far. So it should work. Has anyone else had that problem with Ecwid?
Thanks… !!!
This is a typical backend problem that I can’t really solve. Destination zones are probably in conjunction with tax-rules. So even tax is nill, you have to define it as to be 0%.
I don’t understand how to do the undefined height the way you described it… I’m supposed to click somewhere? I don’t have any window opening up to say ok when I just click in the white area as in your video…? I tried making the box much larger, around 1000 as you said, but then the position of the item and add to cart button etc. was messed up and the scroll at the right side is still there… the scroll doesn’t seem to have anything to do with seeing these items… they are all there apparently… I have some screen shots of what I’m doing but I’m not sure how to add them here.
Select the item on your workspace and simply click on the height icon in inspector:
I have some screen shots of what I’m doing but I’m not sure how to add them here.
… which is usually not enough to see what’s going on. Better make the project public and share a URL.
Seek for any public platform that allows to share images and simply paste the link to the shared image (honestly I haven’t a clue on how to bring images in here but it’s anyway better to keep them outside of FWT).
hmm, I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong here- I followed what you showed here and when I click on the arrows for height the box doesn’t seem to grey out- the pixel size goes to 12 px or so, the size of the inserted action thing- and it gets smaller but there is still a scroll bar and a jump. there still seems to be an overflow too because when I click not to hide the overflow the entire graphic of the image and add to cart button are cut off depending on the size etc.
Am I doing something wrong? if I click visible overflow you can see everything but then I still have the scroll bar- I guess this is causing the scroll bar & visual jump but I’m not sure really.
ok… let me add the rest of the products and I will load it up to my server asap for a preview… I don’t have everything working in terms of shipping yet etc. so I don’t want to leave it up online for too long yet… the page size is 960 x 1020 but to be honest it does seem too short… I hardly have any items at this point… and the image and add to cart button and shopping cart are all very large- I wonder if I can make them smaller?
I have a background image and I set to background does not scroll, changing that back to scroll made no difference to the scroll bars etc.
I did have a problem before with a “jump” when I had different background images for each page so I ended up making it all the same- no matter what I did I couldn’t get rid of the scroll bars with different images either.
A ‘True’ background image will not produce scroll bars - images sent behind other content will.
You set this by using the Page inspector (with nothing selected on the page) under the Paintbrush Tab. There you set your bg colour, your bg image and how it is positioned (whether to center, tile etc)
Thanks, that is how I set my background images… there is a box that says background scrolls that can be checked or unchecked… although it didn’t seem to produce scrolling as far as I can tell…
also when I had different images even if I selected the same location for what I wanted visible in the image… i.e. center bottom, it produced shifts between the different images.
another problem I’m having, which I had in the past is that my photos which look great in ps and lightroom look truly awful and washed out when theyr’e enlarge at all in freeway… the magic photo action doesn’t help at all. so I think I have to reshoot some and use only smaller images… I only had that problem with one image as I recall last time I used freeway for a site.
