Hi,
Thanks for the question.
You’re right, when you create an account in Ecwid and start using it for your online store, all of your store data is kept on our servers. To be more precise we use Amazon Web Services to store and backup all the code and data.
The architecture of Ecwid has many great outcomes which, being not so obvious for a merchant at the beginning, are in fact very important. Here are some of them:
You can mirror the same store on several sites.
Since your store is fully hosted on our servers and embedded into your site as a widget, from this point of view, Ecwid can be easily compared to YouTube. Just like there, you manage some content from a centralized interface and that content is served from our servers. But if you put the video to the site – YouTube does not take over your site, it sits as compact widget inside the page. And the same way as it is possible to put one YouTube video to multiple sites, it is possible to expose one Ecwid store in many places. The same inventory and store settings are mirrored everywhere you install your online store. So, with Ecwid, you create a store that can be installed on as many sites, blogs, social network pages as you want. Whenever you decide to open a new site or blog or open your store on Facebook, you can start a new storefront with your ready settings and the same set of products. All the storefronts are synchronized and managed from single control panel.
You don’t need to care about the updates/patches and server maintenance.
Ecwid’s code and data is hosted on our servers and all new features, bug fixes, security improvements and other system updates are applied from our side centrally for all users – no actions are required on your side. The same is true for the server maintenance: regardless of how many products you add, regardless of how many visitors your store have, our engineers and system software keep an eye on the service availability 24/7 and make sure your store works OK.
Fast and responsive storefront
To allow a merchant insert the same products catalog into any web site, Ecwid widgets automatically load themselves from our servers and fit themselves to the given page layout to make the store look as it’s a part of that page. Ecwid uses AJAX to load the content in background – that makes a store fast since no page reload is necessary on your site to switch store pages. Moreover, the same storefront will work on mobile devices – Ecwid layout is responsive.
Ecwid provides your customers with secure checkout on your site
While being embedded into your site, Ecwid handles the checkout process on its side and takes care of security: all sensitive customer information is transferred securely via HTTPS protocol even if you don’t have SSL certificate on your site. Moreover, as you probably know, every web site that accepts, transfers or anyhow processes customer credit cards must comply with PCI security standards. When you use Ecwid, you can rest assured we make sure your store meets the necessary security rules. Ecwid is Level 1 PCI-DSS compliant solution.
