Own 5 Ecwid stores seriously advise against this Plugin

  • Ecwid PLugin for WordPress.. To Use, or Not to Use?

    First of all, its not really a Plugin, its an iFrame insert that just displays the CP on ecwid.com’s own server. The only bit that can be called a ‘Plugin’ is the widgets area, which are also of course merely html iframes showing data from an external URL (Ecwid), and is not internal and integrated like Woo Commerce, which is a true Plugin, and Native to your WordPress site.

    So what is good about it?
    Well, if you are already stuck with Ecwid and have your store running on their servers instead of your own, then its a good ‘plugin’ to display products and get them read by google’s search bot, and indexed in the google and other search engine registries. It is superior to the Ecwid store widget, insertion, which is almost completely invisible to the search engines, and won’t get you any decent search engine results at all (a seriously inferior aspect of Ecwid’s basic product, is the absence of real SEO on your own website, due to the fact that none of your products or store is really on your website at all, rather, on Ecwid’s)

    And so, despite the fact your store is not on your own website (even though it appears to be to the shopper), the Ecwid plugin for wordpress gets it into google for you on your website by making it readable html.

    Now, what is not good about Ecwid Plugin for WordPress?

    Well, firstly, the fact that things will break constantly as WordPress updates or Ecwid Plugin updates, and you will have to be constantly getting furious, as things that worked yesterday dont work today, and be in a constant battle against incompatibilities.. see the long list of Bugfixes on the Ecwid plugin page at wordpress since the introduction of the Plugin, to see just how many issues you may have to face now and in the future

    Second disadvantage is that, as i said, its not really a Plugin, its just pulled from Ecwid.com in an iframe, so if their server updates and you are trying to use the Ecwid Admin CP within wordpress, you will have to sit drumming your fingers and waiting for them to update. And believe me, Ecwid update all the time, sometimes even 3 or 4 times in a Day! So even if you have your own VPS server and a dedicated IP, if you use Ecwid Plugin for wordpress, that wont mean you can use it without interruption. because its not on your server like a real Plugin would and should be.. its just an iFrame displaying content from my.ecwid.com

    Thats a big disadvantage.

    Third disadvantage is this; Multiple Store Issues. I myself own 5 Ecwid stores and have to log in and out of different stores in my browser, and often have to blog in my wordpress blogs (which have an Ecwid store in them too) at the same time, in another tab of the browser.

    So, lets imagine this scenario;
    You install Ecwid store number 1 in a plugin on your wordpress site

    This adds a Control Panel from your Ecwid store to the WordPress Admin backend, after asking you to log in using your username and password for store (Store number 1 in this scenario)

    Then, after your WordPress site is logged in and connected per baqckend to Ecwid store No.1, you are ready to go. You add a product or adminstrate some orders and sales for a while, then continue to go and blog and create a page perhaps in your wordpress site (after all, its primarily blog and page writing software with a store plugin.. not the other way round).

    You blog for a while in your wordpress site.. then you open a new tab or a new window in your browser (outside of wordpress), and you log in to Ecwid store number two, to administrate one of your other stores..

    THIS IS WHERE YOUR WORDPRESS PLUGIN THEN DISCONNECTS AND RECONNECTS, AND YOUR ‘SURFING EQUIPMENT’, FROM STORE NO. 1, SUDDENLY GETS SWOPPED TO DISPLAY STORE NUMBER 2 , WHICH MIGHT BE ‘ORANGES AND APPLES’

    And unless you are me who has already had that problem, you may not notice for a week, and one day open your surf website to see it is selling oranges and apples instead!!!!

    There are a lot of other disadvantages to this so called plugin, which is in truth not a plugin, rather, a lazy workaround using an iframe (because your store is externally stored on ecwid, not on your Domain server), but the main ones are;
    1. Constant problems with Bugs breaking the features of your store
    2. Depending on their external server, which is constantly updating, and have no total control over your access to your content in WordPress due to Ecwid stores being externally stored on an external server
    3. You cant login to another ecwid store in the same browser, as this will disconnect your plugin and even perhaps reconnect the and display the wrong storefront in your website
    4. Even if you rent VPS and Dedicated IP, that wont save your site from downtime when Ecwid updates their servers (constantly every day), making vps and dedicated IP hosting pointless if you use Ecwid.

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by sakyant.
    • This topic was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by sakyant.
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Support ecwid_team

    (@ecwid_team)

    Hello!

    Ecwid Customer Care team is here.

    Thank you for your extensive feedback! We really appreciate that you shared your thoughts about Ecwid plugin for WordPress. And we will be happy to tell more about the plugin and our recent major updates.

    ECWID PLUGIN FUNCTIONALITY

    As you pointed out, all data is stored on the Ecwid servers and transferred from them. This is actually a great plus: we manage maintenance and store backups and provide the highest level of security. Why is this an advantage? Whatever happens to your website, all store data will be safe and sound and you won’t need to worry about the data restoration.

    We also concern about stores performance, a CDN (Content Delivery Network) approach we use speeds up the content delivery process and provides protection from large surges in traffic.

    This distinguishes Ecwid from other plugins, however it is still a native plugin that has a lot of considerable features. There is a possibility to manage access to the plugin, so you can turn it on and off at any time, add a bunch of widgets to a WordPress website, add your own menu and assign store categories to menu sections or separate pages, integrate a product search function right into your website search widget so it will show store results as well.

    Also, we’d like to mention that the only element that is added to WordPress as an iFrame is a control panel. As for the storefront and widgets, they are integrated into a website.

    SEO

    Yes, you’re absolutely right, Ecwid loads products for each site and makes them visible for Google. There is also one important detail: if you added a store to a website, your products are indexed as a part of your website and all links that are found in Google search will redirect to your website with Ecwid store. We also released so-called Clean SEO URLs that improve the stores indexation.

    UPDATES

    We really want to thank you for the bringing up the issue with frequent updates so many times! Our team was actively working on it and finally we found a solution that reduced the number of control panel reloads during updates. Now the system is updated insensibly and this process almost doesn’t interrupt users work. Last 10 updates did’t trigger control panel reloads. Before an every reload we warn our users about an upcoming update, so they can save all changes they made and wait for just about 60 seconds to let the system be updated.

    We should admit that we constantly update Ecwid to make it better and release bug fixes, features (last great feature we released is Staff Accounts) and security patches in accordance with high security standards. All the updates require absolutely no any actions from the users, we cover all possible capability and compatibility issues and take full responsibility for them.

    Also, our updates don’t affect the store fronts in any way. The accessibility of Ecwid stores is very high and your customers can purchase products even during updates — all information will be saved and displayed in your control panel and you will receive an order confirmation email once an order is placed.

    MULTIPLE STORES ISSUE

    Each Ecwid store added to a WordPress website is individual and can’t affect the other store content and settings. Every time you log into other WP admin panel, the store associated with these site login credentials stays connected to the website you logged into. That’s how it works. We have a lot of examples of multiple stores connected to different WP sites and didn’t reproduce such a problem. If you’re still experiencing this issue, we will really appreciate if you provide some more details on the matter and attach a couple of screenshots or screencasts that illustrate the problem. We will investigate it further and find a source of the problem!

    So, to sum up:

    1. Yes, we constantly update Ecwid to make it even better. We improved the updating process so it almost doesn’t interrupt users work.

    2. All data is stored on the Ecwid servers and if even something happens to your website, the data will stay intact. Also, you have full access to the store and can manage any settings however you like.

    3. It is absolutely possible to have different stores open in different tabs of one browser. Each store has its own content and settings and the plugin doesn’t get disconnected and reconnected automatically.

    4. Ecwid accessibility is very high and no updates can affect your store front, so your customers are able to place orders in your store even during updates. No VPS services can guarantee that if your website experiences downtime or some other issues, all your store data will be saved. Ecwid can.

    Please feel free to ask questions if there are any and share your ideas with us. We are always happy to get a piece of feedback from you!

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by ecwid_team.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by ecwid_team.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by ecwid_team.

    Hello, I just wanted to mention that I had the identical problem and the only solution I found was to use a completely different browser, i.e., Safari and Firefox.

    Hi @crackedvesselcom1,

    Thanks for reporting. Can you clarify — what problem did you mean? What didn’t work for you in Chrome?

    It’s got nothing to do with not working in Chrome. What I’m saying is, you can’t be logged in to two different stores using the same browser, or exactly what he
    s describing will happen. You have to log in to one store on Safari for example, and one on Firefox, Chrome, whatever. If you try to log in to two stores on Chrome, or Firefox, or Safari, or any one browser, you will eventually get logged out of one and logged in to the other without realizing it. Sorry you couldn’t duplicate it, but your customer service people obviously know about it because they were the ones who told me to use two different browsers when I contacted them when I was having this problem.

    Got it, thank you for the clarification.

    Yes, that’s true — Ecwid now doesn’t allow you to be logged in two different accounts in the same browser at the same time. We know about this limitation. I am sorry for the troubles it caused.

    We’ve recently released the Staff accounts feature that allows you to have several people logging in to the same store (e.g. to have your staff processing orders). That is not exactly the same as having a person logged in different stores at the same time, but those functions are anyway connected so we will think about making both more convenient to the merchants.

    As for now, having different browsers or launching another browser window in Incognito mode are workarounds we can suggest.

    Thanks for the feedback,

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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