One of the most difficult challenges for small businesses is to keep up with the latest technology trends and staying on top of business goals. Not everyone has the luxury nor the time to learn all of the technological changes that transpire in the marketplace from one year to the next. For example, merchants that are seeking to target consumers online have their work cut out for them and not everyone can afford to learn all of the necessary technical skills.
To facilitate this transition from an existing business with an e-commerce website has the opportunity to do even more. A new application programming interface (API) launched by Ecwid, short for e-commerce widgets and a cloud-based platform, helps small businesses migrate their efforts regardless if they have little to no tech knowledge while taking advantage of selling quickly online their products or services.
The service or solution that Ecwid offers is currently available in over 175 markets and available in 45 languages. The deployment is pretty straightforward and as is easy as copying and pasting a few lines of code. What is sort of the icing on the cake is the multichannel (website, mobile, social site, offline, etc.) selling it gives to a small business owners. In other words, being able to generate leads from customers located anywhere around the globe who wish to make a purchase.
“So what Ecwid provides is very simple solution for small businesses that are especially new to the online realm and who are not tech savvy. They can start selling online by adding an online store to their existing web presence,” said Head of Strategy and Market Sridhar Nagarajan. “The key takeaway from the API platform as a goal is to definitely get closer to our vision of democratizing e-commerce for small businesses globally. And the developer APIs are critical stepping stone to make this happen because it helps our growing base of developers to sort of extend their reach within the merchant base.”
To date the Ecwid platform or interface continues to attract a high number of merchants. It has rapidly grown to 700,000 sellers from around the world. This in large part due to the constant development of many different apps by developers and the availability of storefront languages (45). The storefront language is if you are a merchant and insert the Ecwid online store to your website the storefront visible to the targeted consumer of theirs is available in the number of languages previously mentioned. The process is complemented with utilizing the browser settings from the customers.
So is it simple to add Ecwid to your site? The answer is yes since it is a three step process where you create a free account, log into the control panel, and back in the source code of your website. Finally, paste in the copied code and refresh the page.
“Ecwid has done an excellent job building out their API. We have integrated with most of the major SaaS e-commerce platforms in the market and this was one of the easiest and most straight-forward to get working,” asserted Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Apptive Jason Jaynes. “This made it very easy on us to build out a robust application that would be able to bring all the value of Apptive to Ecwid’s merchants.”
The next step for the company is to continue to have their developers leverage this API and grow their app market. Furthermore, integrate apps into the Ecwid system more tightly, according to Nagarajan.
“Building a WordPress plugin for WordPress/Ecwid merchants with the Ecwid API was straightforward and simple technically, but truly allowed me to easily create something that would help online merchants. Altogether the API, documentation, and support all made it very easy to build something I knew would bring value to merchants,” explained Developer and Author of WordPress Widgets Avalanche for Ecwid Scott Fennell.
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