In the latest episode of the Ecwid Ecommerce Show podcast, co-hosts Jesse and Rich go over the latest and greatest updates in your Ecwid store. Tune in to learn more about some new tools and find out how to use them. Jessie and Rich also discuss how you’ll see a significant improvement in sales, customer satisfaction, and simplifying operations.

Boosting Sales with Pre-Orders

Whether your product is temporarily out-of-stock or you’re planning to launch a new item, you don’t have to hide products from your customers anymore. Now you can let them pre-order items instead.

Pre-orders are especially helpful for forecasting demand and seeing what products you need to stock up on. You can use pre-orders when you’re running a crowdfunding campaign, planning on dropping some new merch or going to pay the manufacturer or supplier before they send the product to your warehouse. And if you make your product yourself, pre-orders will help you calculate how much material you’ll need to fulfill your customers’ needs.

Customizing Your Checkout Yourself

To adjust your checkout page to your business needs, you can now customize it yourself—no coding required. You can add custom checkout fields, such as “Enter gift message” or “Choose your packaging,” in just a couple of clicks! You can also make these fields mandatory or optional to fill in.

Analyzing Your Order Sources

To help you analyze what promotional and sales channels work best for your store, you can now ​​track your order sources right in your Ecwid Control Panel. Whether it’s from Instagram Shop, a Google ad, or an automated marketing email, easily see where your order came from on the order details page.

Easier Tax Management

Since countries have different tax regulations, some businesses need to ask their customers for tax-related information when accepting an order. That’s why we added a new Tax ID field at checkout for sellers from a number of countries.

Another tax update is that sellers from more countries can use the automatic tax calculation tool. Automatic taxes determine a precise tax rate at checkout depending on both where you and your customer are located.

New Themes and Announcement Bar for New-Gen Instant Site

If you created your ecommerce website with Ecwid’s Instant Site, don’t miss this update. The New-Gen Instant Site now has more design templates—plus an announcement bar.

The New-Gen Instant Site is available if you have an Ecwid store. Learn more about the different Instant Site versions.

With new design templates, you can experiment with showcasing the features and benefits of your store in different ways. For example, you can add an announcement bar to your site’s pages. This is great for letting your customers know about sales, free shipping offers, or any other news you want them to know.

Simplified Local Delivery Management

We constantly add new settings that make local deliveries easier. One of them is the Blackout dates option. You can block delivery not only on some days of the week but on any particular day or date range to adjust your delivery schedule as needed. That’s helpful when you need to go on vacation or plan to take some time off during the holidays.

Better Free Shipping Options Management

When offering free shipping, you need to find a balance between attracting more orders and spending too much on shipping fees. To avoid losing revenue, you can now limit free shipping discount coupons to certain shipping or delivery methods. This is useful in situations like when you can’t offer free shipping for every type of method.

More Estimated Delivery Date Settings

Showing an estimated delivery date at checkout helps shoppers quickly decide which shipping or delivery option to choose from. Good news—the estimated delivery time tool has become even more flexible! You can set up delivery and pickup preparation times for each product to show more accurate delivery dates.

In this episode, we’ve shared just a couple of Ecwid updates. Make sure you check our other resources to stay in the loop:

• For the full timeline of updates, big and small, visit the Help Center. There you can learn more about how to use the new tools effectively.
• Subscribe to the Ecwid Blog newsletter and be the first to know about the most exciting new tools.
• Peek into the What’s New tab in your Control Panel to enable tools that require manual activation.
• Bookmark the Ecwid Updates section of the blog.

Happy selling!