Weebly E-Commerce Fail

Weebly recently released access and support for e-commerce to their wisywig site editors. As some of you may have seen recently, I gave it a go and attempting to add some of my work to a storefront and enabled the store feature on my site. I was not happy with how www.etsy.com stores had gone in the past, so I thought this would be a good new alternative. However, there are a few points they don't mention outright on Weebly that makes it kind of awkward offering the e-commerce feature.

• The e-commerce feature can be enabled on all types of account plans on weebly.
• Weebly offers several package plans for your site and not all offer the same features.
• The FREE plan for weebly allows you to enable a store, but not set-up shipping options, taxes, or inventory tracking.
• The middle of the road plan offers some features, but not all the ones needed to have a nicely integrated e-commerce site - making the middle option nearly pointless.
• The plan that does offer features to make the e-commerce store work how it should is 19.99 / month, if you sign up for 2 years. This does not include the percentage the payment gateways will take with each purchase.
• You pay that price per month, regardless of selling amount.
  
• While I can see that not being a huge issue for a true full time online business, it does not suit the budget of a artist type trying to sell their goods online.
• It might be best to give the etsy site one more go.

So, I am writing this to let all my friends and family know that I gave it a try to offer a more integrated art browsing and shopping experience on my site, but I just don't think it will happen. I will be working on giving the etsy store one more go and have a new link / page to the store here on this site.


Thanks for reading and stay warm. It is reading 0º here in balmy Rochester, MN.