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[Music] hi everyone it's john from rfm calc and today i'm talking about ecwid so ecwid is a software as a service e-commerce platform it's originally launched in 2009 having been co-founded by ruslan fajliff who also co-founded x-cart back in 2000 which i believe is the world's first php online shopping cart in russia so it originally started as a platform really to embed e-commerce functionalities onto other sites so if you had a wordpress blog you could embed ecommerce functionality onto that and indeed ecwid is actually short for e-commerce widgets that's where the name comes from but over time it's also evolved into more of a direct competitor for those full uh service online shopping platforms like shopify and so you've still got that functionality where you can embed onto other sites and i think that's still a popular part of the platform but it's also a standalone ecommerce platform in its own right um the business was acquired by pos provider lightspeed in 2021 uh for a substantial sum which is why you can see you've got a little by light speed uh under the logo there and it's a very popular platform so they don't have a lot about usage stats actually on the website but i can see we builtwith.com that it powers around a million sites which is certainly a substantial number and so it's a very popular ecommerce platform it's used by a lot of people and that's why i wanted to speak about it today so pricing wise i always like to talk a little bit about pricing um it's uh i suppose slightly cheaper than shopify um so they have this free plan that's free forever um which is different to a lot of shopping carts a lot of shopping carts will give you a free trial for a period with all the features uh ecwid kind of goes slightly differently and have a free plan that is is genuinely free uh but as you'd expect i suppose it is very limited in functionality so you can do the basics and you can sell online uh but a lot of the functionality isn't available and they then have these plans uh venture business and unlimited and so these come in cheaper than shopify as it's definitely pitched at a cheaper level purposely i would say and but again you know the more you spend kind of the more features you get really um it does of course integrate with rfm calc no problem or i wouldn't be doing this video but it's worth noting that to export the csv file uh you need for the order data that we need to export from ecwid to then import into our frame calc you do need the venture plan as a minimum so that's what i've signed up for which is you know slightly annoying but uh but you can understand that i suppose and it's just a different way of pricing i think to to rather than give a 14-day free trial with everything and then have nothing they do genuinely have a free plan but the csv export you'll need for rfm calc is only available on the venture plan and above so that's what i'll be demonstrating today so yeah today we'll be talking about um ecwid as a platform so i'll go through the admin area and just give a little overview demo of how that works all the functionality or a lot of the functionality anyway and compare that to other platforms we'll then talk about the orders and how we can export those from ecwid into a csv file and then i'll go through how to then import that csv file into rfm calc which will allow us to generate all those great reports that obviously you can't get from ecwid out of the box things like lifetime value average time between orders and so on and yeah so i've signed up for a trial store or i should say page though as i said and so let's have a look at that okay so let's have a look at my ecwid control panel so this is uh the main dashboard area so you can see it gives you kind of a little overview of visitors and revenue and orders received and so on and then a little step-by-step guide in terms of all the things you need to set up so the order screen i'll come back to in a second but this is where all your orders come through so you can see i put through a few test orders on the site and one of the good things is that you can add manual payment methods and so i'm not had to hook up any live payment gateways for testing which is good and i could do that actually even on the free plan so you can see all these are paid by cash and which definitely makes testing a lot easier when you can do that it's quite frustrating when platforms don't give you that kind of option and but ecwid does and in fairness to them on on the free plan as well and it's quite intuitive i would say the screen so things like if i wanted to change this from paid to a waiting payment it's just one click nice and easy i don't have to tick a tick box and then change something or go into the order and so i can change that to shipped and simple as that so that's quite neat and you can also obviously click in and get more data on the order so you've got um obviously all the products that are ordered the billing and shipping address and the payment details bit of additional information as well you can download a pdf uh for the order as well let's have a look at that there's a nice kind of you know simple laid out pdf in terms of the order there and a barcode as well so you know that that's fairly standard stuff but it's laid out quite neatly and quite easy to kind of manage and like i say updating the orders is fairly intuitive as well obviously you've got the tick box option so if you're updating in bolt you can do that too um in terms of the product setup and so the product setup i would say is pretty straightforward as well so i've set up a few products here if i just go to add new product to just take you through this and so you've got the image and name skew there are little things that i would expect to be slightly better so if i just put in test products here you can see it's telling me there's unsafe changes and that's nice and neat but if i put in a weight here of two kilos for example uh but then i go to the shipping and pickup screen and you can see it still says zero there so it's just little bits of kind of intuitive functionality that i would have expected from an established platform like ecwid that's obviously very popular been going a long time when you update the weight here i would expect it automatically to feed through to here as well so it's a little bit disappointing i suppose i mean that's a very minor thing uh but you know there's just little tweaks that they could potentially make to improve this um you can assign categories uh really easily as well that's straightforward and you've got things called ribbons which you can add as well to the product so you could say sale for example over the top like that which is quite straightforward as well so that's i believe with the venture plan as well that's not on the free plan so that's the kind of functionality uh that you have to pay for um attributes are quite straightforward as well so you can see i've added a random one there so you can add uh additional custom attributes to the product relatively easily options works quite straightforwardly so if i just do a test option here i can call it radio button and then just go variant one variant two and variant three you can see that's relatively easy it does have this slice work so a couple of platforms do this where instead of actually being able to set a set value for the variant it's just a plus or a minus modifier which is kind of frustrating i don't know most um e-commerce platforms gives you the option to say variant one cost 10 pounds not 10 pounds in addition to the base price so it's a little bit strange i think it's a little bit more confusing for customers as well on the front end because it comes through as a plus a value and so before the customer clicks on it they kind of have to work out in their head and what it actually costs um so some platforms do this it's not it's not a it's not an approach i'm a fan of really i would much prefer it to say just equals 10 pounds equals 15 pounds equals 20 pounds for the variance you do have the option to add different images and skews as well and via product variations but that's only available on the business plan so even though i'm paying for the venture plan at 15 or 18 pounds a month um whatever it was and i still can't add stock to each variation which is a little bit disappointing and but you know it's not a huge increase in price i think to go to the business plan so you can understand that but obviously slightly frustrating for this for this demo i suppose uh but that option is there if you pay for it and then you've got the basic things like shipping um related products you could add as well and so you know it's fairly straightforward i would say to add a product not not the most intuitive in certain bits i would definitely change um but it works and it's you know it's fairly straightforward so categories is we're going to tell me i'm not saved but that's fine because i don't want to so if i go to categories and so you can see adding categories is relatively easy um so you can add more categories here if i go to the category i've created um you can see um it's relatively easy there to just set a name and an image for the category uh enable or disable the category as well and then i can go to category products and this does have a little drag and drop interface so you can change the order um of the products in the category relatively easily so being able to merchandise the category is a really important feature of any ecommerce platform um some platforms actually make this very very difficult to find and some platforms are better than ecwid i would say make this much more visual in terms of dragging your products around to see what order they appear in but you can see it's still you know at least they've got the option and it's relatively straightforward i would say just to change the order of your products there in the category we've then got the marketing section uh which has quite a few options uh in terms of integrating with google and facebook uh abandoning carts as well uh but again you need the business plan to access that so even though i'm paying for my plan i still can't access that functionality and discount codes and so on so fairly standard things you've got some automated email functionality as well which again you need the business plan for so i can't demonstrate on this because i'm not upgrading just just to show that and then obviously integration with google analytics and so on in terms of reports there's not really a lot in fact there's not anything actually on ecwid so interestingly they don't bother trying to do anything really reporting wise it's all about just integrating with other apps and so you've got this one they push at the top um for free advanced statistics by uh click in um as a but it's an external app that you can integrate and then you've got other ones here obviously google analytics is one of those but in terms of reports you actually get with ecwid out of the box and i can't see any to be honest it's all it's all done through apps which is fine and you could understand well why bother building that functionality if uh if other people can build it better for you so you can understand that you know they haven't it it's different most ecommerce platforms would put some form of reporting on there but i can understand the decision not to bother at all and just say look uh these apps can handle that we'll just focus on the on the platform itself um under sales channels so you've got quite a lot of different sales channels so i mentioned before that ecwid really started as a way to embed um e-commerce functionality onto other platforms and that's still here and so you've still got those options so you can see here you can embed it onto basically any platform with code so you've got wordpress wix weebly joomla squarespace all of these and then you've got custom options as well and as it says to blend in seamlessly with any website so that's still a kind of core part of the proposition i suppose what i'm focused on more is actually orders through my ecwid platform rather than embedding it but the export process in terms of getting those orders out of ecwid and into rfm calc is still is still the same that we'll talk about um and then i wanted to talk about just the design functionality as well so this i would say um is a little bit less intuitive than a lot of modern e-commerce platforms so i was expecting this to be a bit more feature-rich so you can see in terms of changing the look of the store you've got some kind of you know radio button and drop-down options in terms of you know how big you want the images to be where you want the content to appear and that that's fine it just feels a little bit outdated i would say in terms of how it works um and then you can obviously create your own theme with css as well which is a nice option actually to edit the store you've got to go back to i think there's an option here this this confused me last time but if i go back to website i can then go to design rather than through the design configuration which is a little bit again not not as intuitive as you'd expect and so if i open the site appearance tab here you can see this is my site that i've set up my demo store and you've got all your functionality in here to just go through and change your content and you know it's reasonably straightforward but it doesn't have what i expected it to have in terms of a big range of dozens and dozens of themes for example that a lot of platforms have now uh just to easily change the look and feel with a couple of clicks that functionality doesn't seem to be there it's not theme based it's the same kind of layout for every still but then you customize that which is fine and you can look you can still get i'm sure to the end result you want relatively easily uh by going through these steps but it's just not as intuitive i would say and not as design focused as a lot of modern e-commerce platforms are so i think it falls down a little bit um in that area ecwid versus other platforms and then just to say on the settings as well so we've got payment options so you can see i've set up my manual pay by cash option which is very helpful and the methods they push mostly are stripe um square and paypal um which is fine so a lot of platforms push stripe and paypal are squares um obviously very popular as well and not all ecommerce platforms kind of push that as a primary payment gateway but ecwid do which is fine uh you can then see though you've got down here and focus to the uk because i'm in the uk you've got quite a lot of other gateways out of the box that you can add so my friends adian which is great uh option obviously you've got klanner although via stripe um you've got clearpay um opeo is a really popular one in the uk as well formerly sage pay so you've got a lot of options there kind of out of the box um in terms of uk focused payment gateways you can add and then there are additional ones down here and so if you want to do more worldwide gateways and there's a big list here that you can integrate as well so whatever payment gateway you use unless it's really really obscure you should be pretty pretty covered there as well and then finally you've got a few kind of delivery options so i've set up kind of free and expensive shipping just to kind of demonstrate this but you can you can add delivery options relatively easily this all works pretty pretty seamlessly and then you've got various other settings as well for taxes and and so on and and product filters and you know there's a few more options down there so i think overall you know it's relatively intuitive i would say there's definitely some areas that i think it falls behind other e-commerce platforms on um in certain parts particularly the design aspects and maybe a little bit on the product management as well but generally it's a you know it's a straightforward platform and it's got a lot of features once you pay for them and really that you'll have no issue if you've got a little bit of ecommerce experience you'll have no issue i think um setting up your store and getting going so now i've taken you through the store um next step is to export these orders as a csv file so let's talk about how we do that so to export the orders we just scroll down uh to the bottom of the page here and you can see this export orders option so as i mentioned this isn't available the free plan this is only available on the venture planning up which is why i've had to upgrade to demonstrate this uh but it always appears here just with a button say you need to upgrade if you want access uh it's then just a case of quickly clicking the export all button and you've got a few options here so by default it will try and force a semicolon delimiter make sure you change that to comma uh because for a csv file that really should be a comma you've then got the option of which columns to select so you know it's it's nice to have this option and so you can select all all but item details or none and then just kind of customize the the columns you want to show so for me uh all is fine uh all but item details is is fine as well because rfm calc we don't do anything with the product data we're focused really on the order and customer data that's the important thing for us so you're fine to exclude the product details i'll demonstrate both files um in a second just so you've got a good understanding of what they both look like and what they both contain but basically for rfm calc really all but item details is ideal and there's no date range option and so it's just uh basically select the columns and select the delimiter and that's it uh you then just click download csv file and you can see that's pushed straight to the browser and so i can save that and that is now downloaded so now we've got the files let's have a little look what they look like so this is the order file uh without the product data first of all so that's the one i've just exported obviously i've saved it in excel and just spread the columns out a bit to make it a bit more readable than the raw csv and so there's a few things to know i think structurally about the file um the first thing is the orders run oldest to newest so a lot of platforms run newest to oldest shopify for example will list orders in there csv export newest to oldest magento lists oldest and newest so it varies platform to platform for rfm calc it doesn't make any difference we can handle both that will auto detect that for you as part of the import process but it's good to be aware i think uh when you're looking at the file how that's structured and you've then got just running through the columns so you've got order number which you can see is a random selection of characters so there's no kind of incremental value that you might be used to with with some platforms so you'd expect your orders to kind of go up by one each time um in terms of an order number uh but here it's kind of random letters and so i'm sure that's a unique value i'm going to have to assume that's a unique value and for your store but just bear in mind that it's not an incremental value if that's something you're used to you've then got the customer's email which is very important which we'll need as an identifier which will come back to you you've got the subtotal without tax you've got the timestamp of the order we've then got the shipping details in terms of the name and so the name is the first name answer name combined into one field some e-commerce platforms separate those uh ecwid doesn't which is no problem you then got the shipping address details in terms of street one um street two um city um country postal code um state if there was a state and the country um so you've also got the phone number as well uh for the for the shipping information and so that's all fairly standard what i would say is it's um a little bit strange uh in terms of how the columns are labeled so they've got all these kind of underscores they're not very human readable which is unusual and so it's really kind of made i suppose a system point of view rather than a csv you're actually going to look at but um it doesn't really make a difference at all to rfm calc but it's just something to be aware of because most ecommerce platforms will export csvs with kind of human readable column names and obviously these aren't unreadable they're just not as uh i suppose friend user friendly as some platforms and you then got all the billing details so these are all repeated and so even if the uh billing address differs or i should say is the same to the shipping address um it will still repeat all the information in the billing field so that's again kind of standard uh but good to know and so you've got all the same uh information here again you've got the phone number uh based on the billing uh address as well as the shipping address even if that's the same it'll repeat it in both both sets you've then got the payment method so all mine are paid by cash as i mentioned uh the shipping method uh you've got payment and fulfillment status and you've got the current order status as well and in terms of the fulfillment status code so all mine were processing when i generated this file uh you then got the order subtotal uh the order subtotal without tax taxed separately you've got the order shipping order shipping without tax as well so you've got all the kind of values that you need really and there's a handling fee column if that's set up on your store as well there isn't on mine so that's all zero and then all the way across here you've got the actual order total uh in terms of the grand total the customer is actually paying which is always the value i like to focus on when i'm doing reports and but that's there and then you've got that without tax as well so quite quite um detailed in terms of the different kind of order total so when you do reports if you want to do a subtotal without tax for example as a value that you're reporting for orders that's absolutely fine you can just select that column during the rfm calc process which i'll detail in a second where we do the input and you've then got some information about uh discounts if then you've been applied the order weight and then a few other extra fields as well and things like the customer's ip address which i've just blanked out uh for the purposes of this video and then a few other kind of um fields around payment transaction id and referrer id and things like that which aren't aren't populated online so it's a fairly standard um csv i would say nothing nothing complicated like i say the column names aren't as intuitive um as some platforms and also i think the ordering of the column is a bit weird as well it's kind of strange that you've got this total without tax all the way over here and then you've also got um order total without tax all the way over here which appears to be the same thing so that again is a little bit unintuitive i would say in terms of how that's structured and it might actually be slightly different because that one's got um only four pounds 16 there uh whereas the actual order total without tax is 166 so that's a little bit strange to have two very similar columns with different different values there but the main thing is all the information we need for rfm calc is in there and it's you know it's fairly easy to identify so there's no kind of issue importing into rfm calc i will also just demonstrate the multi-line format so this is the same file but this time i selected to include the product data in the file and so i thought this was useful to look at as well even though we don't use this rfm calc um it's just good to be aware i think of the option that you've got so you can see basically it's very similar in terms of all the um order number and email and so on but you've also got the product details and so you've got the sku and the name of the product and also all the product specific information in terms of the price of the product any options as you can see i've got a size option on a few of these products and basically what ties all these lines together is the order number so some ecommerce platforms will just have on the very top uh line of the order the key order information in terms of the order total and delivery and shipping address and then on subsequent lines just the product information tied together by the order id ecwid is different in that it repeats everything on every line which kind of makes it a little bit easier to manage i suppose but all the delivery information all the all the order totals all the payment information is all repeated on every line and even those product specific lines as well so that's just something to be aware of like i say um if you're already using this format for something else and you want to upload uh this multi-line format into iphone calc rfm cart will handle it no problem uh but obviously because we're just ignoring that product information it's preferable if you can um just for the you know ease of downloading and the the size of the download file and so on just to export without the product data because we don't do anything with it either but like i say if you are using this format already that's absolutely fine an rfm cap will basically just amalgamate all the order information into one line and it'll handle it handles multi-line csvs no problem at all so now we've been through the files let's see how we can create a project in rfm calc and upload the order data okay so now we've got our export the next step is to create a project in rfm calc so i've got my uh test account open here with all my projects so i'm just gonna go here to create a new one and we'll just call it test ecwid and just test liquid.com uh so in terms of the project currency all the orders i've placed through in gbp obviously rfm calc supports all world currencies so you can change a different one uh there if you need to for your default and for the order date column if we just have a look at the order date you can see it's a nice clear kind of time stamp in terms of the the name of the month uh the day of the month of the year so the default interpretation is absolutely fine for that and as i mentioned orders run oldest to newest in the ecwid csv uh but auto detect is fine again and that's all the settings we need really set up with the project simple as that i can then go into my project and schedule the report so all i'm going to do is upload the uh raw csv and so the same information that's in the excel file demonstrating but obviously in the original csv format we'll just download that nice and quick and then it's just a case of mapping the columns so order id um as we can see is order number see there we've got order dates is uh timestamp so again not the most kind of user-friendly name but it's still fairly clear i would say what it is and i think did we have a currency code column let's have a look no there's not a currency code column but that's fine that's optional um so we don't have to set that anyway the only advantage of setting a currency code column is if you are taking um orders in multiple currencies what rfm calc can do is convert orders in other currencies to your base currency at the prevailing exchange rate when it generates the report and that's a really cool feature and so that means when you're looking at lifetime value you're getting an accurate picture in your base currency rather than kind of having to ignore or not correctly convert other currencies and but that doesn't apply to ecwid which is fine now for the order value column you'll notice there's a lot of different potential values for this and you've got this weird total without tax over here which differs um to the order total without tax over here but what i'm going to go for is order total because that includes everything that the customer has paid and i think generally that's a safe one to use when selecting a value column so all the way down here order total we've then got an option to set the order status column so i'm going to set this to i think the fulfillment status it's probably um the safest one so you've got fulfillment status and fulfillment status code which again is slightly confusing uh because it's processing or processing in capitals but i'll just go for fulfillment status um you don't have to set this as you can see it's an optional field and the only reason you would want to set this is if you want to exclude certain statuses from the report so what rfm calc allows you to do is add a comma separated list here of statuses that you want to exclude so for example if you wanted to exclude cancelled orders you could do that here through the report setup rather than having to manually remove those rows from your csv before you upload it so that's kind of cool now for the customer id we'll go all the way back over to here in the sheet and it's the email field is what we want to use for this um so ecwid doesn't have an internal customer id value that you could use uh some e-commerce platforms do and but again unless every customer has that you'd want to use email address anyway so email is really for 99 of cases the best identified to use um as a customer id so we'll select email again if you want to exclude certain id so internal staff orders for example you can come a separate list here of internal customer ids to exclude and that supports wild cards as well so if you want to exclude all orders from your email domain um or assuming you know that they're test orders for example if your staff are placing orders and so on you can exclude those really easily with this exclusion list feature and then we've just got the customer information so we've got again email for the customer email customer phone there's a uh shipping phone we'll go for the billing phone uh build person phone column uh for the customer's first name we'll go for the build person name and so as i mentioned when we were going through the csv some platforms have first name and last name separated in the csv uh ecwid doesn't but that's no problem you just set the name as the first name column and ignore the last name column and then i don't think there was a separate column uh for customer company and no which is fine so we can ignore that and all this information is used for is just populating certain parts of the report so in some places we'll generate for example you know a list of your 10 best customers or um you know your top customers who haven't purchased anything for the past six months things like that and so that just pulls through this information here but it's not essential so if you're not able to map these columns for any reason that's that's no problem and you've then got the option to add custom columns uh if your account plan supports it so i'm on the huge plan so i can add 10 custom columns and so really this is up to you uh what you add quite often things like payment method and shipping method uh common things that um our customers like to use so i'll add those here and all that will do is that will generate additional reports based around the payment method and shipping method that the customer uses um on their first order so for example on this one you might find that for free shipping the lifetime value and the average time to the second order or the average time between the second and third order and so on differs versus if they're selecting the express shipping and so that's kind of really interesting data and that allows you a lot of flexibility then in terms of generating additional reports around any column that you want and of course um you'll know if you've watched any of these videos before that you can add your own columns to the end of the csv we custom data and then generate custom reports around that so it's a really kind of powerful feature for our frame cal that allows you to generate additional reporting data really easily and then that's kind of it so we'll call it uh test ecwid one and there's the option here to anonymize customer data if you want to so all that will do is replace all the real names and emails with ones basically if you don't want real names and emails appearing in your report and that's no problem obviously we don't need to do this because this is just a test order and then finally i'm just going to tip this box to overwrite the default project column mappings and all that will do is assign all the options all these columns that are mapped here will be set against the project permanently and so next time i come back to this project and schedule another ecwid uh report all these columns will already be mapped for me which will obviously save some time and that will remember things like your exclusion list as well as part of that so save the mappings and continue and that's it so now that report is scheduled that will generate in a couple of minutes and i'll get an email to confirm the reports generated and that will give me all the data that i'm looking for in terms of lifetime value average time between orders customer cohort analysis rfm segmentation and so on that's all generated as standard as part of the report great and that's everything so just to summarize today we've talked about ecwid as a platform we've had a little demo of the admin i've shown you how to export orders as a csv file we've then been through that csv file in detail to understand the structure and then finally we've imported that file back into our fm calc by creating a project for ecwid and scheduling the report and so hopefully that's been useful and educational and thanks for watching really appreciate it and obviously if you have any questions on the platform feel free to visit rfmcalc.com and drop us a line thanks very much [Music] you