Hey everyone, David (founder/ceo) of Weebly here. We’re really excited about this launch, Weebly is now a platform to power a business online with websites, ecommerce, and email marketing all under one roof. In case you haven’t heard of us, we were W07 (one of the first YC batches) — 9 years later, over 40M people have created their site or store on Weebly, and 325M people around the world and half of the US population visit those businesses every month.
Here are some cool things you might not notice:
- We were born pre-AWS and actually run our own data centers, have an ASN and manage our own network, host 2PB of data that is geographically replicated in near-real time, and have successfully defended against 200Gbps+ DDoS attacks.
- We’ve put a ton of care into bringing all of the pieces together (websites, ecommerce, email marketing) in a super integrated and seamless way. Check out, for example, how you can customize all of the store emails with Weebly Promote (email marketing), when you send out an email campaign you can automatically track sales generated from that email, how we automatically import and create smart groups -- like frequent customers who haven’t purchased recently -- or how we will even recommend pre-created emails based on actions you take adding new products, putting products on sale, etc.
- The eCommerce platform has been significantly upgraded, with things like real-time shipping (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL integrations), abandoned carts, gift cards, a re-built tax & shipping engine, a new store front & checkout, bulk editing and power seller features, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff.
- Check out the apps for iOS and Android. It was pretty hard engineering work to get a full live editing experience with a fast, native UI that need to ultimately render down to a slow WebView (no one else that we’re aware of has been able to pull this off like this).
Our ultimate goal is to create a platform that small to medium creators of all kinds can use so they can focus on what they love doing, and less on the business of running their business. Imagine all the time spent learning from awesome people like patio11 -- what if we could make the whole online side of running your business a whole lot easier? That’s the dream, this is the first step in that direction.
Happy to answer any questions and would love your feedback!
This looks pretty fantastic! Well done on getting this together and launching! I think we should always congratulate folks who get to the launch phase, no matter their size/age. :-)
I have a friend that reached out to me about setting up a website for her business that she's starting with some friends. I was originally going to suggest Shopify to her, especially since we're in Canada.
I went to your pricing page, and saw that you have more plans, present them in CAD, and are more competitive than Shopify. Am I to assume that means that this is open to Canadian/international customers?
Also, Shopify shows their transaction fees, which seems to be broken down by credit card type. You show your Weebly transaction fee, but then say this is on top of Stripe/PayPal's fees. Perhaps it might make sense to provide details and/or a link to their rates so a customer can evaluate it?
Finally, Shopify has a 14 day free trial that is compelling to "casuals" to try and evaluate before they jump right in. I know that would be appealing to my friend. Is there an equivalent option from Weebly?
Those are the questions I had for now, without diving too deep into the actual platforms. Ultimately, my friend is completely non-technical, and I don't have the time to support her regularly, so a solution like this that's mostly hands-off is perfect. Kudos!
Yes, Canada is a very important market for us, and we think our ecommerce platform with Weebly 4 is incredibly competitive with Shopify for most non-enterprise use cases.
We have a couple big advantages over Shopify: first, the content customization side of things with a WYSIWYG editor -- it's awesome for people who aren't technical, and saves you a lot of time if you are -- and second, deeply integrated email marketing.
I'm obviously biased, but I think overall it's a much more accessible, affordable, and intuitive platform for most small to medium businesses.
Good feedback on the transaction fees. We actually don't charge any transaction fees on the Business plan ($25/mo), and you can integrate from any number of merchant payment providers like Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Authorize.net. I think we can do a better job of being crystal clear on what all of the payment fees are.
On the free trial -- you can try most of the features for free on Weebly, but there are some ecommerce features you need to upgrade to try. We're working on it though, and we should have it released within a couple weeks!
I just followed your link on an English-language website (Hacker News) in response to an English-language comment (yours) on my iPad (running in English, my mother tongue and main language) while in Spain (where I live)
Your site was presented to me in Spanish. Please don't do this. Don't choose a language for me based on my location.
This one is really tricky. You'll see this same behavior by Google, Facebook, and most other major providers. We spent a lot of time looking into this, it's unfortunately a very complex situation:
1- In theory browser language should be the perfect way to do it, in practice as often as 25% of the time or more it's set incorrectly. Unfortunately, that means a lot of people that don't speak English end up with English content.
2- There is more than just language, in several regions we are localized and not just translated. So it's important to send specific content for the region, like prices, specific local features (e.g. payment methods), specific photography to better appeal to the local audience, local user stories & articles, etc.
3- It's especially hard with English because that is, in essence, the "default" language. If your browser language is set to Spanish and you live in Germany, we'll respect that, but it's a bit harder to do with English.
We're definitely open to input on how to handle it better... One step forward would be to bring the language selector up to the top of the page so it is much more accessible.
Thanks for your response. It is indeed tricky, as I know from both sides of the situation. I don't think this behaviour is as prevalent as you suggest.
I just checked Facebook and Google from a newly opened "private browsing" tab and both gave me English versions.
Interesting. I experienced it differently myself (while I was traveling, both Google and Facebook would show me local language, regional sites), as have others we've tested with. We've done a bit of research into how others do it to come to this point, but it looks like we should dig a bit deeper.
[Accepted-Language] in the HTTP header and the location based on the IP address (Google has a super easy API for this) is the easiest way that I could think of. Both are pretty easy to implement as I have done both before.
You will get localized date formatting among a few other things probably. I am just saying you could use location from the HTTP header that is meant to tell the server what languages you speak. The VPN portion could really only be fixed by allowing you to select and save an address that is originally defaulted to IP.
Note the "en" in the URL and "English" in the language selector in the top right of the page.
The button text and input placeholder text is not in English for me, nor is the text at the bottom of the page. Blogger, Google groups and I think other Google stuff, like Flights, is the same.
Google saves the preferred language in a cookie setting, which you can manually reset via hamburger menu -> Search Settings -> Languages or with the &hl= CGI parameter. Most of the time it's autodetected via the queries you type though - the only time it's likely to be wrong is if you type a query that's in an ambiguous language (eg. a proper noun), have no cookies (eg. incognito, or first time searching with the browser), and are not signed in. Then it defaults to the geographic location.
Isn't it simple to just give an option for user to change the language on a site ? A dropdown on top right ? Genuine question. Why guess what the user wants to see ? This is a tough problem. Let the user decide.
I had the same thing happen to me, verbatim (ie, in Spain). To make it worse, I'm on a slow connection so after several tries to get it to load - in English to boot - I gave up. Will have to remind myself to see it tomorrow when I go to a cafe w/ wifi.
I'd like to second this, while also noting that a side-effect of this noodling-with-languages is that my fully English OS and browser is getting a page with some content (full paragraphs!) in Dutch, while other content is in English. On the same page. An interesting bug, but not one that inspires confidence.
Android phone in en-gb. Play Store account from UK. Download Waze while in the middle of France, get the voice indications in French. Who's the clever cookie that decided that? :-)
If you look at your http request headers @stevoski do you have more than one [Accepted-Language]? Is one of them Spanish?
Also, @drusenko (forgot your name on HN)[Edited to add his name], it SHOULD be pretty easy to change your code to switch languages based on [Accepted-Language] and still do localization for payments/time/calendar stuff like that. PM me if you want.
You are probably an outlier, in that majority of ip requests coming from spain are going to want spanish. it makes sense to render default in spanish. I am not sure what headers your ipad is sending, but i doubt it sends what your language preference is. (i could be wrong)
also, as previous sites don't add the chosen language in the click request, i don't see how being on hn previously is relevant.
the flip side to this is - if this is actually a big problem (incorrect renderings of language) maybe some dnn could be applied for a new start up idea! haha
> I am not sure what headers your ipad is sending, but i doubt it sends what your language preference is. (i could be wrong)
You're wrong. :)
This is what the Accept-Language header is meant for[1]. AFAIK it is sent by most modern browsers, although as the referenced MDN article explains it isn't always an accurate reflection of user preferences. I'm not sure how iOS Safari in particular sets its value, but I would imagine that it is based on the current OS language setting.
I'm an outlier indeed, but plenty of people live or travel in countries that use languages they don't speak or prefer, and don't want find themselves redirected to websites they don't understand.
Spanish speakers (in Spain at least) tend to come from google.es, which prefers Spanish-language results, or from Spanish language links and discussions.
It is wrong behaviour to choose my language based on my location.
Google.es doesn't seem to work that well, in certain circumstances. I often write in Portuguese and when I do searches with words in that language, the results come up almost entirely in Spanish (even when placing the phrase in quotes).
Given, they're "similar" languages, but I would think Google would recognize "não" (no), for example, as belonging to the Portuguese language (especially since it's the only language that uses that word).
Hey! Jaclyn here (eCommerce Group Product Manager @Weebly). We have made some improvements this launch to help get us closer to full VAT support, which is something that we plan to get to in the future. We know this is vital for EU businesses, and we definitely want to improve this experience, but in the meantime we have several options to help support this.
Specifically, we've added the option to specify if you want to include taxes in your prices. If selected, we will show a tax summary under the order total.
In addition to this, you can also add a Note to Seller field in checkout and use this to optionally collect VAT IDs if you are selling to customers that could be tax exempt. When an order comes in, the order details will display the message left here by your customer. If they left a valid VAT ID number, you can refund their order the tax amount using our improved refund functionality that easily lets you issue partial refunds.
Finally, you can specify on a per product basis whether an item should have tax applied to it or not.
Hope this helps - and as mentioned, we are working on improving this area and adding an even easier VAT setup feature inthe future!
David, Weebly is amazing! It's what I used for some of my earliest projects and kinda want got me started down the path of web development. Glad to see that it is growing!
I like what you guys have been doing. What I want is an integrated CMS (content management system) that I can easily manage content, text and images. Create new content nodes to combing e-commerce with content.
One thing I've noticed on Weebly, Squarespace, Wix and other similar "DIY without any coding" website platforms is that all their themes depend on having excellent photography.
Excellent photography is great, but many of the small businesses who are primarily targeted with these services, don't have it. And stock photography looks like, well, stock photography.
I'd love to see a service like this embrace themes that don't depend on great photography. Themes that make good use of typography and other non-image visual elements.
Not to diminish your point that more themes need to gear themselves towards imageless content, this is just a good place to start for those working on budgets.
Very true. Great photography is key for a great looking site. We do have some good stock photography available, but it will never look as good as the real deal.
I love your suggestion for more typography focused themes!
It would be cool to make a service that does stock photography (or custom photography for the right price) that integrates with Weebly, Squarespace, Wix and other similar DIY website platforms.
This is problem for every website theme - even lots of bootstrap themes depend on glorious images. Designers who build themes have access to great images and so they use them constantly.
Even searching for wordpress themes (of which millions exist) recently I had to ignore 75% of what I saw because they have a huge hero or full column images.
Weebly is one of the companies from our batch (W07) that I would have wanted to invest in, if given the opportunity. They just build really cool products for non-technical folks. I've been recommending them for years (even though they kinda/sorta indirectly compete with what we build).
I've been surprised by how important and effective email still is to most small businesses, and it's a hard problem to solve; having it integrated with the rest of your site and commerce solution is even harder. Ecommerce is a more obvious need, but has a lot more solutions available, including for non-technical folks.
Congrats on launching cool new stuff all these years later!
We're still hanging in there. Our Open Source user base keeps growing, but revenue from our commercial products has been flat for too long; we're working on some hosted products, to hopefully address that. It's likely a pivot is in our future. And, on the personal front, I'm still traveling mostly full-time in an RV (as I've been doing off and on since I left the valley ~7 years ago).
Obviously, this isn't competing with someone who is spinning up their own Django/Rails/Node solution.
The big questions that come to mind:
1. How does this compare with hosting Wordpress. I like that with Wordpress, if some issue comes up, you can find someone who knows the innards and program what you need. Does the user have that level of access?
2. How does it compare with WIX, and the other site building competitors?
3. What if someone has built some great piece of code and I want to install some of the functionality on my site, can I do it?
It just seems that it is a closed enough system that I have to rely on Weebly engineers to do everything.
1. Wordpress is probably better if you really want a platform to build something very custom off of, so in that sense it would be an alternative to a Django/Rails/Node solution. The downside is that it's a lot of work to both build and maintain, worrying about scaling, ongoing security patches and maintenance, etc.
2. One, Weebly is a much more intuitive, easy to use platform, two, we have a powerful ecommerce platform built-in (Wix doesn't have this), three, we have iOS and Android apps to create or manage everything from (no one else has that), four, we have a deep developer ecosystem (over 200 third party apps and integrations, the most of any platform), and five, the website, ecommerce, and email marketing is deeply integrated, others are more a collection of pieces.
Weebly generates absolutely ridiculous code. Tons of CSS files, tons of JS files, plus random blocks of embedded JS.
I've recently wanted to move a website off of Weebly for a friend, and it's a nightmare. Instead of simple clean markup you get all kinds of monstrosity.
The move from Weebly 2 to Weebly 3 seemed to be very rough - lots of unhappy punters. What lessons did you learn from that move, how did you handle thing differently this time?
We learned a lot, and things have been completely different this time around. We were much more careful about managing timelines & deliverables much further upstream, delivering features in more of a phased approach to prevent on big last minute merge with unanticipated interaction effects, ensuring adequate time for internal testing as well as external beta testing to uncover bugs of all kinds (regressions, usability, etc), and then cutting scope aggressively if necessary as the deadlines approach to make sure that we maintain a very high quality bar -- those are just a few of the things we've been able to improve on.
Very proud of Weebly 4 and the team that made it all happen, it's both our biggest release ever, as well as our most polished!
It's a pretty neat environment for editing online and seeing a real-time preview -- lots of people use this to learn to code. We also have a Ruby gem that you can plug into a git hook or your favorite IDE for rapid prototyping.
I live in the Netherlands and don't speak Dutch. Got redirected to /nl/4, which is almost all in English but has some of the headings in Dutch. Pretty sure it's not intentional..
Yes! You can absolutely do that and customize quite a bit, although the payment flow is not fully customizable. Check out the docs here: https://dev.weebly.com/use-partials.html
So let's say I'm going to set-up a small business with an online store and other content (blog, etc...). Let's also say I don't care about the tech stack or want to be doing custom css/html.
Weebly looks promising for that, and at $25-50/month isn't too bad.
For people more familiar with this area, what other options are there? Wordpress+shopify? And how do the fees stack up with the different options?
I haven't played with Weebly, and I've spent a fair amount of time doing custom development, but I have a store on Shopify. The pricing on the last two tiers is very competitive. On the top non-enterprise tier, Shopify is about $180 a month and the feature set seems pretty comparable. Shopify doesn't provide a ton of tools to build your site unless you can do HTML/CSS, so I'd imagine Weebly is stronger in that respect for non-technical users.
The email piece seems like an after-thought, once you get beyond a few hundred customers, you will need a more serious solution for email marketing.
Webflow CTO chiming in here - Weebly is definitely great for getting something up and running. But if you have specific design needs, then Webflow may be a better fit for you. We have powerful layout options like Flexbox: http://flexbox.webflow.com, and a full interactions & animations toolset: http://interactions.webflow.com. Our CMS also gives you the ability to embed dynamic content into you page, so you can power a lightweight ecommerce solution via Shopify or Foxycart. We also support SSL, and a powerful hosting stack where you'll pages will load in less than 30ms.
tl;dr: Webflow if you need powerful design controls without coding.
Do app integrations have a way of storing arbitrary data on resources, such as products?
For example, Shopify has "metafields" which allow Apps to add strings of data within a namespace/key, which can then be used in the liquid templating engine.
Justin from the Weebly Apps team here -- that's a great suggestion! We'd love to add functionality to store custom data on products, pages, blog posts, etc. and even allow apps to access other apps' data stored in that fashion. We don't support this quite yet, but it's something we're thinking about. You can find all of our documentation at http://dev.weebly.com
Here are some cool things you might not notice: - We were born pre-AWS and actually run our own data centers, have an ASN and manage our own network, host 2PB of data that is geographically replicated in near-real time, and have successfully defended against 200Gbps+ DDoS attacks.
- We’ve put a ton of care into bringing all of the pieces together (websites, ecommerce, email marketing) in a super integrated and seamless way. Check out, for example, how you can customize all of the store emails with Weebly Promote (email marketing), when you send out an email campaign you can automatically track sales generated from that email, how we automatically import and create smart groups -- like frequent customers who haven’t purchased recently -- or how we will even recommend pre-created emails based on actions you take adding new products, putting products on sale, etc.
- The eCommerce platform has been significantly upgraded, with things like real-time shipping (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL integrations), abandoned carts, gift cards, a re-built tax & shipping engine, a new store front & checkout, bulk editing and power seller features, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff.
- Check out the apps for iOS and Android. It was pretty hard engineering work to get a full live editing experience with a fast, native UI that need to ultimately render down to a slow WebView (no one else that we’re aware of has been able to pull this off like this).
- We’ve built a web code editor (similar to Mozilla Thimble from a few days ago) that’s pretty nifty. Create a site, then go to Theme>Edit HTML / CSS (screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...)
- Here are some of the cool new themes: https://highpeak-theme.weebly.com/, https://verticals-business-slick.weebly.com/, https://pathway-financial.weebly.com/, https://urbandine-business.weebly.com/, https://jaysims-oasis-merch.weebly.com/, https://oikos-test.weebly.com/
Our ultimate goal is to create a platform that small to medium creators of all kinds can use so they can focus on what they love doing, and less on the business of running their business. Imagine all the time spent learning from awesome people like patio11 -- what if we could make the whole online side of running your business a whole lot easier? That’s the dream, this is the first step in that direction.
Happy to answer any questions and would love your feedback!