Webflow Ecommerce overview
Discover Webflow Ecommerce! This guide provides an overview of all the fundamental pieces that allow you to build, design, and launch your store.
With Webflow Ecommerce, you can build and design online stores, customize every detail of your cart and checkout experiences, manage products and orders, set up and launch a fully functional, completely custom online store without writing a line of code.
In this overview
- Building your store
- Designing your store
- Launching your store
- Marketing your products and online store
- Processing orders
Building your store
You can get started with Webflow Ecommerce by choosing a template or starting from scratch. If you choose an Ecommerce template, Ecommerce will be enabled for you by default. If you choose a different template, start from scratch, or update an existing site, you can enable Ecommerce by clicking the Ecommerce icon in the left sidebar.
Once you enable Ecommerce, a number of Ecommerce features (elements, pages, collections, settings) will be available for you to get started within the Designer and Editor.
You can follow the Setup guide in the Ecommerce panel to set up your store and launch it or follow this guide which also links to a ton of educational content related to Webflow Ecommerce.
Resources
Ecommerce collections
Two Ecommerce collections are automatically created for you so you can get started with your Webflow store: Products and Categories. These are dynamic collections, just like CMS collections. However, unlike CMS collections, Ecommerce collections are somewhat different. Check out the resources listed below to learn more about dynamic collections in general and Ecommerce collections in particular.
Products and categories
Once you’ve updated your collection structure, you can start adding products to your store and organize them in categories. You can do this manually or automatically by integrating it with other services such as Zapier.
Learn more
- Ecommerce collections and default product fields
- Adding and managing products and categories
- Creating product options and variants
- Importing products
- Tracking inventory
Designing your store
When it comes to designing your store, you’ve got the same design freedom and flexibility as the CMS — so the shopping experience can integrate seamlessly with the rest of your site. You can create filtered, limited, and paginated lists of products and feature them on your homepage.
Ecommerce elements and pages
You can also create collection template pages for your products and categories, and even customize the checkout experience by styling two Ecommerce utility pages: the checkout page and the order confirmation page.
Learn more
- Designing with Ecommerce collections: Designing pages and lists
- Creating an add to cart button
- Adding a shopping cart onto every page of your Ecommerce site
- Customizing the view cart button
- Customizing the shopping cart
- Customizing the checkout experience
Launching your store
Once your store is built and designed, you’re ready to launch it. However, unlike the CMS, you cannot publish a functioning Ecommerce site by just pressing publish — you’ll need to set up your store first.
Ecommerce settings
First, add your business address and information. This allows us to set intelligent defaults for many of the other store settings such as currency, unit system (imperial vs metric), initial shipping zone (store's country), and initial tax settings. You can, of course, update these settings at any time from within the Designer or the Editor.
Learn more
- Ecommerce settings overview
- Connecting to a payment gateway
- Configuring shipping methods for different shipping zones
- Configuring taxes
- Inventory sync integrations
- Enabling checkout and launching your store
Marketing your products and online store
You can connect Ecommerce collections with CMS collections and feature products in blog posts, or link products or product categories to a brand collection. You can also feature filtered product lists on your homepage to create seasonal promotions, advertising campaigns, and coming soon landing pages.
Customize emails
Customize and style automated transactions and receipt emails to match your brand.
Learn more: Customizing Ecommerce emails
Manage lifecycle marketing with flexible forms
Add a Webflow form to collect emails for a waitlist. Connect your form to MailChimp or other platforms to run email marketing campaigns.
Learn more
Create dynamic ads
You can also pass events to Facebook, Instagram, and Google to run smarter marketing campaigns.
Learn more
- Syncing products to Facebook Catalog Manager
- Setting up Instagram Shopping
- Syncing products to Google Merchant Center
Set up Ecommerce tracking with Google Analytics
You can also integrate your site with Google Analytics and set up ecommerce tracking to see ecommerce data in your analytics reports.
Learn more
Processing orders
Now that you’ve published your store, you can start getting orders. Orders will be received in the Webflow Designer and Editor where you can dig into the details on who ordered it, what their address is, and most importantly, mark the status of the order for your own tracking. You’ll also get a notification for new orders through email and in the Designer.
You can also manage your orders with the Webflow API or Zapier integrations to make fulfillment and store management a breeze.