Choosing an e-commerce solution for your online store can be a real hassle these days.
There are lots of different options, each responding to specific needs. In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of a new kind of tools: the no-code solutions.
Webflow is one of the pioneers here.
It’s a designer-centric website builder. People use it to create beautiful websites without writing a single line of code.
A while back, we published a Snipcart integration tutorial with Webflow following increasing demand from the community. However, both platforms are miles away from what they were at that time.
Last year, for starters, Webflow released an e-commerce feature for its platform.
In some ways, Webflow now overlaps with Snipcart functionality.
This piece will cover:
- An overview of both Webflow e-commerce & Snipcart
- Their included features and pricing
- What makes them unique
- A Snipcart + Webflow video tutorial
Hopefully, it will help you decide which one is the best for your next e-commerce project.
You can find more e-commerce solutions comparisons here.
Shoutout to our friend Pixel Geek, who made the video tutorial. It’s the best resource out there showing how to easily integrate our shopping cart into your Webflow project.
Let’s get into it!
What is Webflow e-commerce?
At its core, Webflow is an all-in-one web building platform. In that sense, it provides a no-code website building tool oriented toward web designers.
It offers a visual editor to create custom web pages from scratch (or themes). It can also act as your CMS and hosting provider. The code is automatically generated while you design your site. They also let you export the rendered HTML, CSS and JavaScript code if you wish to use your own CMS and hosting.
Recently, they released a new feature: Webflow e-commerce, the no-code/design-first e-commerce site builder. It allows you to build an e-commerce website using the Webflow platform entirely. Their offer is more on par with Shopify in the way that it offers an all-in-one package. Content management, design, admin functions, and e-commerce features; everything is managed within Webflow.
The main difference between the other monolithic e-commerce solutions is that they offer true customization. You can genuinely craft a unique website as opposed to the rigid templates offered by traditional e-commerce platforms.
Everything from the product pages to the shopping cart can be designed to match your brand. You can also customize the checkout experience to be in tune with your whole website.
The process is relatively simple:
- Create an account on Webflow
- Choose a template OR start from scratch
- Create your products inside the platform UI
What is Snipcart?
Snipcart is a flexible shopping cart developers can easily integrate into any website in minutes.
You add Snipcart's checkout to a site like you'd do with Google Analytics: by copy-pasting a few lines of code snippets.
Products are added pretty much in the same way!
All of your e-commerce logic can effectively be handled in the frontend, making it easy to integrate in web apps, static sites, or even old school CMS.
With basic CSS skills, you can change the look and feel of your whole checkout flow without much limitations. Snipcart makes for a particularly flexible development experience, hence the “dev-centric” part of this description.
Now for non tech-savvy folks trying to figure out what they’ve just read, here’s how I explain what we do to my mom (‘sup Carole): Snipcart allows you to sell pretty much anything on your website while keeping your personalized brand.
If you decide to go with a combination of Webflow and Snipcart however, you’ll only need very basic HTML knowledge and solid Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V skills. The tutorial below will highlight that.
“Developer-oriented” doesn’t mean that merchants are left behind. Snipcart offers a friendly merchant back office to manage all of your e-commerce operations: orders, discounts, abandoned carts, shipping, and more.
Read the rest of this post here
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