Show HN: Weebly 4 – Websites, eCommerce and Email Marketing

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).

- 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!

Hi David!

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!

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?

Accessed from Brazil and the content is translated. Very cool. Congrats!

Thanks!

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!