Weebly Adds More E-Commerce, Marketing Capabilities to Its Website Builder

San Francisco, CA-based Weebly has expanded its website builder with a focus on e-commerce and marketing, along with more insights and mobile management.

Weebly Co-Founder and CEO David Rusenko said Weebly 4 pairs advanced e-commerce features with integrated email marketing capabilities. Combined, they enable users to autocreate email campaigns based on activity in online stores.

Weebly 4 Focus

Rusenko, Chris Fanini and Dan Veltri created Weebly in 2007 when they were students at Penn State University.  Since then, they’ve raised $35.7 million in four rounds from nine investors and created a product that enables non-technical users build websites and webstores.

Some 40 million people are already using previous versions of Weebly, with 10 million of them signing on for version 3 alone. To continue that growth, Weebly 4 includes a new layer of intelligence that makes it more flexible and responsive, and easier to develop an online presence.

“On average, small businesses use four online platforms every day. One of the top complaints we hear is that they are overwhelmed — figuring out what to do with technology is a nightmare, and it’s just getting worse,” Rusenko told CMSWire.

“With Weebly 4, we wanted to create a platform that has all of the pieces in one place — high design and easy to use websites, a robust online store and integrated marketing — so that you can focus on what you are doing. We’ll help with the rest.”

Weebly’s E-Commerce Platform

The e-commerce space is competitive — even Salesforce is now in the game following its purchase of Demandware. To succeed, vendors really have to offer something different.

Weebly 4, Rusenko said, is a rich platform that’s tailored for small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs). 

“Nothing out there combines the depth of features with the ease of use of Weebly to help businesses at this scale. It’s also the only platform that deeply integrates best in the world websites, e-commerce, and email marketing that works together seamlessly,” he said.

E-Commerce Intelligence Layer

Weebly 4’s intelligence layer sets it apart from earlier versions.

“The intelligence layer starts with the new onboarding flow, which directs users onto a fully built page specific to the industry they are working with along with curated apps that Weebly thinks users need to fuel growth,” Rusenko said.

“On the marketing front, the email marketing is tightly tied to your store that all your content like products, prices, blog posts, photos logo and categories are ready to be dragged and dropped into an email template.”

Simplifying E-Commerce

Weebly 4 also captures contact information of site visitors who sign up, purchase, fill out a form or leave something in their cart and automatically groups them for email marketing campaign purposes.

This means SMBs can run targeted campaigns to segmented customer groups like “people who haven’t purchased in 30 days” or “people that have browsed site without buying,” he said.

“We realized we had an opportunity to do what we do best as a company — simplify complicated technology for entrepreneurs. We’re hoping you will only have to log into one platform to run your business with Weebly 4,” he added.

A Weebly 4 e-commerce site can be accessed and managed from a mobile device through a mobile app.

“Just last week we had a customer testing the new app and she was able to fully update her inventory from her phone at the airport. We think that’s the new normal,” Rusenko said.