Review of Easy E-Commerce Solution, Wazala
August 22nd, 2010
Wazala is a great new e-commerce solution that can work with any web site and is designed to make setting up an online store a simple copy, paste, point, and click operation.
In experimenting with Wazala in conjunction with a WordPress website, sadly, at the time of this blog posting, the WordPress plugin simply did not work for me, and I had to refer to the inaccurate instructions on Wazala’s web site to get the thing working (long story short, you need to paste a bit of code directly before the </head> tage of your site.)
However, once you get the code into your header, then it’s smooth sailing without another lick of code necessary to get your store up and running.
How it Works
To quote from Wazala’s web site:
Add a “store” button to your blog or website, and your store will simply pop-up over your content — no more sending your customers elsewhere to make a purchase. Wazala functions as a part of your existing site.
Wazala Store Button on the upper-right hand side. Upon mouseover, it slides down just a little bit to display checkout information.
Once you click on the store button, you get a clean and attractive overlay window with containing your entire store. By default, the window is styled in a neutral manner so that out of the box it integrates pretty seamlessly into the look and feel of your site.
Here's what the store overlay looks like.
The store in the screencap above allows for multiple categories, which is not possible with the free plan, but comes with the least expensive of the paid plans. The free plan restricts you to 5 products and limited functionality, while the paid plans run anywhere from $9.95 to $29.95 per month, with significant discounts if you pay for the entire year up front. Click here to see full pricing details.
Adding Products
Adding products is done on Wazala’s web site using a set of super-easy and intuitive forms that allow for a good amount of flexibility in terms of product, payment, and shipping options. I actually found this much easier than that the ubiquitous E-junkie shopping cart where the interface for adding products is much more cluttered and involves jumping through some relatively unintuitive hoops for adding product variations.
(Click to enlarge image) This is where add, edit, and delete individual store products
(Click to enlarge image) This is where you control store-wide options.
Other Integration Options
Some other cool things that you can do to make your store integrate more seamlessly and effectively with the rest of your site:
- Replace the default “Store” button on the top of your screen with your own button or text link to be placed anywhere you want on your web site
- Link directly to individual products
- Add an “Add to cart” button or link anywhere on your site
- Add an “Add to Favorites” or “Wish List” button or link anywhere on your site
- Add a “View Shopping Cart” button or link anywhere on your site
- Replace the black semi-transparent overlay which surrounds the store window with a custom background image
- Add a custom page to your store which is accessed by clicking on a link at the bottom of the store overlay
Compatible Payment Processing Options
- Paypal Premier
- Paypal Business
- Google Checkout
- Paypal Website Payments Pro
- Authorize.net
SEO Considerations
While the overlay makes for very easy integration, keep in mind that your products will not be indexed by the search engines, so if SEO of your individual products is a deal-breaker, then this is may not be the solution for you.
One possible workaround would be to create individual product pages within your web site. On each product page you could include a button that spawns the store’s overlay opening to that exact product’s page.
Conclusion
After playing around with the store quite a bit, I found it to be rock-solid and super-easy to use. Unless your intention is to build a site that is completely centered around e-commerce (a la Walmart.com or BestBuy.com), then I highly recommend Wazala.
For more details, see Wazala’s web site.
Category : Blog & Cool Tools & Reviews & WordPress
Wazala
1 year ago
Want to thank you for the kind words! You seemed to really put the effort to get to know Wazala and write this great review. Hope you will use it for your own endeavors as well. What we hope to know more of is the trouble you faced when integrating with WP? We hope to make it easy for everyone, so if there are inconsistencies in our instructions or your faced problems using the WP plug in we would like to know about it. You can email us if that helps.
Thanks again from the Wazala Team..
Doron
1 year ago
Hello there,
Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for a great new e-commerce solution!
As far as the plugin goes, I found that entering the JS code into the plugin’s entry field did not result in the code appearing in my header, and of course the store button did not appear. Although I do not have the store plugin currently installed, I believe that there was another option to enter a “nickname” into the admin, but I could find no such nickname anywhere in my Wazala control panel on your site.
As far as the instructions for adding the store to WordPress, your instructions say “Under Admin, Go to design” but there is no such option in the WP admin. What I believe you meant to say is “Under Admin, Go to Appearance.”
In my personal opinion, ideally you would have explained it a bit more “for dummies” style by saying something along the lines of “Under the Appearance section, click the ‘Editor’ link. From there, under the list of templates along the right-hand side of the screen, click on the ‘Header’ link and add the code directly before the tag.”
Otherwise, again, I really love this option, with the only major downside is the SEO issues. However, the overlay is what makes it so user-friendly, so I’m not really sure what I could suggest there.
Wazala
1 year ago
Doron, Yes we will do our best to better explain it… We just got added as a plugin so we may need to tweak the instructions so it’s best suited. Thanks for the heads up and again thanks for the great review.