Ecwid one-page checkout overview
Your Ecwid store has a secure one-page checkout where your customers enter their shipping and payment details and leave order comments before placing orders.
After choosing products and adding them to the shopping cart, shoppers can proceed to checkout and make a purchase. If you’ve enabled automatic inventory tracking in your store, shoppers can add only in-stock products to their shopping carts. Sold out items can never be added unless you've allowed pre-orders for them. The cart content of shoppers is checked against your product inventory in real time to help you prevent overselling.
Checkout in Ecwid consists of one page with several steps. All sensitive information provided at each step of checkout is sent via HTTPS secure protocol so your customers data is safe with Ecwid. Below, you will find a detailed overview of how the checkout process works for your customers.
Entering email address
The first step for customers at checkout is entering their email address:
Email address is captured at the beginning of order placement to ensure that you have the contact details of those shoppers who can drop out at this point, for example, due to poor internet connection or being distracted. Your store forms a list of abandoned carts so that you can send out reminders to customers that intended to purchase products or services but didn’t buy them.
To the specified email address buyers receive order notifications to track their order status. Ecwid automatically creates a customer account for every new email address entered in this field. Customers can sign in with this email address to their customer accounts at any time and check their order history.
Choosing from delivery options
After entering email address and clicking on Checkout, shopper proceeds to the Delivery options step to provide shipping address and choose from the shipping/delivery and pickup options that you’ve enabled in your store and that are available for this address and the order:
A buyer needs to choose one shipping method for all products from one order. Your store checks what shipping methods are enabled in your store and shows only those that can be used for an order based on total order weight, dimensions, customer location, etc.
If you sell downloadable products or services, you should untick the option Requires shipping or pickup on product editing pages, so that shoppers buying intangible products skip the Delivery options step.
Your store automatically detects customer’s location using the MaxMind GeoIP service to show estimated shipping costs and tax to the shopper in the shopping cart, hence the shipping fields like country and city can be prefilled for your customers at checkout.
If you communicate with customers mainly by phone, you can require your customers to leave their phone number at this step. For this, enable the Require phone number at checkout option in Settings → General → Cart & Checkout.
Choosing from payment options
After a shopper enters shipping information and picks shipping/delivery method available for the order, it’s time for them to decide how they want to pay for the order. Shoppers see all payment methods that you’ve enabled in the Payments section of your Ecwid admin:
Ecwid is differently integrated with payment gateways and this affects the checkout flow. With some gateways, the credit card form is securely embedded in the store checkout so shoppers stay at your site during the entire checkout process. With other payment processors, customers visit the processor’s site for entering credit card details and then they are returned to your store.
You can learn more about it in the FAQ about online payments in Ecwid.
You can limit particular payment methods to specific shipping/delivery options. That way, you can decide what payment methods to show with a particular delivery method. For example, you can limit cash-on-delivery to local delivery only.
You can add payment instructions for a payment method to describe how to pay with that method, e.g., how to pay offline. Customers will see the instructions below the list of your payment methods.
If you need to collect billing addresses of your buyers, you can add the Billing Address section to the Payment options step at checkout. To add the Billing Address section, go to Settings → General, click the Cart&Checkout tab and enable the Ask for a billing address during checkout toggle:
Collecting customers' billing addresses can help you prevent chargebacks and fraud, since some payment gateways (e.g., Lightspeed Payments) can verify whether a billing address entered at checkout matches what the card issuing bank has on file. If the address doesn’t match, the attempted purchase may not go through.
Placing order
After choosing the desired method of payment and specifying payment details, shoppers click on the Place Order button (it can say Pay or Pay with PayPal, depending on the payment method). Then they see Thank you for your order! page with order details:
That’s it; their order is placed! It will appear in My Sales → Orders in your Ecwid admin.
After placing the order, customers will get the Order Confirmation email with all the order details to their inbox if this email is enabled in your store. You can also choose to attach the printable version of the order/order invoice to such emails. As you process the order, customers can be notified to their email about changes in its status. Learn more about customer order notifications your store can send →
Customers who place orders in the Safari browser on iPhones with iOS 17 or higher or on Mac OS version 14 or higher can also add orders to their Apple Wallet to track orders and get notified about order progress with push notifications.
Related articles
Customizing checkout in Ecwid
Collecting tips during checkout
Place a test order
Getting paid