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Webflow + Foxycart partnership?

#1

To whom it may interest,

I really hope Webflow succeeds in the ecommerce venture, but I think the Webflow development team might be in over their heads.

I’ve ran ecommerce businesses for about 12 years and ecommerce functionality is incredibly complex and nuanced. Adding ecommerce functionality to a web design platform such as Webflow is a major business and strategy decision, not just an “added feature”. With ecommerce comes PCI compliance issues, sales tax, shipping calculations, product management, product options, inventory control, backorder controls, coupon functionality, order management, customer management, order fulfillment, subscription functionality, backend management, etc… then a tidal wave of feature requests, integration requests, and bug fixes related to all-of-the-above.

Foxycart has a long history in ecommerce, a small nimble team, a very flexible shopping cart model, a robust set of features for subscription products, PCI compliance, etc… While Webflow has a beautiful and intuitive design platform, it seems like Foxycart + Webflow would be a great strategic partnership.

I also started a thread about a Foxy + Webflow partnership here: https://forum.foxycart.com/discussion/11509/webflow-foxycart-partnership?new=1

Either way, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the best!

#2

Hi @eric594!

As the one of folks working on Webflow Ecommerce, I appreciate the honest feedback.

Adding ecommerce functionality to a web design platform such as Webflow is a major business and strategy decision, not just an “added feature”.

We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we have a large (at least for the size of our company!) team dedicated to building out our V1 – and to advancing the ecommerce functionality of our platform going forward as well. It is a major undertaking, but one that we believe is really important to achieving the vision of our company. :sweat_smile:

I can tell you that we do – and will continue to – explore many different opportunities to integrate and/or partner with other offerings as we build out our own solution, and choose those paths when we they best fit in with our product vision. You’ll see some of these from the beginning in our V1 (Stripe for payments, TaxJar for sales tax and VAT calcs). And more will be coming in the future as we add more payment options, shipping and fulfillment related integrations, and more.

We are confident that as we roll out our ecommerce offering, it will become more apparent where and why we have chosen to build our own unique Weblfow experiences vs integrations and partnerships, and that we are striking the right balance.

We will continue to appreciate your feedback and suggestions throughout the journey!

#3

Hey @kkilat thanks for the reply.

#4

@eric594 Thanks for starting this thread. I responded to your post in our forum earlier this morning. Foxy will continue filling the gap for Webflow users. :slight_smile:

#5

Biggest concern I have at the moment is that it seems allowing client accounts, sign ups, logins etc. is a stage 2 feature. I run two online stores for clients (unfortunately not on Webflow) and the FIRST feature that was asked for was being able to establish and grow a customer database and customer relationships. The feature set as described in the initial release is the MINIMUM that I will need to physically make a store work. As far as any store owner who is serious about their online business unfortunately the feature set falls short of what they are looking for.

This is going to be a hard sell until it further develops. Not saying don’t do it, but being able to manage customers is at least as important as being able to manage products, sales, payments and deliveries.

The store won’t exist long without customers, and asking a customer to enter their details, payment details, delivery address etc. every time they buy (is that the plan?) is a major negative.

Feels like your team needs to add a digital marketing/experience manager or consultant. A store experience really can’t be designed solely by engineers, no matter how clever.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to switch to Webflow when it’s a viable product, but for now it seems to fall short.

Just offering my 2ç.

#6

@ideasman For what it’s worth, Foxy supports customer accounts, along with Single Sign On.