Has Webflow given up on eCommerce?

Community resources Product feedback
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I get the feeling that Enterprise is now the priority with eCommerce put on hold. There have been no significant updates in the past year.

I emailed support to ask about some key features and got told to add them to the ‘Wishlist’ which is a tragic mess that further highlights the lack of progress.

The current eCommerce offering by Webflow is half-baked. Where are the following fundamental features?

• Partial refunds (currently the entire order or nothing!)
• Partial shipment (sometimes orders need to be split for shipment)
• Multiple currencies (your competitors have this)
• Customer accounts (order history etc)
• Pre-ordering
• Abandoned carts
• Gift vouchers
• Manual tax rules
• Subscriptions

I would love to hear back from Webflow to know if the above are happening or not and with a sense of timescale - I’ve got a client website ready to build but at the moment I am forced to go elsewhere.

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If your client’s needs don’t align with the platform then unfortunately I’d recommend going with something that does. As someone who absolutely loves Webflow, I will regularly recommend a different ecom platform if the client needs some of the things you’ve mentioned. Webflow is great at a lot, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution by any means.

You listed quite a few features, most of which are fairly significant updates, so I feel confident in saying that we’re at least a year or more out from those being widely available natively. The biggest update on the radar is Customer Accounts and Webflow has stated that they’re hoping for a beta later this year. With that update I’d imagine it’s possible that Subscriptions (and possibly Abandoned Carts) could follow—as the former really requires account management features—but I’d guess it would be a few months after that where it would be available to all users.

In the meantime, @Monto has been churning out some great apps for Webflow lately, with Abandoned Carts and Subscriptions available today—and they may or may not have Multiple Currencies in beta :wink:

As far as the other requests, you can always use Webflow and something like @foxy which would handle the ecommerce side of the site, and while I’m not as familiar with their offering, they should fill in a lot more of the gaps as far as needs go. You can check out a bit more of their product features below, but I’m sure they’ll also chime in here to answer any questions you may have via email:

The last option you have is using the Udesly Adapter to build your site in Webflow and then convert the exported files to use on any number of other platforms—one of which being Shopify, but they also work with Wordpress or a more custom “Jamstack” option. This is the option I develop on outside of Webflow and, alongside their app ecosystem, should provide you with just about everything you need:

Sorry I couldn’t give you better news in terms of development on Webflow, but with the options above you should be able to get all the benefits of their great development tool and still offer your clients the features they need—although keep in mind a lot of these options do change the pricing a bit. Keep in mind that Webflow’s ecommerce platform is still super young (most of their “competitors” got started 5-10 years ahead of them) so I’d imagine they’d like to offer a similar feature set in time.

Good luck on the project and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions :+1:

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Hi @joelfreeborn thank you so much for asking and posting about these specific Ecommerce features as well.

We have undergone quite a few changes internally as our team has been scaling and focusing on a multitude of new features, bug fixes, and performance updates. Our team is reading every post here on the forum and on the Wishlist and you can expect significant updates to our engagement both here and on the Wishlist over the next 30-60 days and beyond. :webflow_heart:

Thank you so much for sharing each of those platforms, @mikeyevin, that’s a really helpful list. We also have a list of third party Ecommerce integrations available here.

Our Ecommerce offering is still in the early stages, and we have plans for a multitude of the features which you listed above (we’ll be responding within the Wishlist over the next 30-60 days with status updates, what to expect, and workarounds where possible).

Ecommerce website builds nearly always have a custom factor to them (especially as we factor internationalization into it), and we’re working on prioritizing the highest impact features for our customer base to serve as many customers as possible. There are many integrations available out there, though I personally understand the complexities that arise with each specific build and finding the best solution for your clients/businesses to ensure success.

From your feature list above, here are a few workarounds/and plans we have so far:

  • Partial refunds: Right now these can be issued within Stripe, but not within the interface.

  • Partial shipment could be something communicated on the order success page, email flows with Zapier, or in the purchase process. I’m doubtful that we’ll build a feature like this, natively, but if you have anything to share about it I’d love learn more about the use cases.

  • Multiple currencies go hand-in-hand with localization and it’s very top of mind for us as we’re seeing more and more international Ecommerce stores built in Webflow.

  • Customer Accounts/user login and membership functionality is currently in development as one of our top requested features. We know that this will have a significant impact on several of the features which you mentioned and allow many more people to build stores within our platform using native Ecommerce.

  • Pre-orders aren’t designated as a specific feature build yet, but you can set up Zapier flows for purchase events to trigger emails and sort customers into specific lists based upon pre-orders. We’ve seen several stores take this approach successfully.

  • Abandoned cart flows are something we’re also looking into offering, though I don’t have a timeline or firm commitment on this feature natively, yet.

  • Gift vouchers aren’t on the current road map, but we do offer the ability to create custom discount codes within each store.

  • Manual tax rules are something our team is exploring further, right now we offer a few ways to configure taxes for stores.

  • Native subscriptions is something we’re planning to offer and is something we’re working on in tandem with customer accounts/functionality. There are several third party integrations available at the moment, but we hope to offer this one day as well.

Thank you again so much for asking difficult questions, Joel.

Timeframes are difficult to predict due to the complex nature of software development. With building anything, new information and regulations arise each day, and we want to build the best possible product to serve as many customers as possible. These endeavors take time, research and deep levels of development as we work to enable everyone to create for the web. We can definitely show up and provide more transparent feedback to everyone, so we’re investing in this area to ensure that we do that. Thank you so much for your patience as we build out our team and our presence here.

I understand that some of these responses may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but I want you to know that we’re here to help, we’re dreaming big, and we’re never giving up.

Thank you again for your candor and kindness, we’re making progress each day and you can expect changes both here and in the Wishlist over the next 30-60 days and beyond.

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@Waldo Thank you so much for taking the time to write a comprehensive reply. This is the kind of communication that is needed. If Webflow are silent or giving poor support responses and the Wishlist is left in a decaying state, then it’s natural that the community are going to make assumptions and get frustrated.

I run a Webflow Designers & Developers community on LinkedIn (1670 members) and similar frustrations have cropped up.

Part of my frustration with Webflow eCommerce has been seeing how quickly the competition (Wix) are releasing extended commerce features. But yet Webflow is priced the same as the competition.

We don’t need dates, we just need to know that things are actually happening, with some kind of prioritisation and a rough timeframe. If I know that certain features are going to be released within the next 3 or 6 months, then I can pass that on to my stakeholders. At the moment, I’m fighting to use Webflow because I love the design freedom it provides, but my client are concerned that the commerce part of it is being neglected.

So with the above in mind, I’m pleased to hear that the team at Webflow are seeking to address these issues. Again, thank you for taking the time to respond. I wish you and the team every success as you aim to take things forward.

Thank you for clarifying the features individually. I would like to elaborate on the need for Partial Shipments. It’s not an unusual scenario whereby an order can have multiple products with different shipping dates. At the moment, the the entire order is either pending or fulfilled which sends the customer an email (and adjusts inventory?). What if the order contained an item that is needed to be sent separately? The customer email has already been sent and the staff running the site are likely to miss the partial order because it’s status is now fulfilled.

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Thank you so much, @joelfreeborn :webflow_heart:

This is definitely an interesting use case, and I’ll need to think about different workarounds for it.

Right now I’m leaning towards a Zapier + Airtable integration where the purchase events go into Airtable with a row of orders, a column for each item purchased and a column to input a shipping tracking link.

Then a Zap from a new record in Airtable to send a custom Zapier email, pulling in the dynamic tracking information for each item shipped out of the order.

Are you currently handling these with a different platform?

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Yea i get that feeling as well, there are a lot of gaps in Webflow commerce that need attention and the wishlist is a disaster area. There were regular updates last year but seem to be nothing happening this year. Would be a real shame of standard non-enterprise users were being neglected for higher end users.

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That looks a very useful suite of tools, thanks for sharing, will have to have a look at these. Really Webflow should be adding this functionality, not third parties IMO.

Also Foxy seem to have good support but they need it because the UI of their backend is like something from 2006. Sorry guys but the usability is dreadful.

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@joelfreeborn thank you for this great discussion. I was feeling the same and couldn’t have written this better myself.

I have for a long time resisted switching to a competitor because I “emotionally” really liked Webflow, and told myself to just wait. But seeing people around me hoping on other solutions at same or lower prices and having access to all essential e-commerce features, while feeling myself in an unknown wait, it started getting more and more difficult.

I also noticed the Updates page has slowed down.

For me the major missing feature that I can’t understand why taking so long is the “iDeal” payment support. This is supported by Stripe by default, but is not active on Webflow. It is one of the most popular items on the Wishlist for a long time and a relatively simple one.

Anyway, it is also great to see @Waldo 's reply. I will keep waiting for now :slight_smile:

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@Shaneod 100% agree! New admin coming by end of year. It’s beautiful and fast! Thanks for hanging in there. - Josh

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@Waldo I see that you mentioned customer accounts/logins as a top priority. Are you planning on adding subscription options and the ability for customers to managed/upgrade/downgrade subscription plans? I have several customers who have needed this and it takes too long for us to build this custom every time. Thanks!

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Thank you so much for your feedback! Many of us would love to see similar features in Webflow.

Please stay tuned for announcements at No Code Conference this November, @Andrew_Beardman

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Ecwid is also a nice option to implement e-commerce to webflow, the adapt to colors of site function seems to work pretty well out of the box so it blends in.

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It really does feel like Webflow given up on e-com but just not saying it openly to avoid losing customers.

Imagine being founded in 2013 and after 9 years, still no ability to partially refund an order. How am I supposed to answer my customer?

Webflow is instead prioritizing features such as below. Is this really worth allocating resources when you are missing the standard basic features for almost a decade now? At this point it’s so much hassle for me to leave WF for Shopify, but I don’t know how long more I can endure…

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image912×462 55.6 KB

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Hey Malik, we definitely haven’t given up on Weblfow e-comm!

Abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, reviews, etc. all with one easy script addition. What are you building, and how can we help?

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It’s been 12 months since my last message on this thread. Since then we still don’t have the below basic e-com features.

Can someone from Webflow clarify if they will ever make such basic features available so I will keep waiting, or can they openly say they won’t implement these so I can stop hoping and move onto another solution? How many e-com features were added in the recent past?

Missing basic e-com features:

  • Ability to partially refund an order

  • Support for major EU payment methods (which Stripe already offers)

  • Automatically generate customer invoices

  • Having a “required phone number” field on the checkout page which shouldn’t force for non-shippable items