Selz WordPress eCommerce Plugin Review
You are excited to start your very own online store. You have a master plan, great products and you can almost smell the money rolling in.
I know the feeling; nothing is as exhilarating as starting an e-commerce store. Even if you don’t know what will happen to your store in the future, you can’t wait to start and sell your first item.
But you are stuck; you cannot choose the perfect solution from the many ecommerce platforms out there. You heard your friend talk ten to the dozen about WooCommerce, but before you could make a move, somebody else recommended Ninja Shop.
The next guy swore by Shopify but your search is still going nowhere. You need to make a decision on the best e-commerce platform so you can save time, money and effort. And if you’re like many other e-commerce store owners, you want only the best and nothing short of it.
If any part of this intro sounds like you, welcome and feel at home. In today’s serving, I will review Selz, a powerful e-commerce platform you can easily integrate with WordPress.
Before we get to the end, you will have a better idea of why over 120,000 merchants run their stores on Selz.
Sounds good? Great. Let us get down to business.
What is Selz?
Launched back in 2013 by Martin Rushe, Selz is a hosted e-commerce platform very much like Shopify but with a little extra kick. What I mean is the platform makes it super-duper easy to create an online store, embed buy buttons on your existing website, or sell on your Facebook page.
Selz comes with a brilliant drag-and-drop store builder that makes creating estores a breeze. On top of that, the tool offers you many themes that you can customize to your heart’s content. To sweeten the deal, Selz comes with a wide range of features that make creating and running your online store as easy as A, B, C.
It is this unique blend of design and functionality that makes Selz the perfect e-commerce partner to have in your corner as you build the online store of your dreams.
In the coming sections, I highlight the features that makes Selz an amazing e-commerce platform. Additionally, I show you exactly how to integrate the platform with your WordPress site so you can start selling right away.
Read on to learn more.
Selz Features
Now, let us see the features available in Selz. Personally, I go for an e-commerce platform that offers the features that cover all my needs. If it is easy to use, the better. Luckily for you, Selz ships with a ton of features and it is easy to use.
If I need to get into the code side of things, I go with a platform that I can extensively customize, something like WooCommerce. If you’re a beginner and need a simple but powerful e-commerce platform that doesn’t require coding, Selz has your back.
An Intuitive Drag-and-Drop Store Builder
The drag-and-drop store builder is probably Selz’s main selling point. It is incredibly easy to use, and requires no coding or design knowledge. In a matter of minutes, you can build a beautiful store that matches your branding. This store builder alone will save you a lot of time and money.
On top of that, Selz offers you 20+ professionally built themes with your subscription. These themes are responsive and mobile-ready meaning your customers will have an awesome shopping experience regardless of the device they use. You can customize and style the themes to complement your brand and put a spotlight on your products.
Further, you can register a custom domain name with Selz, or use an existing domain name. A good domain name is easily recognizable and perfect for your marketing/branding purposes. Combine a good domain name and Selz’s built-in SEO optimization and you’ll attract more visitors from search engines.
Additionally, you will be glad to know that every Selz store comes with a free SSL certificate for all pages, not just the checkout page like some other e-commerce platforms. This means your customer’s information and transactions are secure from day one, which boosts confidence.
If you think you’ve heard it all, you’re wrong because Selz offers you a powerful blogging platform. Thanks to this feature, you can publish content, drive SEO and rank higher in search engines. You don’t have to set up a blog elsewhere; Selz offers you powerful blogging capabilities that help you to grow your business.
Sell Everywhere
Selz offers you a couple selling options unlike other e-commerce platforms. You can sell your wares directly from your Selz online store thanks to a secure and streamlined cart and checkout process.
If you already have a WordPress website, you can add your products by embedding beautiful buy buttons, widgets or the whole store. Your web visitors won’t need to leave your existing website to purchase.
If that isn’t enough, the Selz e-commerce platform allows you to sell on Facebook with a single click. The Facebook shop is easy to set up, mobile-ready and products on your FB shop sync automatically. Creating a Facebook store also unlocks powerful advertising features, which can mean the difference between success and failure.
Built-in Payment Options
With your store up and running, you don’t want problems with a payment gateway to get in your way. The guys behind Selz understand how this can be a huge problem, so they process all major credit cards and PayPal payments for you. Then, they transfer the funds to your bank account without forcing you to use extra accounts.
Additionally, Selz payment engine helps you to calculate taxes automatically, which saves you a lot of time and headaches. Taxes include US sales tax and EU VAT among others. Say goodbye to calculating taxes manually, and focus on growing your business.
To save you even more time and add a professional touch, Selz allows you to create invoices for your customers automatically. Other than that, you can send out customized order confirmation emails automatically. If you had no idea, order confirmation emails are perfect for upselling and promotional purposes.
Excellent Checkout Options
To begin with, Selz comes with a powerful shopping cart that has every feature you need. For instance, customers can add multiple products to their cart effortlessly, and pay without going to another website, which is great for user experience and building trust.
Moreover, Selz offers you over 100 different currencies and plenty of custom fields to collect a lot of information about your customer at checkout. This information can range from delivery address, social accounts to gift details and stuff like that.
With Selz, business does not end after successful checkout. After completing a purchase, you can easily redirect the customer to any page you desire. You can use this opportunity to take your customers to custom thank you pages, exclusive content and so on.
Abandoned carts are a huge problem for many entrepreneurs. Selz allows you to send out abandoned cart emails to customers in order to increase your conversions. You can use this feature to send your customers incentives and special offers to persuade them to complete the purchase.
Amazing Order Fulfillment Options
Many a seller struggle with order fulfillment, especially when you have many orders to process and ship out. When you start getting more and more orders, you need a system that streamlines the entire order fulfillment process. This is exactly what Selz offers you.
You get tools such as order notifications, SKUs, shipping integrations and refund processing. You can easily offer your customers real-time shipping rates and options at checkout. Additionally, you can connect with major shipping providers such as DHL, Fedex, UPS, Australia Post and Deutsche Post just to mention a few.
If need be, you can customize your shipping options further, meaning you can predefine domestic and international shipping rules based on item or order contents. This also means you can set manual rates to customize shipping options further.
World-Class Inventory Management
Selz offers you a beautiful dashboard to manage your inventory like a boss. For starters, you can sell whatever you want be it digital products, physical goods or services. If that sounds amazing, you will be glad to know that you can easily create any variants for your products like color, size and weight.
Additionally, Selz supports multiple product images meaning you can show your customers every angle they need to make an informed decision. Other than that, you can add product categories and subdirectories as well as menus and pages to manage your content.
Further, Selz allows you to set and track your stock levels. If you sell out, the platform will pause selling automatically without your involvement. That aside, Selz comes with a Pay What You Want (PWYW) feature that empowers your buyers to choose their own prices.
Become a Digital Ninja
Selz allows you to sell like a boss. The platform comes with all the features you need to sell apps, courses, ebooks, videos etc professionally. You can automatically deliver digital products to your customers via Kindle, Dropbox or email. Further, you can protect your products with license keys.
With Selz, you don’t have hosting or bandwidth limitations meaning you can sell as many digital products as you desire. If you have updates, you can automatically email previous buyers and let them download at no extra charge to you.
Most people who will buy from you will get that professional vibe that is characteristic of major e-commerce retailers. You won’t have to devise ad hoc solutions to sell; every feature you need to build a professional store is available in Selz.
Real-Time Analytics
Tracking how your store is performing is of utmost importance, especially if you’re looking to offer your customers a better user experience and boost business. To aid in this, Selz comes with real-time analytics. For starters, you can see where you customers came from and how they found your store.
Additionally, you can track your sales stats and connect to your favorite analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Bing Analytics. On top of that, you can export your traffic and sales data to a .csv file for future reference and use. This also means you can import your data into any other external system. Isn’t that just amazing?
Integrations, Integrations & More Integrations
Selz is the king of integrations. The platform offers you one-click integrations with popular apps and services such as MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor among others. Just hit a button and wham-bam, your integration runs like a well-oiled machine.
Build Customer Relationships
Getting customers is no easy work. The smart business owner knows this fact and works tirelessly to build productive customer relationships that lead to repeat business. Selz offers you plenty of options in this area, so you can keep your customers happily engaged with our brand.
I’m talking about features such as email marketing integration that allows you to grow your mailing list as you sell. Email marketing is a great way of remarketing to existing customers and priming new prospects. It is also a great way of spreading your brand message.
In addition, Selz comes with a discount and coupon generator that helps you to reward loyalty and maintain healthy customer relationships. After all, everybody loves a discount or free shipping! Further, you can use apps such as Disqus and Yopto to encourage conversation on your product pages and show social proof.
Other than that, Selz comes with detailed customer profiles and built-in messaging, which is ideal for one-on-one interaction with the buyer.
24/7 Support
You work so hard to provide the best experience and products to your users. For this very reason, you deserve a great support team to help you out when something breaks. This way, you can focus on your customers, and not boring technical work.
Selz offers you 24/7 real-time live support on all paid plans. On top of that, you can read amazing expert guides and get ahead of the learning curve. Additionally, you have full access to a help center, meaning you have adequate support at any given time.
With such an impressive list of features, I decided to give the free 14-day trial a test drive. In the upcoming section, we create a Selz store and integrate it with WordPress.
Read on to learn more.
How to Integrate Selz with WordPress
Now that you know what to expect, let us create a Selz store and integrate it with a WordPress site.
Head over to Selz.com, and hit the Get Started button as shown below.
On the next page, enter your email address, name and password. After that, agree to the terms and conditions by ticking the checkbox, and then hit the Sign up button. Alternatively, you can sign up with Facebook, Twitter or Google as we highlight in the image below.
After successful registration, the page will redirect you to the dashboard. Selz will invite you to provide more information about your business and/or join 15 – 20 online trainings as shown below.
Provide the information needed and reserve a spot for the training if you so wish. So far so good, you’re doing amazing. After that, navigate to your dashboard as shown below.
Looks pretty neat, huh? Now, let us add a couple of products and get this done and over with. Navigate to Items > All on the left-side navigation menu, and then click the Add Item button as we highlight below.
Next, choose the type of product you want to add. You have three options; Physical, Digital and Service as shown below.
I went with a physical product for this tutorial. After that, you will land on the beautiful product editor shown below.
The above editor pleasantly surprised yours truly. It’s intuitive, so it predicted my currency automatically. Well, you can easily change the currency. Further, the editor has a lot of product options. You can add categories, variants, SEO, licenses, and so much more all from one screen.
Add the necessary details, scroll towards the bottom of the screen and hit the Save button.
I went ahead and created three dummy products for testing purposes.
Next, you can navigate to Items > All on your Selz dashboard to view all products as shown below.
At this moment, your products are added to your online store, but they are not live on your website. Tick the checkbox next to each product and then click Publish as shown below.
Confirm you want to publish the products. Your products are now live, but we haven’t activated payments yet. Navigate back to the dashboard by clicking Dashboard from the admin menu as shown below.
From here, you can enable payments, customize your store, create a buy button for your existing website, configure shipping and so much more (most of the administration settings are hidden in the admin menu to the left, so feel free to explore that area extensively to see what you will find).
If you click the Customize your store button, for instance, you get the chance to select your theme as shown below.
As you probably will notice, you can also access the above screen by navigating to Store >Themes. Choosing a theme will redirect you to the amazing store builder we’ve been talking about. See image below.
To quickly see how your new online store looks on the front-end, navigate to Store > Preview in your Selz admin menu as shown below.
And oh btw, below is how our sample store looks with minimal customization (I only changed the theme, and didn’t edit anything, although you can edit almost everything).
Bellisima. Just beautiful. And faster than many budget hosts I know. Plus you can style your website however you like. Now that we have a functioning store, let us integrate it with WordPress.
Remember, you can buy a custom domain and use Selz without integrating with WordPress. The following section is for the person looking to add powerful e-commerce features to an existing WordPress site.
Integrating Selz with WordPress
Navigate to Plugins > Add New on your WordPress admin menu as shown below.
Next, enter Selz e-commerce in the search box. The hit the Install Now button when you find the Selz WordPress eCommerce plugin as shown below.
Next, activate the plugin and then hit the Connect button that appears on the next page as we detail below.
On the next page, authorize your Selz account by clicking the Allow button as shown below.
Once your Selz account is connected to your WordPress site, you should see the following page.
From the above screen, you can activate a site-wide shopping cart or click Go to Selz dashboard to access your dashboard at Selz.com. Now your WordPress site is integrated with Selz.
However, how do you display a product from your Selz.com account? Better still, how do you display your entire store on your WordPress site?
Well, the process is incredibly easy. Say you want to add the product on your shop page. Simply open the page within WordPress admin (Selz works only with the Gutenberg Editor). See image below on how to add a Selz button, store or widget in a page or post.
To add a buy button, store or widget, simply click the respective icon from the image above. If you are adding a buy button or widget, you can choose the product you want to link to using the menu to the right of the editor as shown below.
Aaaand that’s it! That’s how you create a Selz store and integrate it with WordPress. I urge you to explore the Selz dashboard and the store builder for all the features you need to customize your online store beyond your wildest imagination.
Selz Pricing
Selz offers you three price packages as we detail in the image below.
We have:
- Lite, at $17 bucks a month billed annually
- Standard, at $23 bucks a month billed yearly
- Pro, at $35 bucks a month billed yearly
Go for a package that works for you, but if you have no idea where to start, the Standard package looks pretty solid if you ask me. Keep in mind that Selz.com charges a 2% transaction fee, and 2.9% + $0.3 credit card fees. And as you already know, there is a free 14-day trial that helps you to test the waters. There are no set up fees and you don’t need to purchase additional hosting services. Is there a money-back guarantee? Nope, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, right?
Conclusion
Between you and me, Selz is a remarkable e-commerce platform. It is easy to use even with a million and one features. The platform will help you set up an online store within minutes thanks to the store builder, and start selling right away.
Which is your favorite e-commerce platform? Have you used Selz in the past? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Cheers to happy selling!
Wow, Selz offers too many features with amazing minimal prices. What could be better than this for an e-commerce platform?
Seems the designing is too simple, will try out for one of mine. Thanks, Freddy for the awesome review of Selz. Appreciate the effort.