Meet Microweber: Open source, drag & drop website builder for ecommerce entrepreneurs

This is a guest post from Boris Sokolov and Peter Ivanov, cofounders of Microweber. Microweber is featured as a 1-Click App on the DigitalOcean Marketplace.

If you’re looking to launch an ecommerce venture, you probably have lots of questions. Is it going to be too complicated? Take too much time? Need too many plugins and add-ons?

That’s why we created Microweber. It’s an open source, drag-and-drop website builder specifically tailored to address the needs of ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Why we built Microweber

We noticed that most existing website builders and CMS platforms felt clunky and lacked simple drag-and-drop capabilities. Meanwhile, platforms that did use drag-and-drop tended to lock users into their ecosystem, were expensive, and didn’t offer a built-in online store function.

We saw an enormous opportunity to create an all-in-one platform for setting up websites and online stores. We wanted it to be so dead simple that anyone without any web experience could launch an ecommerce business in a matter of minutes.

Making it simple – even for beginners

To make things easier for you, Microweber runs on a smooth technological duo: our Drag and Drop and special Live Edit features, which fit perfectly into our modular architecture.

Drag and drop means that you can use your mouse to drag any element or module – text fields, images, videos, layouts, you name it. This makes arranging or rearranging anything from blog posts to e-commerce catalogs easy and intuitive.

Pairing this functionality with Live Edit mode makes it particularly powerful. With Live Edit, you can work live on your page. No pop-ups, no infuriating navigation or inter-page loading times. Take a look at how it works:

Even users who consider themselves bad with technology find Microbrewer intuitive to use.

Building in a rich online store

Building an online storefront can be taxing. Existing platforms either require external plugins or charge you a flat fee plus additional transaction fees for using their online store functions.

We didn’t think that was fair. So we decided to give Microweber a built-in online store that doesn’t cost you anything extra.

To make it easier, we have included various e-commerce features such as:

• Multiple payment methods accepted (Paypal, Stripe, Authorize.net, Payza etc.)
• Management and tracking of orders inside Microweber
• Automated emails after customer purchases
• A variety of shipping options
• Custom product fields – sizes, colors, prices, and numbers, among others
• Social network linking
• Currency options and setting your taxes as a merchant

Everything’s inside Microweber, so you don’t need to deal with external plugins or suffer from additional costs when you’re bootstrapping.

Open-source and self-hosted: because privacy, flexibility and security matter

As the Open Source Initiative notes, open source equals reliability. With open source you benefit from a whole community rigorously testing your software for bugs, vulnerabilities, or anything else that might affect the platform. Microweber has always been open source, and our own community is constantly on the watch to give us their input. The CMS has more than 50,000 downloads and installations around the world.

Microweber is also self-hosted. You can use us as your hosting provider, but you’re also free to use any other provider on the Web. We don’t lock you in, because we believe that you deserve choice and flexibility when it comes to installations.

We are also proud to be part of the DigitalOcean Marketplace! You can find us in the Blogs and Forums category, or try out our app with just one click.

What about the templates?

Let’s be honest: functionality alone doesn’t cut it. You want beautiful customization at your fingertips. In a competitive environment, appealing templates play a big role in capturing your customers’ attention.

We’ve got good news – although we offer free and paid (premium) templates, as a DigitalOcean customer you gain free access to all templates!

Stay tuned, because we are continually adding to our template portfolio, tailoring it to the needs of ecommerce entrepreneurs.

We hope this was a useful introduction to what Microweber can do for you! We’d be thrilled if you give our CMS a try and share your feedback with us.