Vetrinalive Review: Is This The Right eCommerce Platform for You?

eCommerce is on the rise and showing no inclination of slowing down. Astonishingly, in 2020 alone, over two billion people purchased something online. 

Moreover, thanks to the sheer array of eCommerce platforms on the market, launching an online store is now one of the quickest and most straightforward ways to start your own online business. Often, these allow you to create an e-store and start selling within minutes.

Of course, the success of your store depends on much more than your initial choice of software – finding the right niche and marketing your products is often the most challenging part. However, you can't get started without a toolkit that encompasses the functionality you need. This includes an online checkout inventory, order management features, intuitive ways to display and advertise your products, etc.

So today, we're looking at one of many eCommerce platforms that allow you to start your own store: Vetrinalive.

With 0% transaction fees and claims of being the easiest eCommerce platform on the market, it may well be the right choice for you.

So, without further adieu, let’s get started on this Vetrinalive review. 

Vetrinalive Review: What's Vetrinalive?

In a nutshell, Vetrinalive is a simple and intuitive eCommerce platform that allows you to display and sell your products online. New users can create a store within a few minutes by:

• Choosing a shop theme
• Uploading their logo
• Writing their website copy
• Adding products and product images. 

Vetrinalive originated in Italy and caters mainly to European users, especially those based in Italy and Scandinavia. 

At the time of writing, there are over 1259 online shops using this eCommerce platform across various industries, including art, fashion, gastronomy, and more. 

Although Vetrinalive’s developers have been around since 2010, the app is still very new. Most of its features were developed in 2020, and they're still following a roadmap to fully realize the platform they want to create. As a result, Vetrinalive is still a work in progress and lacks some features.

Is it worth watching its progress nonetheless? First, let’s see what it currently has to offer:

Vetrinalive Review: Its Key Features

As we just hinted, Vetrinalive is still an eCommerce platform in its infancy. It dates back only to 2021, and many of its features are still under development. Nevertheless, the platform's roadmap gives us some idea of what to expect in the future and showcases what's missing right now.

Set to be developed soon include features like abandoned cart emails, the ability to cross-sell products, sell digital products, and timed discounts. Email marketing and blogging functionalities are also included on the list, as are dropshipping integrations and better SEO features.

That said, let’s take a peek at some of the features you can already count on.

Store Features

Vetrina has several basic store management features that allow you to add and sell products online. 

These include:

• Displaying product availability
• You can create product categories.
• Order management features (you can receive notifications for each order you receive, contact customers via WhatsApp, change order statuses, and request new payments)
• Change your store's country and currency.
• Download and print orders
• Add discounted prices to products to boost sales.
• Highlight featured products
• Add product variations such as size and color.
• Set up delivery costs and create rules for free delivery offerings – for instance, when carts exceed a specific value
• Manage existing customers, including their phone number, email, marketing consent, and total order number
• Upload up to 25 pictures to your gallery 

All these features are available within your store dashboard, which you'll easily find from the sidebar.

Advanced Features

Vetrina also lists more in-depth features, most of which are only available on the higher pricing tiers.

These include:

• The ability to upload product videos
• You can create promotional packages, which you can offer to customers at special prices.
• Advanced product variations – These offer more customization options than just size and color, for example, weight, dimensions, etc.
• Link to your Facebook shop's catalog and integrate Facebook Messenger with your online store for more direct contact with your customers
• Choose from an array of shop themes to change the look of your store with just a click.
• Set up low stock alerts and get notified by email when products hit under five available units
• You can contact customers directly via WhatsApp and let them contact you.

Customizing Your Store

With Vetrinalive's premium plans, you can choose a shop theme that you can edit to make your own. There are nine themes available. However, these aren't very varied and look pretty similar at first glance. There's also no drag-and-drop editor. Instead, you can only edit web page sections like the header and menu, the cover image, checkout, etc. However, you can determine your text and background color, upload your own logo, and link your own domain. 

Overall, Vetrinalive's design options are minimal, and the editor is unintuitive. You frequently have to click in and out of sections to try and find what you're looking for. The gallery feature is also a little cumbersome. You can only add up to 25 images to a gallery displayed on your website, and you have little say about its applications or design. You also can’t add titles or descriptions to these images. Unfortunately, this has negative implications for your store's accessibility and SEO.

Integrations

Vetrinalive currently offers few integrations – in fact, there aren't any native integrations. Instead, you can integrate with third-party services via webhooks and Zapier. You can also access tracking and analytics through Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics. But, at the time of writing, Vetrinalive doesn’t offer its own website analytics features.

Payment Methods

Vetrinalive supports five payment methods:

• Razorpay
• Wire Transfer
• Offline payments if you run a local business (cash)

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for ensuring your products get seen online. But unfortunately, Vetrinalive doesn't currently offer even basic SEO functionality. For example, you can’t change the meta tags or website description, nor can you add alt text to images. 

That said, SEO features are on the roadmap to be added eventually. Still, for now, this is a significant drawback.

Vetrinalive Review: Pricing

Vetrinalive adopts a simple SaaS pricing model with monthly and annual billing. Paying for a whole year in advance saves you two months' worth of fees. 

There's also a free plan that allows you to list up to ten products. You can, however, accept unlimited orders, upload unlimited product pictures, and benefit from Vetrinalive's basic features that permit you to quickly start selling online. 

Alternatively, the premium pricing plans are as follows:

The Vetrina Plan for €109 per year: You can list up to 50 products. But, most importantly, you can use your own custom domain and choose a shop theme.

The Store Plan for €209 per year: You can list up to 300 products and unlocks the ability to feature products in a carousel, offer discounted prices, download and print your orders, sell on social media, and sync with the Facebook catalog. You can also create advanced product variations and access the Zapier integration and webhooks.

Finally, the Megastore plan costs €349 per year and offers unlimited products. It further unlocks galleries, discount codes, the ability to upload product videos, and you can use Facebook Chat.

Add-ons: 

Suppose you want to expand your product offering with a cheaper plan. In that case, you can do so by purchasing additional products for your account. 

There are one-off payments that last a lifetime. You can add:

•  50 products for €36.89 
•  100 products for €61.48 
•  500 products for €143.44 

You can also extend your cheaper Vetrinalive plan with features from higher plans for an additional monthly cost. For example, Facebook Stores, Facebook Chat, and discount codes can be added to your plan for €5 per month. These upgrades can be made from your store dashboard anytime by navigating to the extensions marketplace.

Vetrinalive Review: Customer Support

If you have questions about Vetrinalive’s platform, where can you turn to find answers? One option for many ecommerce platforms is their online knowledge base. This aims to answer frequently asked questions and provide insights into the platform's features. But unfortunately, Vetrinalive’s knowledge base is relatively sparse. 

There are only 13 FAQs that concern themselves almost exclusively with pricing and 14 articles on critical features. Unfortunately, these have all been updated over one year ago, and articles on pricing seem to refer to outdated plans.

None of these articles are particularly in-depth, which sadly means that there isn't too much self-help support on the website.

However, customer support is available via chat and phone. Vetrinalive promises to get back to you within 24 hours or less, Monday to Friday.  

Vetrinalive Review – Pros and Cons

Before we wrap up, here are Vetrinalive's key advantages and drawbacks:

Vetrinalive Review: Our Final Verdict

So that brings us to the end of our Vetrinalive review!

If you want to sell products online, dozens of platforms are available to make this possible. Vetrinalive is one option amongst many, catering mainly to an Italian and Scandinavian audience of beginners in the eCommerce industry. Its features are relatively easy to use, so you shouldn't have to spend more than an hour setting up your store.

If your only aim is to get your products online in the simplest way possible, then Vetrinalive could be the right option for you. It's very affordable, and thanks to its 0% transaction fees, there's a lot of potential profit to be made!

However, compared to many other online store solutions, Vetrinalive is incredibly limiting in its features. For example, it only offers basic store, order, and inventory management features, and its few promotional tools are locked behind higher pricing tiers. Plus, there are barely any integrations to extend Vetrinalive's functionality.

The most limiting feature, however, is its theme editor. You can barely adjust anything about your shop theme, which is limited to a measly choice of nine- and don’t offer a lot of variation. This makes it challenging to build a brand and achieve any sort of creative vision.

Suppose you want to scale your business and offer a more tailored customer experience. In that case, we can’t recommend Vetrinalive as it is today. However, perhaps the platform will add enough functionality to help it compete with other options in the future. 

Right now, you could achieve a much higher level of web design and slightly more advanced eCommerce functionality by opting for a more affordable website builder like Wix. 

What do you think? Has Vetrinalive piqued your curiosity? We would love to hear about your experience with the platform in the comments below. Speak soon!