We've integrated with Ecwid.

Who are Ecwid?

Ecwid's tagline is 'E-commerce for small businesses'. Put short, Ecwid offers anyone, anywhere, the opportunity to start selling online. Ecwid can be added to websites, social media, and marketplaces, providing a single dashboard for the user to manage everything, from inventory to pricing, in app or online.

Ecwid are a one-stop shop to start on any e-commerce journey, and they're used by over 200,000 merchants worldwide.

Why did we want to integrate?

This might seem self-explanatory, and it is, but let us indulge slightly as it speaks to a broader part of the Banked mission.

Ecwid supports the best e-commerce technologies from around the world, providing merchants and small businesses with easy access to a variety of tools and plug-ins to enhance their checkouts, payment processing, accounting... the whole kit and caboodle. This ethos of supporting merchants and creating easy, fluid user experiences is synonymous with our own. Our first question is always, well:

But not long after that comes the more contextually relevant:

Banked exists to provide the best payment experience. The payments infrastructure we've built is direct, it operates in real-time, and processes account-to-account transactions. If you're new to what that means, or how it differs from existing money-moving practices, we've written a simple introduction to account-to-account payments here. Essentially, we made a faster way for money to move and enhanced the value of each transaction by adding increased functionality, insight, and optionality within both the checkout and back-end. The full potential unlocked by our platform is constantly emerging, but the driving force of this development remains consistent: useful, intuitive, helpful experiences.

Ecwid opens a door for Banked to quickly and easily help thousands of small businesses on their journeys.

How can Banked help Ecwid's store owners?

Time to pull out the trusty bullet points:

• Instant payments

• Direct payments

• Low fees

• Microtransactions

• Automated refunds

What's not covered in the above list is the impact these changes have on small businesses or, more pertinently, the negative impact existing payment providers can have on small businesses that Banked negates.

For a new business (just the type looking for an e-commerce solution and discovering Ecwid), payments can influence those make-or-break early months and, for small businesses, make-or-break can be a constant state. To crudely paraphrase and be boldly reductive for the sake of simplicity, business = payments. Whether you sell art on Instagram, mow lawns, or you're Jeff Bezos, fundamentally your business is getting paid. Payment providers know this and, guess what, they're businesses too.

So, what do they do? They charge an average of ~2.9% on processing transactions. Plus, they have minimum fees, so if you charge 99p for something, maybe 50p of that goes to your payment provider. They can also divert the payment through their own accounts, so small businesses might see a delay in their income, meaning that buying resources, self-sustaining, and staying on top of incomings/outgoings can have an added layer of complexity. Some payment providers also use this period of flushing your payment through their accounts to make money from your money.

We don't do do any of that.

Any payments processed through Banked go from customer account to merchant account, instantly (see account-to-account payments).

Microtransactions (<£1) don't have minimum fees. Merchants pay the same % to process 99p as they do £99.

In contrast with the average ~2.9%, our fees are 0.1%. Flat. We want merchants to get paid what they earned, which is crucial for new/small businesses (and obviously pretty nice for the big ones, too).

How to use Banked with your Ecwid store.

• First, sign up with Banked. It takes minutes.

• Connect the business bank account you want to link to your online store.

• Copy your API Key and API Secret.

Then, pop over to the Banked page in the Ecwid app store.

• Click 'Get'.

• Paste your API Key and API Secret into the respective boxes, and select the account you just linked with Banked.

• You're all set.