1&1 MyWebsite Plus review

As with MyBusiness Site previously, you can still add other objects and elements such as YouTube videos, links, forms and more. Elements can be reordered on the page by clicking the up/down arrows, so you can customise your site to your liking. The only limitation is that you need an internet connection: there’s no offline editing.

The e-commerce addition will be of most interest to any business wanting to sell products directly to customers without resorting to eBay. This should provide a more professional look, especially if you have good product photography. Like eBay, the main payment method is PayPal, although you can provide options to pay by cash in advance, cash on delivery or by invoice.

As with rival offerings such as the online shop in Serif’s WebPlus X5, the implementation in MyWebsite is very basic. You must list items individually, even if there are variations such as size and colour, as there are no options. It’s possible to create search keywords for each product so customers can find them, but this can be time consuming. Another slight problem is that there’s no way to generate a concise list of products for customers to browse through – you simply see the each product’s description, photo, price and an ‘Add to shopping cart’ button. Plus, by default, each description is truncated until the customer clicks the Display more>>>> link, which looks untidy.

Overall, MyWebsite is a decent package for small businesses, but the improvements aren’t quite as good as we’d hoped for. If you’re serious about selling products online, an eBay shopfront will be easier to manage. You’ll get a more professional look by linking to a third-party online shop such as 1&1’s own eShop. Had MyWebsite included eShop as part of the package, we’d have liked it a whole lot more.