Ucraft

What Ucraft is

Ucraft is a drag-and-drop website and online store builder for non-coders, aimed at "a small business owner, entrepreneur, artist, blogger, or anything in between." The homepage pitch is that it is "time to build a website for your brand", and it adds the shop to that: "Build an online store and become an eCommerce expert with our multi-functional website builder." The About page calls Ucraft "a tech company founded in 2014 by a group of design enthusiasts" and says it is "trusted by 360.000 active users from all over the world." Its roots go back to Bang2Joom, a Joomla templates club the company ran from 2010 to 2014; the page says it received an investment from SoftConstruct and launched Ucraft in 2014. It lists 2 offices, in Glendale, California, and Yerevan, Armenia.

What you build and how

The editor

The homepage sums up the product in 3 points: "Drag-and-Drop", described as "an intuitive website builder for non-coders"; "Free Hosting", "fast and secure websites hosted on Google Cloud"; and "Affordable Pricing" for small and medium-sized brands. The platform menu covers a landing page creator, online stores, dropshipping, a blogging platform and templates, so one account can carry a multi-page business site, a one-page landing page, a blog and a shop.

The features page goes into detail. You build from "Over 100 designer-made blocks" covering about sections, forms, testimonials, FAQs, sliders, footers and eCommerce storefronts, then adjust typography, layout and the UI kit with designer tools. Blocks can be saved and reused on other sites in the same account, headers and footers can differ by page, and elements take parallax, rotate, fade-in or affix scrolling effects. A logo maker, a media library, image galleries, a video widget for YouTube, Vimeo or MP4, and free images and icons through a partnership with Unsplash and Nounproject round out the design side. For anything the editor does not cover, you can embed HTML, CSS or JS on the whole site or part of a page.

Languages, visibility and teams

Multilingual sites are a strength. You translate the site into several languages, Ucraft detects a visitor's language from their IP address or browser, and a region switcher uses the hreflang attribute. Visibility control shows or hides content by device, geolocation (country, city or custom IP), page or logged-in user. Pages and whole sites can be password-protected. For collaboration, you give teammates selective access as editor, marketer, designer, admin, billing admin or owner, and a freelancer can hand billing ownership to a client by assigning a new billing admin.

Selling online

The store is the second pillar and the reason this entry also sits under no-code ecommerce. The features page lists digital goods such as eBooks and music delivered by email, product import and export in CSV files, inventory tracking with low-stock alerts, 50+ payment gateways, 20+ shipping methods with real-time carrier quotes, in-person pick up, a tax calculator, product options and variations, filtered search, coupons, customer groups, an abandoned cart saver, an order editor and custom invoices on Pro Shop or Unlimited. A multilingual storefront translates the catalog, and the page says Ucraft translates the checkout, invoices and email notifications automatically. You can list products in any official currency, though the page notes that selling in multiple currencies "isn't available at present." A store management app for iOS and Android handles products, orders and payments on the go, and the sales channels feature syncs products with marketplaces to "reach over 179 million shoppers worldwide." Ucraft charges a 0% transaction fee.

Integrations, blog and SEO

The pricing page lists 20+ integrations on the paid plans, and the features page names many of them: Hello Bar, Algolia, Typeform, Mandrill, MailChimp and PayPal for marketing; Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds; Intercom, Live Agent, Jivosite, Live Chat, Zendesk Chat and Facebook Messenger for live chat; Hotjar, Uservoice, Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics for analytics; Countdown, Calendly and Eventbrite for events; Soundcloud and iTunes for music. The blog has categories and tags, scheduled posts, Disqus comments, RSS feeds and featured articles. SEO tools cover meta titles and descriptions, an auto-generated XML sitemap, robots.txt control, 301 and 302 redirects, custom URLs, OG images, alt tags and automatic conversion of images to WebP.

Domains and hosting

Every free site gets a free yoursitename.ucraft.net subdomain, and a yearly Pro Website, Pro Shop or Unlimited plan comes with a free domain for a year. You can connect an existing domain "free of charge" by pointing DNS records at Ucraft's IP address, link several domains to one site (the page's example is ucraft.com, ucraft.ru and ucraft.am), assign a domain per language, or buy a domain through Ucraft with free WhoisGuard privacy protection. A free SSL certificate is issued "in under a minute", and hosting runs on Google Cloud.

What the company's pages state about plans

Personal plans

The pricing page offers a "14-day free trial. No credit card required." and these plans, monthly price first, annual-billing price per month second:

• Free Website, free: up to 15 pages, Ucraft branding, SSL, unlimited bandwidth, Google Analytics, password-protected pages and 24/7 support.
• Website, $8 a month or $6 paid annually: your own domain, SEO and blogging tools, multilingual site, custom code, fonts and team members.
• Basic Shop, $13 a month or $10 paid annually: unlimited pages, 15 products, Stripe and PayPal, 20+ integrations and membership functionality.
• Pro Shop, $24 a month or $21 paid annually: 1000 products, 50+ payment methods, 20+ shipping methods, digital goods up to 1GB per file, the abandoned cart saver, reverse-charge VAT, and selling on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and eBay.
• Unlimited, $75 a month or $69 paid annually: unlimited products, digital goods up to 10GB per file and a Square POS integration.

A separate Essentials Plan at $4.99 a month adds a custom domain, removes the watermark and opens up the SEO App for a free website. The FAQ says annual billing brings "15% off plus a new custom domain", that plans can be upgraded but "not vice versa", and that a free website goes offline if you decide not to move on with the current plan. A site whose payment is missed goes offline until the next payment.

White label

Under a Branded tab, Ucraft sells white-labeled website building "under your brand and domain name", which the About page dates to 2016 and pitches to design agencies, resellers and startups. The PayGo tiers set your per-site cost: PayGo 1 at $39 a month (Pro Website $13, Pro Shop $24, Unlimited $75 per site), PayGo 2 at $69 ($10, $20 and $70) and PayGo 3 at $109 ($8, $16 and $65). Each includes your own pricing, your domain, an admin dashboard and a set number of imported and custom templates.

Support

The features page promises email and live chat support "on 24/7 basis", plus a help center, a community forum and YouTube tutorials. The Ucraft Academy offers courses on landing pages, marketing, creating a website and creating an online store. For people who would rather hire help, the pricing FAQ points to certified Ucraft experts on Fiverr.

Who it suits and who it does not

Ucraft suits a small business or solo seller who wants to start free and grow into a shop, and it stands out for multilingual and multi-regional sites: language detection, a domain per language and a translated storefront are built in. Agencies get roles, billing hand-over and a full white-label program with per-site rates that fall as the tier rises.

3 caveats deserve attention. Plans only go up, so pick the smallest tier that does the job. Selling in several currencies at once is not available, which matters for a store that wants to price separately for each market. And the hosting FAQ is explicit that a Ucraft site and all of its content "is hosted exclusively on our servers, and cannot be exported elsewhere", so a move later means rebuilding.