Cart66 – A Quick Review
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As a web designer, I use a CMS on most of my projects. These days I primarily use WordPress. It’s powerful. A lot of programmers design plugins for the Platform and if you can think of some kind of functionality you need on your website, chances are somebody has created something already that will allow you to do what you want. Whether it’s contact forms, user subscriptions, interfacing with social networking tools or any number of other functions, it’s probably out there.
Cart66 is a c-commerce plugin. While it’s not a free offering like a lot of available WordPress plugins, it is pretty powerful and seems to have a group of dedicated programmers committed to constant updates and improvement.
Interface:
The dashboard interface for this plugin is very intuitive and easy to use. Setup can take a minute, but there are a ton of option and features with the plugin, so once you have everything set, you have a pretty powerful tool at your fingertips. The first thing I do when diving into a new project using this plugin is to go through each setting on the admin settings panel, from there you can start on the fun stuff.
Features:
First off, some of the high level features. Adding products in Cart66 is easy and can be done pretty rapidly once you get the hang of it. You have the option of adding a product name, item #, price, shipping, weight and tax options and product variations for each product you add. Product variations also have the ability to add a cost value if applicable. For example “red (+$5.00)” would add $5.00 to the price of the red variation of that item. Once you have products listed, it is just a matter of adding a little bit of shortcode anywhere on your site to add a price, options menu and add to cart button for each product. I think this is a huge advantage to other e-commerce solutions, because instead of listing every product in a category or group, you have the option of designing the layout of each product however you want – not to mention the ability to simply add the action item of an add to cart button anywhere on your site.
There is also an inventory panel that allows you to add inventory numbers for each product and variation of that product. If a user selects a product or variation of that product that is not available, they will get an error message stating there are no more items available and will list the inventory numbers for variations that are available.
Shipping is very intuitive and allows you to do everything from live shipping rates with a number of carriers (USPS, UPS and FedEx in the United States) to shipping price adjustments. Flat rate shipping options are also available for setup as needed (location/product/ect.).
Car66 interfaces with a number of different payment gateways including PayPal, Authorize.net and several others. Setting up each gateway is very easy and there are help guides to find the information that the plugin requires for each of the supported payment gateways. There is also the option to toggle in and out of using SSL when collecting sensitive information on your site.
There are a ton of other features in the system, but the biggest advantage I find when using Cart66 is the amount of other services they interface with (FedEx/UPS/PayPal/Authorize.net/ect.) and that they seem to work hard to make sure that the list is always growing.
Cost/Conclusion:
As I stated earlier, there is a free (Lite) option for the plugin, but you will get constant prompts to upgrade to the pro version and the features included in the Lite version are greatly decreased from the Pro version. The Profession Version is $89 a year, and in my opinion is well worth the cost if you are doing any kind of productive online sales. I’ve used several other e-commerce solutions including some of the free ones, and Cart66 is by far the most expansive and easy to use plugin I’ve found for handling online sales.
Alternatives: