I’m building a new e-commerce setup here at wpdude to sell my downloadable video courses, and as part of that project I’m using a new plugin called Cart66.
I thought a plugin review was due.
What Is Cart66
It’s a plugin that allows you to sell physical or digital products. It also allows you to create membership sites and protect content. I’m not using that function, so I’ll just concentrate on the e-commerce side of things.
Lite and Pro
There are two versions of the plugin, the lite free version and the premium version with more functionality. The premium version starts at $89 for a single license and goes up to $299 for a developers license.
Minimal and Simple Setup
Some of the e-commerce plugins I have used are a little unwieldy, but cart66 is very minimal, I plugged in a couple of details like my paypal information, create some products and I was good to go.
I like low overhead simple plugins like this.
Downsides
It doesn’t have as good a set of product display options, so you need to create post or pages for your products and embed a buy now button.
This is not that bad, the way I have overcome this is to create a course category, and list all of my courses with a category link wpdude.com/category/premium-courses.
Cool Features
What set’s it apart from the other e-commerce plugins in my mind are some of the cool feature they’ve built into the plugin, see below a few that I’m using:
Paypal Express Checkout
Using paypal express checkout you can complete the payment process and stay on your own site. By adding a couple of API keys I can keep people on my site and not send them away to paypal to complete the checkout.
Amazon S3 Integration
I’ve written about amazon S3 a number of times in the past, but it’s a great and cost effective way to store large files. The beauty of Cart66 integration is that it allows me to store my large course zip files on Amazon S3 and then serve them up only to people who have bought them.
Mailchimp Integration
I can automatically add people who buy from me into a Mailchimp list.
Digital Product Delivery
Built in to the system is the ability to host and download digital products upon checkout.
Wrap Up
I’m really happy I’ve chosen Cart66 to manage my new store, it a simple yet incredibly effective solution.
Check it out cart66.com (aff link)
Image by polycart
7 thoughts on “Plugin Review: Cart66”
Neil, I was very interested in Cart66 until I found I couldn’t do recurring payments without paying extra fees for another separate service. Has that changed by any chance? And does Cart66 integrate with Amazon Payments?
I haven’t looked at recurring payments yet, but the docs say it supports via paypal or spreedly.
I’m using express payments, and that’s free with paypal business accounts
Check out http://cart66.com/features/subscriptions/
Yes, I think it was Spreedly that required an extra subscription (which I’m very much wanting to avoid). PayPal has new API based recurring payment options; I wonder if Cart66 will integrate with that soon. That would be brilliant!
I’m using the paypal api on my cart so I presume it;s the same with subscriptions
Hi Neil.. did you manage to get zipped mp3 downloads working. I’ve Tried everything and keep getting no such key exists after Paypal has taken payments. The payment goes through but it cannot connect to the s3 bucket for download. Any ideas ?
Neil, You still liking this plugin? Just wondering as I know sometimes things change after using things for awhile. Let us know.
I second your enthusiasm about Cart66 … I have built carts for clients using almost any cart you can imagine.
Cart 66 works and pays attention to actually running a shopping cart business after the site is up.
Building a Google Product feed for Cart 66 was pretty easy as well (for a programmer).
Stay away from the wordpress shoppping cart by Tribulant software…it leaves broken links on every page (which is horrible for SEO) and has a host of other problems under the hood (from a programming standpoint) Also, they will not refund your money once you find this out.
WP-Ecommerce has a ton of problems as well.
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