Cart66 seems very efficiently developed. Unlike other plugins that try to pack-in as many features as possible, Cart66 leverages what’s already available. For example, instead of building yet another affiliates management software, they integrate existing and popular affiliate software with their cart. Instead of managing product categories, they utilize existing WordPress API to help with that.
There are two versions of Cart66, free and professional. The free version can be downloaded from WordPress.org. Both versions are licensed under the GPL. So, in a sense, both plugins are free. What you buy from Cart66 is the support, tutorials, documentation, and entitlement to upgrades.
Cart66 lite (the free version) is a fully functional shopping cart. But it has limitations that any serious merchant would eventually run into. Cart66 professional (the paid version) is a more practical ecommerce solution. That’s why I bought it and it is what I’ll cover in this full report and analysis.
You would choose Cart66 if you wanted a professional-grade and well-rounded ecommerce solution for WordPress. And if you are willing to handle the presentation of your store with WordPress themes rather than have the cart handle the appearance for you.
Cart66 can manage all types of merchandise, like physical products, digital products, and even services and recurring memberships.
Installation
Because Cart66 is open source, it is very easy to install. Simply upload and activate. If you’re a real newb, though, there’s a step by step guide on how to install Cart66 provided in the members area.
Technical Support & Documentation
Technical support provided through two channels: email and community forums. The community forums are only accessible to paying customers. The support forums are actually useful and actively monitored.
Members also get access to several detailed tutorials and a full user-manual PDF.
How It Integrates with WordPress
Upon activating Cart66, it’ll create several WordPress Pages. These pages are important for the functionality of the shopping cart. Then to display products on your Cart66-powered WordPress site, you’ll use shortcodes. You can write the shortcode yourself, or click on the Cart66 button in the Visual Editor to have it insert the shortcode for you.
Ability to Specify Product Variations
Cart66 supports product variations. I’ll copy what’s said about product variations in the user manual. It’s pretty useful.
“Cart66 let’s you specify product variations. So if you are selling t-shirts you customers
can select what size and color they would like using drop down menus on your website.
You can even specify product options that change the price of the product. For example,
if you are selling t-shirts, you may want to charge and extra $2.00 of the XXL size. Or
perhaps, you are selling headphones and you want to reduce the normal price of a set
of headphones by $10.00 because you have an open box or refurbished set of
headphones. You can specify up to two groups of product options with as many options
in each group as you like.
Suppose you are selling t-shirts that cost $15 each and you offer small, medium, large,
and extra large sizes. You want to charge an extra $2.00 for the extra large size. You
also have both white and navy blue colors. Cart66 has two product option group fields
for you to list these product variations. You would enter them as follows:
Option Group 1: Size: S, Size: M, Size: L, Size: XL +$2.00
Option Group 2: Color: White, Color: Navy Blue
The product options are simply typed in and separated by commas. Notice that all you
have to do to change the price of a product is add a plus sign followed by a dollar
amount. If you want to decrease the price of your product, such as with the refurbished
option, you simply add a minus sign followed by the dollar amount by which you want to
reduce the price.
Suppose you were selling headphones and wanted to have the option for your
customers to buy either new or refurbished headphones. You could specify those
options as follows:
Option Group 1: New, Refurbished -$10.00
Shipping and Tax Management
The way Cart66 handles shipping methods and calculation is very flexible and robust.
First, you can set various shipping methods, each with a default rate and an incremental amount per added item. Then, you can specify a shipping rate for each product and additional items of the same product. Or, you can specify a shipping rate based on the order amount.
Another great feature that Cart66 supports is Live Shipping Rates, which calculates shipping costs automatically based on customer location and the weight of the items in their cart. Currently, this only works with UPS. However, integration with FedEx, and USPS are currently planned.
Cart66?s tax management is made for American and Canadian merchants specifically. You are able to specify a tax rate per state or province. If your store is for another country, handling taxes with Cart66 may not be possible.
Admin User-Interface Design
Cart66 admin UI is very professional and makes very good use of WordPress styles.
Accepted Payment Methods
Cart66 supports PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, Authorize.Net, Quantum Gateway, and Eprocessing Network.
Selling Digital Downloads
Cart66 provides excellent support for selling digital products, such as music, ebooks, or software. First, you specify a non-web-accessible folder to store your files, like something higher level than public_html/, www/, htdocs/, or whatever your host calls it. And then go to the products creation screen and upload the file.
You can limit the number of possible downloads but you can’t set an expiration time for the download link.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
Cart66 gives you the ability to offer discount coupon codes in your online store. The coupons can either be fixed price or a percentage of the total amount (excluding shipping & handling charges). You can also specify the minimum order amount for accepting coupons.
Sidebar Widgets
Unfortunately, Cart66 doesn’t support many sidebar widgets. It only supports one widget for showing the customer how many products are in their cart, the total price, and links to view cart content and checkout. There is no way to show best selling products or things like that.
Themes and Styles
It is possible to use CSS to style any HTML that Cart66 outputs. You can put your CSS in your WordPress theme or simply specify a CSS file within Cart66 so that your shopping cart CSS is preserved even when you change themes. There aren’t many themes available for Cart66. But one great choice could be the theme called Acquisto by Press75.
Affiliates Management
To manage your store affiliates in Cart66, you’ll have to purchase a copy of iDevAffiliate, which is a 3rd party software for which Cart66 has built-in integration.
Multi-Language Support
The backend of Cart66 has no support for translation and is only offered in English. However, the frontend of your store can be in whatever language your WordPress site is in. Cart66 doesn’t interfere a lot with frontend appearances. It leaves appearance to WordPress and its themes.
Who’s Using It
In my opinion, the biggest testament to the viability of Cart66 is that Automattic, the company who built WordPress, is using it for their WordPress Swag Store. But they’re not the only ones. WeGraphics is another online store that sells digital goods and manages its members using Cart66. If you want to see more examples of stores using Cart66, check out the showcase.
Money Matters
You can download Cart66 lite from WordPress.org and start using it right now, completely free. But if you’re serious about your online store, then you probably want to pay for Cart66 professional.
Cart66 professional comes in 3 different licenses.
Single Site License ($89), which entitles you to professional support for one domain for one year.
Multi-Site License ($179), entitles you to professional support for up to 5 domains for one year.
Developer License ($399), entitles you to unlimited support for unlimited number of sites for one year.
All licenses entitle you to lifetime software updates for the current version (i.e. all 1.x releases).