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).

Visit Cart66 homepage »»

Read on to learn more about the plugin–what it can and cannot do for you…

Ease of Use and Installation

Installation of Tribulant Newsletter isn’t as easy as some of the other plugins. After purchasing the plugin, you’ll have to obtain a license key and activate the plugin. But don’t worry, there’s a pretty good user guide for that.

Once installed, the plugin is very easy to use, thanks to its professional design. The plugin is packed with features, options, and menus. Yet, things are sensibly labeled and laid out that you don’t feel overwhelmed.

• Screenshot: Tribulant Newsletter “Create Newsletter”

Technical Support and Documentation

Support for Tribulant products–this newsletter plugin included–is provided through multiple channels: live support, community forum, and a ticketing system. The forum isn’t that useful to be honest. It’s best that you just go ahead and submit a ticket for support.

As for documentation, it is great. It is well written and comprehensive. There are step by step instructions, video tutorials, and a full user guide.

Managing Subscribers and Mailing Lists

The nice thing about Tribulant Newsletter is that it mimics WordPress functionality very well. The subscribers management screen is a fully featured user interface in which you see a paginated list of your subscribers. You can search them, perform bulk actions on them, sort them, and more.

Tribulant Newsletter also provides the ability to export and import subscribers. This is done through either uploading a CSV file of import data or downloading the CSV file of export data.

Capturing custom fields for subscribers is possible by first adding a custom field from the “Save a Custom Field” screen and then using the custom field in your subscription forms.

It is also possible to segment your subscribers by mailing lists. Mailing lists can be free to join or paid. You can even create private mailing lists that are not displayed on your site publicly. These can be used for internal communications or for managing mailing lists for clients.

Opt-in Form Features

Tribulant Newsletter supports many types of opt-in forms: hardcoded form, offsite form, post/page embedded form, registration checkbox, and of course sidebar widget form.

The behavior and number of fields in each subscription form is determined by the mailing list to which the form belongs.

One interesting and unique feature of Tribulant Newsletter opt-in forms is that they can be embedded on external websites.

Tribulant Newsletter can also make use of great 3rd party plugins to create opt-in forms, such as popups, subscribers from comments, and more!

Scheduling Autoresponders

Like most other things Tribulant Newsletter does, it nails autoresponder functionality! You can assign autoresponders to specific mailing lists and each autoresponder message has its own delay settings. You can turn a previously saved newsletter into an autoresponder message or you can create one on the spot.

Sending Site Content Updates as Newsletters

Tribulant Newsletter is able to send a periodical newsletter that contains the latest posts from your WordPress site. You have a lot of flexibility as to how frequently the newsletter goes out–from “Every 2 minutes” to “Once Monthly”. You can even specify the categories of posts to include, and the specific mailing lists that should receive those posts.

HTML Emails, Themes, and Attachments

Tribulant Newsletter handles email sending better than any other plugin in its category. It is capable of sending nicely themed HTML emails and with attachments.

The plugin ships with 7 premade themes. You can easily create your own theme by peeking at the existing themes and copying the template tags that are used in them.

Tribulant Newsletter claims to send a plain text version along with HTML, but I don’t see any user interface for that.

Bounce Email Management

Tribulant Newsletter offer two methods of bounce email management: email piping and POP/IMAP mailbox. If you use the POP/IMAP method, you can simply specify an address that will receive the bounced email and the plugin will check that address to see if there were any bounces. And then the plugin will perform the necessary clean up.

Email Newsletter Analytics

Tribulant Newsletter provides several email tracking interfaces. You can track subscription rates of opt-in forms, open rates of emails, click tracking through bit.ly. And each one of these is done through a clean interface that’s easy to use and understand.

Money Matters

Tribulant Newsletter costs a one time payment of $55 for the single site license or $275 for the unlimited license. I think (for its features and robustness), it’s a great value for the money. Both licenses give you 3 months worth of updates. If you wanna update the plugin after that, you’ll have to buy update points. They are pretty affordable, but keep in mind that there are no refunds.

Visit the homepage of Tribulant Newsletter »»