What is WP EasyCart?
WP EasyCart is an ecommerce plugin for the WordPress CMS and offers an alternative to the very popular WooCommerce plugin.
The plugin offers a large selection of features as standard on the free plugin, with additional options available through the paid plans available but is it any good and more importantly, is it a good alternative to WooCommerce?
Total out of 5
WordPress website required
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WP EasyCart Pricing
WP EasyCart offers three different plans for their users to choose from and the table below shows a quick breakdown of these:
Free
• Unlimited Products
• 2% Transaction Fee
• No Direct Support
• 3 Payment Gateways
Pro
• Unlimited Products
• No Transaction Fee
• Support Tickets
• 30+ Payment Gateways
• Additional Features
Premium
• Unlimited Products
• No Transaction Fee
• Support Tickets
• 30+ Payment Gateways
• Additional Features
• + All Extensions
The biggest drawback on the free plan is obviously the 2% transaction fee, which is kind of understandable as they are providing you an ecommerce plugin to use for no fixed cost. It should be noted that this is charged on top of the payment processor fees but this is removed when you upgrade to the Pro and Premium package.
There are quite a few benefits to upgrading to one of the paid plans as you not only get additional features but also support from the developers behind the plugin and overall $69 and $99 a year isn’t too bad for what you get in terms of features, which is covered more below.
WP EasyCart Features
WP EasyCart offers a very good selection of features, even with the free plugin and one of the things that does make them different to the likes of WooCommerce is that you don’t need to install additional plugins and everything is available within the one plugin, which does make it easier to use.
For this review, we will be looking at an overview of all the features available with WP EasyCart but any features available on the Pro & Premium packages will be marked with an * and any features only available on the Premium package will be marked with an ^.
Ecommerce Tools
In its standard form, WP EasyCart does come with all the tools necessary to build a functioning B2C ecommerce store but the additions that come with the paid packages does make it a very good all round ecommerce tool.
- Sell a Wide Range of Products, including:
- Physical
- Service
- Ticket or Event
- Online Class or Course
- Digital Downloads inc eBooks*
- Subscriptions*
- Memberships*
- Gift Cards*
- Customer Accounts
- B2B Tools inc Volume based pricing*
- Product Variations* – Basic and Swatch inc with free plugin
Marketing & SEO
All the marketing tools available with WP EasyCart are only available on the paid Pro and Premium packages and it offers the following:
- Gift Cards
- Discount Codes
- Promotions
- Abandoned Cart Emails
If you want to sell via Facebook and/or Instagram, then you are going to have to opt for the Premium Plan as this is one of the extensions that is available as are ones that integrate with MailChimp for email marketing and AffiliateWP to build your own network of affiliate marketers.
In terms of SEO, you get some decent options, including:
- Custom Titles & URLs for Products and Categories
- Meta Description (called SEO Description)
- Meta Keywords (called SEO Keywords), these are pretty redundant in SEO now
As WP EasyCart is a WordPress plugin, you also get all of the WordPress content creation tools such as being able to create blog posts and pages for your site.
Reporting
WP EasyCart comes with a very good set of tools when it comes to reporting and analytics and all of the following can be applied to your overall store, billing and shipping countries and on a product-by-product basis, which can be pretty powerful.
- Total Sales
- Shipping Charged
- Taxes Charged
- Discounts Applied
- Refunds
- Net Revenue
- Order Count
- Number of Items Sold
- Unique Customers
- Abandoned Carts
As you can see, this is a lot of reports but it is all very useful information and it is easily accessible as they show you figures but also have a couple of useful charts to use and you can also choose date ranges and compare them to other date ranges, which is a very useful thing to be able to do.
Payment Gateways
With the free plugin, you only get access to three payment gateways:
- PayPal Express
- Stripe
- Square
For most new ecommerce businesses, these three options are more than enough to get started but it is recommended to use either Stripe or Square, rather than both as they both do basically the same thing, which is process credit card payments.
But as mentioned in the pricing section above, if you are using the free plugin, you will be charged an additional 2% fee on top of the standard payment gateway fee.
If you want access to the 30+ additional payment gateways that WP EasyCart supports, then you do need to be on one of their paid packages but the additional payment options include popular names such as:
- 2Checkout
- Authorize.net
- Braintree
- PayPal Pro
- Sagepay
- Secure Pay
- WorldPay
The only options that are really missing from this selection are buy now, pay later options such as Klarna, which is becoming a popular option for merchants.
Shipping Options
WP EasyCart comes with a lot of Shipping options, such as:
- Static (Fixed Price)
- Price based
- Weight based
- Quantity based
- Percentage-based (shipping is a percentage of the sale price)
This gives a lot of flexibility when it comes to setting up your shipping options and they also allow for you to sell globally as well as they list 219 countries that you can ship to.
You can also set up shipping zones, so if you want to set different rates for different continents or countries, you can easily do so. If you do go for WP EasyCart, it is worth watching their tutorial videos on setting up your shipping as it explains what all the different options are and how to implement them correctly on your store.
If you opt for one of the paid packages, you can also get live shipping rates from:
- UPS
- FedEx
- USPS
- DHL
- Australia Post
- Canada Post
WP EasyCart Theme Selection & Customization
One of the good things about WP EasyCart is that it works with nearly every theme, which makes life so much easier! But even though it does work with pretty much every theme, it does look better on some than others.
For reference, it looks very good on the Storefront theme but didn’t look great on the default TwentyTwentyOne theme, so you may want to check it to see how it works with your chosen theme.
All of the customization is done within the plugin and there are no options within the main theme customizer for WP EasyCart and options available include:
- Layout options for Product and Cart for desktop, tablet and mobile
- Store Colours
- Custom CSS
Currently, WP EasyCart does have one block for the Gutenberg editor and it allows you to add a variety of different elements to a post or page on your site but they aren’t isn’t the easiest to use and you can’t preview it within the editor, you have to preview it on the front end of your site.
This is definitely an area that requires some improvements as better Gutenberg integration would be beneficial to the WP EasyCart plugin, especially when you see the number of widgets available for the sidebar and footer from the plugin.
WP EasyCart Support
Support for the free plugin isn’t great with only Documentation, Videos and the Support Forum available. However, support tickets are available for users on the Pro and Premium plans but no live chat, unfortunately.
WP EasyCart Hosting
With WP EasyCart, all of the store, checkout and account pages are stored on your servers and this means that is your responsibility to ensure that your hosting environment is suitable for ecommerce and at a minimum, you will need to have:
- An SSL Certificate for your site
- Some sort of security plugin to protect your WordPress site
While not a requirement, using managed or PCI-compliant WordPress hosting would be advisable.
How Easy is WP EasyCart to Use?
As WP EasyCart is a plugin for a self-hosted WordPress, the learning curve is a bit steeper than fully hosted platforms, but don’t be put off as it still doesn’t take long to get up to speed. When we look at how easy a platform is to use, we look at the following 3 points:
- Getting Started
- Managing your Inventory
- Managing Orders
Getting Started
Getting started with WP EasyCart is about as easy as any other WordPress plugin, simply go to the WordPress plugin library and search for WP EasyCart and then install and activate it.
Once the plugin has been activated, you will be asked if you want to go through the setup wizard and if you are completely new to the plugin, it is worth going through this as it will help you set up some of the basic elements of your store.
The setup guide has 4 main steps:
- Page Setup, choose to create your own inventory or important demo content amongst some other options
- Location, set where your store is located, the language and current of your store
- Set up the payment options, as mentioned above, with the free plugin, this is PayPal Express, Stripe and Square
- Set up your shipping options
Once you have done this, the basics of your store will be set up.
Outside of the setup guide, the WP EasyCart dashboard is very well designed and it looks like a dashboard within a dashboard (if that makes sense) and it is aesthetically pleasing, you can also choose to change the color of the WP EasyCart dashboard.
Navigating around the EasyCart dashboard is very easy as they have eight main headings that are clearly labeled but with the free plugin, the marketing section is not accessible.
However, there are a lot of settings and options within WP EasyCart and it does take some time using the plugin and trying things out to really understand it and how to use it effectively and the learning curve is a bit steeper than some of its competition.
Managing Your Inventory
Adding a new product with WP EasyCart is a little different as when you click to add a product, a sidebar pop-up appears and asks you for the following basic information about the product listing you want to create:
- Product Status
- Product Type
- Product Title
- SKU Code
- Manufacturer
- Price
- Select a Main Image
- If the Product has options and which type
Once you have filled out these sections, you can then choose to Create and Edit the product, Create and add Another or just create it.
If you click on Create and Edit, you will be taken through to the full product page, which includes a lot more information.
The first section on the page contains a lot of the info you added on the pop-up but you can also opt for a custom URL by changing the Link Slug section. As you scroll down the add new product page, you will see the number of options that are available and there is a lot, 22 to be exact!
For new users, this can be a bit daunting as there are a lot of options to work through and there are a couple of sections that could be combined into 1, such as Packaging Options (which is the size and weight of the product) and Shipping Options as they are pretty close.
There are also menu locations, which is a way of organizing your products but WP EasyCart themselves recommend using the category system as it works better and it easier, if that is the case then why keep the menu locations setting?
Next up is organizing your products and using the category system is the best method to organize them, you can easily create parent and child categories to create a really good hierarchy for your products.
You can also choose to add categories to the main navigation menu to help customers find products along with being able to add individual products to the navigation with just a couple of clicks.
Inventory management could be better with WP EasyCart, this is because they have an inventory section, which just shows you your current inventory level but you are unable to update the inventory levels using this page, which is a little frustrating!
However, you can quickly and easily manage your inventory by going to the product overview page and using the quick edit option, which brings up a pop-up sidebar (similar to the one when you add a new product) and this allows you to change the:
- Quantity
- Price
- Title
- SKU Code
- Active Status
- Shipping Status
Overall, the inventory management in WP EasyCart is good but some simplification and being able to bulk edit your inventory would make it much better!
Managing Orders
WP EasyCart order management is really good!
This is because it allows you to do some much from the order management page as it offers a variety of bulk management tools and you can see all of these in the image.
This makes order management incredibly easy to do and all of these options are also available if you go into each order, there are also edit options, should you need to manually change any of your customers orders.
The only improvement to the WP EasyCart order management would be the ability to quickly and easily customize the printable elements such as the Receipt and Packing Slip as they are quite generic and being able to brand and design them would be a good addition.
Conclusion
WP EasyCart
WP EasyCart is a very viable option when it comes to building an ecommerce website using WordPress and it is surprising that is not more popular than it is!
It comes with a very good selection of features as standard, even the free plugin and that you only need one plugin for your ecommerce store can be very beneficial when it comes to updates and WordPress maintenance.
The paid options are also inexpensive when compared to the like of WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads as a single plugin for a payment gateway can cost $79/yr, whereas for $99yr, you get 30+ payment gateways and a whole host of other features.
If you are considering either of the options mentioned above, then definitely consider giving WP EasyCart a try as well!
WP EasyCart Pros:
WP EasyCart Cons:
So there it, our complete review of the WP EasyCart plugin and we would recommend trying it out if you are looking to either build an ecommerce store using WordPress or want to add ecommerce to an existing WordPress website.
WP EasyCart Alternatives
Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!