By Bogdan Rancea
I launched my first online store (what feels like a lifetime ago), using everyone’s favorite website builder at the time: WordPress.
Although WordPress isn’t designed for ecommerce, it does offer access to plugins that make it possible to sell products and services online.
The only problem? Most of these plugins are notorious for being clunky, difficult to use, and packed with expensive “add-on” fees that can quickly eat into your profits.
Fortunately, Surecart saw the obvious gap in the market here, and devised a solution: the ultimate WordPress ecommerce plugin.
Since initially working with WordPress, I’ve switched to other ecommerce platforms (like Shopify), but I always wanted to discover what it would be like to build a store on WordPress without the hassle.
That’s why I conducted this Surecart review – to find out whether it really is the best option for companies that want to sell online with a WordPress site.
Quick Verdict: Pros and Cons
SureCart is a world-leading ecommerce plugin for WordPress – excellent for anyone who wants to create a fully customized online store, without the headaches.
It’s lightweight, lightning fast, easy to use, and allows you to sell everything, from physical products to recurring subscriptions. It even has a free plan – but it does lack some advanced features that would make it more appealing.
Pros:
- Free plan for beginners, with flexible pricing options
- Support for all kinds of digital and physical products
- Simple visual editor and customization tools
- Support for multiple payment gateways
- Lightweight and fast-paced plugin design
Cons:
- Limited payment gateways compared to some competitors
- No bulk editors for inventory or order management
- Pay-as-you-go extras can add up
SureCart Review: The Core Features
First, I should point out that SureCart isn’t a full “ecommerce” platform – it’s a plugin, which means you need an existing WordPress website to use it.
It actually works as a “headless” solution, giving you an external platform where you can manage ecommerce processes outside of WordPress.
What makes SureCart amazing is that it’s highly versatile, and easier to use than most of the WordPress plugins I’ve tried before. It also doesn’t add any unnecessary bloat to your website – which is great for improving customer experiences.
Let’s dive into the core features.
Store Design and Customization
SureCart might not be a website builder, but it still gives you options to “customize” your store. The plugin works seamlessly with virtually any WordPress theme or template, and allows you to edit certain elements of the user experience.
The main thing you can customize with SureCart is your shopping cart. Every user gets a lighting fast slide-out cart they can customize with unique messages, labels, and additional elements, designed to drive conversions.
SureCart can also automatically translate your checkout content and currencies for customers. Plus, it allows you to create “bundling” options for buyers.
For instance, you can offer customers the option to “upgrade” to a bundle when they’re in their checkout.
You can also experiment with a range of different conversion features, like discount codes, vouchers, coupons, and “first purchase” deals.
What I really like about SureCart from a design perspective is you don’t actually need any technical knowledge to change things.
You can edit your checkout visually with a simple drag-and-drop “block editor”, and even add widgets to showcase things like trust certifications and reviews.
Ecommerce Capabilities
SureCart doesn’t just give users a fully customizable checkout. It gives you literally all of the tools you need to sell virtually anything online.
You can sell physical products, and bundles, as mentioned above. You’ll also be able to sell digital products (like downloads), and services with booking forms.
SureCart also gives merchants a really flexible system for selling subscription services. You can set up packages with fixed subscription payments, installment payments, and even auto-payment recovery features.
There are even tools that allow you to suggest upgrades or downgrades to customers automatically, or give them the option to “pause” their subscriptions.
When customers do stop or pause a subscription, SureCart can try to win them back automatically with a tailored offer, or ask questions about why they cancelled – giving you the insights you need to potentially boost future conversions.
From a payment processing perspective, Surecart doesn’t offer quite as many options as some alternatives, but you do have flexible options.
Surecart can integrate with Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more. You can also enable customers to make offline payments, send donations to your company, or just “pay what they want” for a product.
On top of that, SureCart handles the complex financial parts of running your business for you, automatically converting currencies for international customers, calculating tax, and handling VAT.
It can even help you simplify refund management, with straightforward dashboard tools.
Marketing and Business Growth
Most ecommerce-focused plugins don’t offer a lot of additional tools to help you promote your products and increase conversions. That’s not the case with Surecart.
As mentioned above, you can create product bundles, discount codes, and coupons to help boost sales revenue.
SureCart even has a dedicated “smart coupons” feature, which allows you to pre-configure specific rules that determine the type of offer a customer gets based on the URL they click, or other factors.
To further increase average order values, you can display enticing offers to customers at the checkout with “order bumps”, and create one-click upsell funnels.
These basically allow customers to add new products to their order, or upgrade a product instantly.
You can also offer customers “early pay-off” options, if they’re purchasing a subscription, which is a great way to increase the revenue you might not get from a customer considering cancelling a subscription.
Plus, you can send automatic abandoned cart notifications with SureCart too.
For those who want even more marketing options, SureCart makes it easy to create lead magnets (to collect customer details), and issue customer surveys to collect feedback.
You can also create your own affiliate program and reward your customers whenever they send new leads to your business.
Business Management and Analytics
One of my favorite things about SureCart is how simple it makes managing your ecommerce business. You get all the basic tools you need, like fulfillment management solutions, tools for tracking returns, refunds, and inventory levels, and manual order creation tools.
You can also automatically calculate tax, track crucial information about your store through real-time dashboards, and create accounts for team members.
There’s even the options to create invoices for larger customers and store them in a cloud environment.
Unfortunately, order management is a little tricky for companies selling physical products.
Although you can create flexible shipping rules and monitor inventory, there are no tools for creating bulk orders, or updating your product collections in bulk.
On the plus side, SureCart does give you plenty of ways to discover insights that can help you grow your business.
You can create custom reports, monitor engagement and return rates, find your most popular products, and more in an instant.
Integration Options: Scaling your Business
Primarily, SureCart is a plugin for WordPress.
It doesn’t work with any other website building platform, but it does work with a lot of popular WordPress apps, like LearnDash or MemberPress – even WooCommerce.
You can also take advantage of webhooks, and a full REST API system to create your own automated workflows (if you have the developer know-how).
Fortunately, you don’t really need a lot of integrations and extras to make the most of SureCart.
All the features you would usually need additional plugins for – like subscription management, or custom order emails, come built into the platform already.
SureCart Review: The Pricing
As mentioned above, SureCart does offer a free plan, which gives you access to virtually all the features of the plugin, and basic support from the technical team. You can even sell unlimited products, send 50 cart recovery emails per month, and create 3 team accounts.
However, the free plan isn’t completely free, as you are charged a 1.9% transaction fee on every purchase made in your store. You can avoid this by upgrading to a paid plan.
Currently there are two options – both of which give you the exact same features. The only difference is that you pay yearly for one, or pay a single “lifetime” fee for the other.
The Pay Yearly plan starts at $179 for 1 store, $249 for 5 stores, or $399 for unlimited stores, and gives you all the features of the free plan, no transaction fee, and premium support.
The “lifetime” plan (with all the same features) will cost you $499 for one store, $899 for five stores, or $1,499 for unlimited stores.
One quick thing to mention is that there are some extra fees for some things, like a 0.5% transaction fee on subscription purchases, a 1.9% fee on “revenue boosters”, and a 1.9% fee on affiliate transactions. You’ll also need to pay 0.5% licensing fees on any “licenses” you sell as an agency.
SureCart Review: Ease of Use and Customer Support
I mentioned at the start of this SureCart review that the main thing that makes this plugin stand out to me, is it’s simple functionality. Everything is extremely easy to set up and use.
It takes virtually no time to purchase a subscription, connect your WordPress site to SureCart, and start customizing your checkout. A few things do have a slightly higher learning curve, however.
For instance, I spent quite a while sorting through all of the “site settings”, to set up different order and receipt rules, abandoned cart strategies, subscription programs, and notifications.
However, you’d probably spend a lot of time on tasks like these no matter which platform you choose.
From a customer support perspective, the guidance you get all depends on your plan. All plans include basic email support. Plus, SureCart offers plenty of self-help guides, and resources on its website.
The premium plans, however, give you priority support, so you should get answers from the team faster – although you can still only get in touch via email.
SureCart also has a great community group on Facebook, where you can ask other business leaders questions and get their tips on how to troubleshoot issues.
SureCart Review: The Verdict
SureCart definitely has its downsides – the lack of a bulk order management option, and the fact that you can only use this plugin with WordPress websites are two of the biggest.
However, despite these issues, I still think SureCart is one of the best ecommerce plugins for WordPress sites.
It makes it quick and easy to sell unlimited products, subscriptions, and services online, with minimal effort. If you already have a WordPress website, and you want to monetize it with online sales, SureCart is definitely worth trying.
