Excellent product, questionable pricing strategy

  • The good first: WP EasyCart is the fastest way to a full-featured e-commerce website on WordPress that doesn’t charge a recurring fee. Documentation is good to great, you can do tons of customization before you start having to write any PHP, and the list of features is solid compared to the competition.

    I only have one complaint: the no-recurring-fee tier costs 2% of your gross volume on top of your payment processor’s fee, which means it’s about as expensive as Etsy, but WP EasyCart treats it like a free trial. There are some things a paid web store should be able to do—and even the no-subscription tier of EasyCart is a paid web store—that are gated behind a subscription that doesn’t make financial sense until your sales volume is $1400 a year (at which point the 2% fee exceeds the cost of the cheapest subscription tier). I can’t issue promo codes, do volume pricing (except by using product options, which isn’t ideal), or even see an order’s status history without paying for a subscription that is probably going to cost 2-3x what the 2% fee does for my store, which is a low-volume side hustle.

    If the no-subscription tier were actually a free tier, I don’t think I would have any room to complain. This is a full-featured software package, and developers need to eat. (I am one, by day.) The thing is, though, even if I’m not paying a subscription, the 2% fee means I am still a paying customer, and I feel like they’re a bit too aggressive about pushing a much costlier product on me, rather than giving me the tools to expand my business to the point where the subscription is the obvious winner.

    That doesn’t change that EasyCart is still the best budget option, even on the 2%-fee tier, but it could be even better in ways that wouldn’t meaningfully hurt the developer’s bottom line.

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  • Plugin Author levelfourdevelopment

    (@levelfourstorefront)

    thanks for taking the time to do a good honest review. You bring to light some good points on costs. One thing I might also add here is the free edition is often used by our users though without connecting to gateways such as paypal, stripe, or square via our SaaS connect services. Many use it in catalog mode to just display products and don’t need ecommerce, and quite a few of our businesses just use the free manual payment method, which allows users and businesses to collect an order, then invoice users for payments. It’s pretty interesting to see how people utilize the software and we are constantly analyzing the situation and good feedback like yours is essential to that, so thanks.

    Thread Starter Fishbreath

    (@fishbreath)

    I appreciate the reply!

    Even if I may quibble with the feature list of the fee tier a little, you deserve credit for filling a market need for people who aren’t ready to commit to a subscription product, but do want to set up a fully-featured store with an on-site checkout. I am generally a happy user, and look forward to seeing where the plugin goes in the future.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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