Good plugin but still needs more time to address unexpected issues

Updated the review on 14/11/2024

The issue with the checkout form appears to be resolved after updating to the latest version (v3). I got a follow-up from the team via the ticket system to see if the issue was persisting and if everything was fine. I changed the review to 5 star because once the ball got rolling on the conversation Andre dedicated time to address the issue which I greatly appreciate.

AIOSEO metabox is still not appearing underneath the product editor page in the backend but in the new release products and collections were assigned as custom post types automatically which makes them recognisable to the SEO plugin and also the custom search plugin I am using – that’s really great because you can easily exclude/include products in sitemaps or apply robots.txt rules in AIOSEO dashboard. Saying that, the products appear in rich snippets results and in product tab, so there is a native support for that. The meta title and description are pulled from SureCart’s native meta box now for SERP previews which was not the case for me in the previous version – another huge plus.

I am leaving the old review below in case someone ever encounters a similar problem, especially with processing free orders via regular checkout form with payment processors block – I did not test it anymore with my regular form because having a separate checkout form for freebies worked.

—- Old review —

This is an honest review based on my experience. I genuinely love the product – it’s fast, installation is very easy, product pages look amazing. I am using Version 3.0.0-beta1.

At the same time, it’s still new and issues are to be expected.

Checkout issue and experience with customer service

What got me was no readiness to help with technicalities of the issue – an assumption was made and no offer of help from a techy person extended until I sent an email where I expressed my frustration.

1. I ran into a problem where new orders were classified as test. Now, the orders were 0 cost (I have a lot of freebies on my page) so not paying customers yet but real customers nonetheless. I reached out to support and also commented in the Facebook group (it’s very active and extremely helpful). I was subsequently and immediately told by two people, part of the core team, that the form is definitely in test mode (without looking at it). The customer support person looked briefly at the backend once I told them that no, everything obvious had been set to live but did not provide any suggestions for a solution. I imagine they cannot do that for every customer but I chose to get the lifetime plan split into 11 installments and for 100$ per month I felt the responses were very blase. New customers continued to be marked as test and there is no way to convert them to actual customers according to the customer service rep.
2. I found a workaround to the issue of users being directed to a form where payment processor block is not added to avoid triggering any issues. This seemed to work. Together with a friend developer we potentially identified issues with Stripe not handling no-cost transactions in the default setup with SureCart. This I did not test further because Stripe’s help docs recommend webhooks for no-cost purchases and that’s beyond my skill level.
3. The main checkout form is not working for some customers still. Sometimes they get a message that the form is live but the request is in test mode. Or a validation error “there are no processors to make the payment”. I eventually sent the customer a link to one of these instant buy pages and the payment went through. I think there is something wrong with the checkout page and the checkout form, which begin to experience issues aftering being assigned as primary checkout page & form. It’s very fragile and prone to conflicts – I might disable some plugins to see if this helps (although my website does not have many plugins to begin with).

I continue to experiment on my own and I do enjoy the flexibility of SureCart. I just think that as it is still a relatively young products, many instances were not tested so there is no precedent to tap into to solve these issues.

A note about SEO

One additional comment: currently, the SEO optimisations are limited. Google pulls data from the product description fields directly for meta title and descriptions – and not from the two fields that Surecart added for this purpose. My plugin (AISEO) does not collabotate with SureCart yet completely – it does not display the SEO box underneath products in the admin view. But I imagine, this might change eventually. Woocommerce still has better options for optimising for SEO – SureCart will require you to do some manual implementations still be it product snippets in Google or embedding products in pages that rank well and pushing them as canonicals rather than relying on native SureCart product pages.

Saying all that:

I am excited to see what the team is coming up with next and I am still plan to stick with the current payment plan because the price for what you get is still incredible. I will update the review if the issue gets resolved eventually. I want to really praise the team behind SureCart – it’s really a prime time to dethrone some of the other ecommerce options that began to monopolise the market and really squeeze creators and small businesses. I already recommended SureCart to my clients – and advised them to start small and test, test, test.

• This topic was modified 4 months, 1 week ago by CSV.