Probably the nicest thing about the package itself is that it is self-contained. It is a full-featured online store package. There is no need to acquire other supplemental plugins to provide additional functionality.
]]>One of my clients is a small parish. With the advent of the pandemic, we installed an online store on their Joomla website. The store turned out to be very successful. We were able to easily convert their bake and foods sales from in-store purchases to curb-side pickups. Remarkably, their sales and revenues actually increased. Unlike most other churches, our parish as able to remain financially viable.
Although this first store served the parish well, it did has some limitations, e.g., difficult to configure and make changes; did not work well with mobile phones and tablets; and did not have the live-shipping connections we needed.
We began looking for an online store that would better address our needs. After extensive research and reading many reviews, I decided that we should build a new store using the open-source software Prestashop. This was mistake! After hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars spent on plugins and programmers, a year later I simply abandoned the project because we could never get it to work properly or reliably. Fortunately, our existing online store continued to work fine during that time.
I once again began a search for easy-to-use online store software that had the additional features we need. Doing a Google search, I stumbled on WP EasyCart. What attracted us immediately was that this one plugin had everything we wanted … works with all devices; a better Stripe integration; and a live integration with Canada Post. One hesitation was that this was a WordPress Plugin, and our current store ran on a Joomla website. However, I was already hosting two WordPress sites. I have a dedicated server so creating a separate WordPress website for the parish store made good sense.
So I created the WordPress website, and downloaded and installed the free trial version of EasyCart. Using the included demo data, I had the new store up and running in less than two hours! Based on my experience, EasyCart is one of the best designed software packages that I have ever used. The documentation and videos are excellent. I was able to quickly learn how to set up and configure the various components of the store. It is very feature-rich, for example the flexibility and options available for each product are very impressive.
Yes, there were a few bugs and missing features. One was that Canada Post integration stopped working after an update. This was fixed quickly, and a feature we requested was added days after we asked for it. The technical support and customer service is among I best I have ever dealt with. For example, the free trial period was extended a couple of times because I was waiting to make sure the bugs were fixed before purchasing a license. Normally, I get a response from Josh or Matt within hours, or certainly within day or so. Also, having to deal with only one vendor makes things so much easier!
Finally, a comment on pricing. EasyCart is a great deal! A three-year professional license cost me less than the price of ONE plugin for Prestashop. We need to financially support the developers of great software so that we too can continue to reap the benefits from it.
I highly recommend WP EasyCart to anyone that wants a all-in-one, feature-rich online store that has excellent technical and customer support. EasyCart is being continuously updated so it is only going to get better and better.
]]>The GOOD:
I first want to say that the plugin has great features too. And support is top-notch. You get answers very quickly to any doubt you might have. Also the different types of galleries are beautifully crafted. And you get a beautiful theme (Imagely), that although not very powerful like the ones we have today like Blocksy , Astra, Avada etc might be enough if you just need to show your images as a simple portfolio.
The BAD:
1- The search engine to find images is just plain horrible. They show every image that has that keyword (tags) or word in a title (if you select title or caption). For example. If you have hundreds of images and you search for an “old car”. You will get results with the word “old” or “car”. Depending what you have on your library you will get: old people, old furniture, old clothes, old maps,….and cars (new ones too) as the query looks for cars and not for images that have both keywords.
You have no option to select that both words have to be present or a NOT order to discard images with a specific keyword. Search is really limited.
2- You are locked into their proprietary folder and gallery structure that is not the one of the Media Folder. This can bring you many problems down the road. If you set your store to sell images with Woocommerce that is a much more robust and flexible solution this one relies on the Media Folder of WordPress. If something goes wrong with Nextgen down the road you are in trouble. If you pick up any solution that works on the Media Library (there are many now) you can simply change it and keep on working.
3- Selling Prints– You are locked into their specific vendors. Nowadays there are much more powerful solutions like Printify, printful etc that can also be adapted later to Etsy,Ebay etc etc.
4- High Resolution images cannot be stored in the cloud. I will store my high resolution files in Google Drive and will deliver every time a customer purchases one. When you have thousands of images that weight between 15 and 25 MB you better have it not in your hosting server, specially if you have a shared hosting or virtual one as your hosting price would become quickly very expensive and also slow down your website in general.
So would I recommend this products? Maybe. If you want a portfolio for your images the galleries are beautiful, fast to arrange, if you have any problems support will give you proper help in a timely manner.
If you want to sell images or print them, I would not go that route today. That has been a mistake, and I thought that going to a more basic solution than WooCommerce would help me to reach the same results with less cost and faster. I was completely wrong, and I would recommend that if you are serious about selling downloads and or prints you will have to look at WooCommerce that is more expensive once you have all the needed plugins and has a steeper learning curve but is much much more flexible and is not limited by the points I pointed before.
]]>`Warning: Attempt to read property “ID” on null in /home/customer/www/beta.speechworks.net/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-easycart/inc/classes/core/ec_page_options.php on line 13
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Current PHP v8.0.
What is causing this? We will not go to PRO until this is resolved. Thank you.
]]>I am currently working on growing my online shop and it would be very handy to find a plugin that can do something like the following:
I would like to have a document template (for example a template for a document like a letter or also a template for signage for a hospital for example –> so it should be possible to integrate graphic design and text). And then I want the customer to be able to fill in a certain form and select from a dropdown menu, what they want to be shown in designated areas of the template. They should also be able to put in their own text if necessary.
Afterwards i would like them to be able to purchase this pdf with the inserted data and then download it, so they can print it or send it to somebody to print the signage for them.
I hope you understand more or less, what I want.
Do you guys have any idea if there is a plugin that can do something like that or how I could achieve this on my own?
Thank you very much
Best regards
Miriam
It provides almost all the features that we need and the Software Licencing extension makes it a complete solution for selling digital goods on your own platform.
We recommend this for sure, best ever support and updates!
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