Best online store plugin

To put my review in context, I have designed, developed and hosted over a hundred websites since the inception of the Internet in the early 1990s. I currently manage and host about a dozen websites that include Joomla, WordPress and Moodle software. Therefore, I have much experience (and many frustrations) in installing and configuring plugins and extensions.

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.