Discontinuation of cartloom free plans - TOPIC CLOSED

First it took me almost 6 months to get my account set-up in Cartloom and them excepting me as an EU-client, and now…

Cartloom announced on VERY SHORT NOTICE to discontinue with there Free Plan. I did not want to sign up for there ‘paying’ plans, so I wanted to migrate all my products to for example Paddle.

Now Cartloom does NOT support a migration or offer a download of your own products in a datasheet.

And than we have Paddle which does not support importing my product list.

What is wrong with these US companies?

Now what to do? Any suggestions?

Paddle is a UK based company, and when asking them, they will be happy to help you setting up your shop for you.

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Yeah I think Paddle’s onboarding will be top class. Just ask them @Jerome and see what they say :slight_smile:

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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What an unhelpful thing to say :confused:

On the contrary @Bazza. The sooner people wake up to the fact that something free is liable to give problems at some point the better.

There is an adage that says: ‘If the product is free, you are the product’.

At the very least the ‘free’ product will be after an email address and some personal information.
At it’s worst it will be riddled with malware.

There’s very little that’s free and sustainable in commerce

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Whilst your argument might hold to a degree, your comment is unkind at best. The guy has an issue and is asking for a little help. Either offer support or don’t say anything. I suspect the amount of support taken from sanctimonious comments is probably zero.

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It wasn’t really a ‘free’ plan as Cartloom took a percentage of your sales. From what I gathered (I’m not on Cartloom) - there was some unforeseen abuse being taken on their product that warranted it get discontinued right away. It’s understandable that they do that but it’s also unfortunate they couldn’t provide any allowances (product migration could be an example) for those ‘innocent but affected’ folks where the monthly plans weren’t an option.

As for other options - one thing I believe Paddle does not do is offer a ‘Cart’ where you can purchase multiple items. This might not be an issue depending on what you’re selling…

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Thanks Jabostick. I have sent Paddle my questions/ request and waiting on there reply. And yes it was not really a ‘free’ plan but pay a fee % per order.

RapidCart Pro could be an option if you don’t need to edit it away from Rapidweaver. And, depending on how many items you have - Ecwid offers a free plan for up to 10 items. Within those items, you could have multiple options so you could potentially get creative and sneak a larger catalogue in. It isn’t fully featured but has a pretty good base set of options.

(Also, my ‘free plan’ comment was directed more towards the discussion in the couple of posts above me and what reasonable expectations are around ‘free’ things).

I can see now that my off the cuff comment may have come over as unhelpful please accept my apologies @bazza for being so down to earth.
I’d apologise to @Jerome but he doesn’t seem too bothered about it.

@Bazza- Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways. It’s reassuring to know that the forum is being diligently policed for sanctimonious comments.

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Hi Ric, I accept your apology.

Hi,
I set up a cartloom account as well for our web-shop-project. I was aware that the “free” version would be a part-time solution, because percentages make up to some serious amount of external costs after our business is running. I just wanted to avoid a monthly fee before income is generated. The monthly rates are quite reasonable, support is (my experience) very good and helpful and as far as I remember, Cartloom offered a prolonged free period for existing users who commited to them.
An alternative (in Germany) is a webshop-solution by Provider Strato. You have to set up online (disadvantage) but you can configure any “outfit” which suits RW-Layouts as well.
Rapidcart is very powerful. I didn´t find out so far how to set up backgrounds and page-layouts for the rapidcart-page which use the same style like the other RW pages. (btw: any suggestions?)

Jo

If you are building your website layout with Stacks, just use RapidCart Pro Store Stack to include the complete store into a Stacks page.
https://tls.4gnd.com/rw/rapidcartpro/manual/#stacks/store-stack

I use Cartloom for my own shop – defligra.com – works great. I have no plans of moving.

Recently I had to put together a shop for a client, who didn’t know what he wanted. I choose RapidCart. It works great, I’m really impressed.

I did test Paddle (because I liked the way Paddle handles vat, but it fell short in many terms compared to Cartloom.

But it all depends on what you want or need from your cart solution… so test all.

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I second RapidCart. It’s a solid solution, as long as you don’t need to do anything while away from your computer. But if you use stacks, you can always use time release stacks, etc, to handle publishing deals and sales, etc. It’s relatively easy to setup, you can import in items, and if you delve into it, it’s really powerful.

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Thanks folks! Thanks for all the suggestions. I actually also use RC for one of my private websites. I have decided not to use any webshop feature for my own marketing website anymore and let customers ask for a quote. So the ‘shop’ buttons, will become buttons to a form to fill in (asking for a quote).

I am closing this topic now.

I would like to point out that Cartloom offered 3 FREE Months of service to all Free Plan Subscribers.