Context: I’m helping set up a website for a small, one-product company. These are physical products.
It’s a start-up and at this point the owner does not want any subscription-based carts. If sales warrant, he may consider a change in the future. 9so Ecwid, Cartloom, etc. are out of the running)
Must have ability to use promo / discount codes. That’s because he works with a couple of different organizations and wants to tailor offers for them. (so PaySnap
He has PayPal and Stripe capabilities.
Fulfillment is done by another company. In an ideal situation, at the end of everyday a batch file (like Excel) would be generated to go to the fulfillment center…preferably automatically.
I think I’m into RapidCart Pro or VibraCart Pro territory? Any suggestions?
I looked at Ecwid and signed up for the free store. Regrettably, the ability to deploy discounts / promo codes doesn’t kick in until one signs up for the Seller Level at $15 / month. So it doesn’t seem to be a possibility at this time.
On a related note, I have to say that Ecwid does a great job of following up and trying to convert. For the past few weeks I’ve been receiving emails from “Liza @ Ecwid” highlighting the features and capabilities. Reading them provides a great deal of interesting information that goes well beyond Ecwid and into general web marketing. Kudos to their marketing folks.
Depending on your product image needs, Machform offers Stripe/Paypal payments and supports both % and absolute discount codes. It is a webform product rather than e-commerce, hence is better for services rather than products which you may want to show a number of images for. However, I built a simple flower shop with basic photos using it - and it worked very well. Also supports export to excel I believe.
Had a look and it’s an interesting alternative. I also like the fact that it’s possible to do a one time purchase and self host. I plan to explore this further.
this solution may be over the top and comes with a monthly subscription, but it has all the features you want: Cartloom | Pricing. You can integrate the storefront in RW using a stack: Cartloom | Storefront Stack for RapidWeaver.
Adding products, changing prizes, … can be done via the cartloom website.
Thanks for the tip Hans. It motivated me to check out CartLoom again. I notice they have a free test version which I may play around with. Could be very useful for a future project.
I have it running purchases for a couple of helicopter flight companies and a training company off the top of my head. With these, photographs are not important as there is no physical product being sold. With the smaller florists site, I was able to put in 2-3 images per product but they were not lightbox enabled as is common with e-commerce so the larger pictures were on an initial products page which then linked to the machform page with smaller images. The other thing I like about it being a form based product is you can get any information from the customer you want. Most of the smaller e-commerce products don’t allow you to easily create forms and get anything beyond the most basic info.