Cart66 is a

Premium e-commerce shopping cart plugin for selling both digital and physical products and services.

What’s the value of Cart66? It’s not necessarily in what it does (sell products/services) but in the approach in which it does it. You might take a look.

Shopping Carts

If you are setting up an online shop, there’s a few things up for consideration, the first being, of course, your products or services. Once those are prepared, next may come the question, “Which shopping cart should I use?”

There are lots out there. The conversation is ongoing and will be.

Cart66 offers an approach fairly unique to WordPress unlike it’s alternatives in that it makes available shortcodes for adding products (physical or digital) to a Page or Post already created. It is fairly usual practice for WordPress eCommerce plugins to create a Custom Post Type called “Products” and a user would create a “Products” like they create a “Page” or “Post”.

Cart66 on the other hand let’s you place products, via shortcode, into Pages and Posts a user may already be creating and familiar with. That means products can be sold on any page via their free Cart66 Lite plugin. Cart66 Pro offers more payment gateways and a few other features.

Few words

The only bummer I find, but understand, in the business model for the guys at Cart66 is the annual membership fee for Cart66 Pro (which I ended up using on 3 sites). It’s hard to pay this every year.

The other is that if you have a large shop that is basically eCommerce, having a plugin that creates the Custom Post Type for you out of the box can be quite helpful (for example, WooCommerce). My experience with Cart66 (then PHPurchase) started in this post where Jonathan explains how cool using shortcodes could be for a custom shop. The only thing is the amount of work (and experience) required to pull it off, though possible and cool. I believe it is too much for the average WordPress builder.