Are you looking to sell something on your web site?
If you come to my site often enough, you'll see that I try to write at least a couple posts a month about WooCommerce. Soon I'll be adding some posts about Easy Digital Downloads because I find it's another really solid solution for e-commerce. But both of those solutions have more in common than just being great and easy WordPress solutions for e-commerce. They both assume you're going to be an e-commerce expert.
Few of us are e-commerce experts.
Most of us just want to sell something on our site and move on in life. But selling anything online requires a bit more knowledge than just writing posts. How current are you on PCI compliance? Or gateways – what do you know about them? And do you have your own private IP address? And SSL certificate to go with it? Will your hosting provider help? Or just wait for you to tell them everything you need?
The truth is, and I'm not trying to scare you, getting into e-commerce isn't something you do casually. Sure, you can put a Paypal button on your site and send your traffic there – and that's what a lot of people do – but you know I won't recommend that to you because of my feelings regarding Paypal.
There's another way – to sell without SSL
Well don't stress because you haven't become an e-commerce expert overnight. There's another approach, brought to you by my friends at Cart66. In fact, I'm using it here on my site to sell my two eBooks on Virtual Teams and on High Performing Teams. The pages start on my site, but the cart and check out are on Cart66‘s infrastructure. Now, normally, that would result in a really ugly looking experience. But as you can see, it's amazing!
So here are the five things you need to know about Cart66:
- Your site doesn't need an SSL cert. That makes things fast and easy for you.
- You don't pay any transaction fees. Ever. That's pretty nice if you're doing a decent amount of sales.
- You don't pay until you go live with one of their 40 gateway providers. Yes, they connect with just about everyone.
- Your web site is now PCI compliant. You may have other things to work on (if you work with a virtual terminal, for example).
- Most importantly, the experience seamless. So your cart and checkout look like they're on your page.
It's e-commerce that's hosted in the cloud so that you don't have to worry about things. Pretty nifty! And it doesn't impact your ability to design your product pages whatsoever. If you've tried it, let me know – post a link below – I want to check it out.