If you’ve spent some time looking at the best ecommerce solution for your business, chances are that you’ve already discovered that there are a plethora of ways to start selling online.
You’ll find options where you get everything you possibly need to only the shopping cart software itself. All-in-one solutions are practical and convenient but the drawback is that you need to start a new website. If that’s out of the question, then you’re looking at an ecommerce solution that you can add to any website.
Cartloom is a fully-fledged ecommerce solution that you can use standalone – that is for a new website – but you can also embed it on any website so that you can run your online store.
Pros and cons of Cartloom
Cartloom is an all-in-one online store solution that can also be used to add ecommerce functionality to any website. It’s easy to use so that anyone can set up a an online store without an IT department.
Pros
- Intuitive interface so that it’s easy to grasp and use
- Multi-language support: Its storefront can automatically switch to English, Spanish, German, and French
- You can set up your store (in jargon “localise”) in your desired language
- You get to try out everything with its forever free plan and only when you’re ready to accept payment do you need to upgrade to a paid account
- Easy to add to any website, social media profile, marketplace, or use it in an email campaign
- Reasonable pricing
Cons
- Not for large, complex stores with a ton of products
Who is Cartloom for?
Cartloom gives you a convenient way to add a shopping cart to your already existing website. It’s also a very simple way to start selling on your social media profile. It’s also a good option to start with selling online in general, since it provides you also with a storefront.
As you can use Cartloom as an all-in-one shopping cart with all the required pages (such as about or terms) or add a product/storefront anywhere you want, it gives you many options in your marketing and sales toolkit. If you want to use it as an all-in-one, you need to upgrade to its pro account.
How easy is Cartloom to use?
It feels like Cartloom has the easiest and quickest setup process ever. After your first login, you’ll be onboarded with an interactive getting started guide. The short tutorial guides you through creating your first product, setting up your storefront, connecting with PayPal or card getaways so that you can get paid.
The backend of Cartloom is where you’re doing the daily tasks of running an online store. It’s where you’ll be adding and managing your products, taking care of your orders, setting discounts, and so on.
Cartloom was designed from the ground up to be easy to navigate and to use. This includes everything from signing up to creating your products. The interface is remarkably easy to use. It sports a dashboard where you get all the important metrics at a glance.
Everything is clearly labelled. You’ll find on the sidebar on the left with the controls for running your online store. It’s simple enough so that anyone can find their way within minutes. Perhaps the most complex task is to embed your storefront or a product page into an existing site, be it your website, social network, or marketplace.
You can sell any kind of goods, be it physical, digital, or a service. Your products can have variants with different prices and inventories. If you’re selling a digital product, Cartloom will host your file and deliver it to your customers after their purchase. You can also add license keys or serial numbers to your product.
Cartloom design
Out of the gate, Cartloom provides you with a simple and mobile-ready storefront. That you can use a standalone storefront. In contrast to the prevailing all-in-one shopping cart solutions, you don’t get a slew of themes and templates for your storefront. That being said, you can style your storefront and receipts to match your corporate identity.
If you want to have your storefront to show a custom header and footer, you need to subscribe to a paid plan.
Cartloom integrations
Cartloom comes with a range of add-ons to extend the functionality of your store. You’ll find add-ons for analytics, shipping, email marketing, and more. If you don’t find an add-on, you can get a developer to build a custom integration using its RESTful API.
Marketing and SEO
Cartloom is a well-rounded shopping cart. You don’t need separate services to recover abandoned carts, create bundled products, or give discounts.
It also keeps track of who has bought what. Say, for example, anyone who has purchased the special edition of your ebook, you can send a targeted email only to that group of people.
SEO
Cartloom auto-generates the standard meta tags for Google. If you’ve subscribed to its pro plan, you get the standard pages that you need to run an online store such as the about or contact page. You can easily add meta tags to all the standard pages.
Blog
If you plan on publishing a blog or in general use Cartloom as an all-in-one store, you need to subscribe to its pro account.
Writing and publishing blog posts is a piece of cake. Although you can’t expect it to be a blogging tool as powerful as WordPress, you can run a multi-author blog. Blogging is easy and doesn’t feel like an afterthought that was quickly slapped on just to have the feature.
Payment options
You can accept payments via PayPal, Ideal via Mollie, Stripe, and other credit card gateways, as well as manual payments. But you need to subscribe to a paid plan to activate one of these options. It’s also nice to see that Cartloom doesn’t tack on a transaction fee.
Cartloom security
Cartloom has secured its application with SSL. This means that your store backend and frontend are both secured with SSL.
Cartloom support
If you get stuck, you can contact the support team with the help button in your backend. If you’re impatient and can’t wait until the support team gets back to you, you can check out Cartlooms knowledge base or the how-to videos.
Cartloom pricing
Cartloom has reasonable pricing. If you know you only want to add a shopping cart to an existing website and start accepting payment, you go with it plus plan for $19.95 per month.
If you want to have a full-fledged, all-in-one ecommerce solution, then you need to upgrade to the pro account.
Is Cartloom the right solution for you?
Cartloom is a nifty tool in your marketing and sales toolbox to easily add an online store anywhere you want. It’s a great and flexible tool for individuals and dynamic merchants to get a store up and running or test out new ideas.
It’s a well-rounded shopping cart solution without significant drawbacks.
Lastly, even if you can build a store with many different products and categories, it may not be quite the right tool. So, if you want to build a complex online store, you may be happier with a solution such as Magento or Bigcommerce.
If this post has given you ideas on how to “retrofit” an online store to your site, please feel free to share it with someone who might find it useful.
Original post here: Cartloom review – add a shopping cart to any website
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