You can do the same thing with your Cart66 store using the Buy Now Links feature of Cart66. For example, an exiting way to run a Duck Feeding promotion is to create a promotion code that you only share on Twitter. Cart66 has a very powerful promotion management system.

First, log into your Cart66 admin and create a lovely discount that no one can refuse, like 50% your best selling product. In this example we will offer 50% off our Brita Pitcher water filter. Be sure to set the maximum redemptions to a relatively small number like 10. Also specify which product the promotion is for.

Once you have the promotion created make a buy now link for the promotion then run it through a URL shortener like Bitly so you have a nice little link to share.

Now that you have your nice, short link, log on to Twitter and send out a tweet like:

The next 10 people get 50% off our best selling Brita Pitcher http://bit.ly/yourLink

Sit back and watch the sales roll in.

Creating “Add to cart” links

Cart66 has an “add to cart link” feature that will let you:

• Specify what page to go to (such as the checkout page, view cart page, or any other page)
• Specify which product to add to the cart
• Optionally specify a promotion code to apply to the order

To make an add to cart link follow these steps.

Landing page

Pick the page where you want the customer to land when they click your link. Often times a good choice is your checkout page, but it can be any page or post on your entire site. For this example, let’s say you want folks to go to straight to your checkout page to pay for their order.

Landing page URL: http://mystore.com/store/checkout

Product ID

You will need to put the product id for the product you are selling in the link. This is the product id, not the item number. So log into your WordPress admin and navigate to your Cart66 products. You will see the product id in the left most column. It will be a number, in this example it is 4.

ID: 4

Promotion code

If you want the link to also apply a discount to the item, go into your Cart66 Promotions and create the promotion you want to use. Suppose you create a $5.00 off promotion and you give it a promotion code of 5OFF. Make sure you check the “Enable” check box so the promotion is ready to be used and that the promotion applies to the product you are working with.

Promotion code: 5OFF

The link

Now that you have all the pieces figured out, let’s put the together to make your link.

Here is a summery of what all the pieces mean:

http://mystore.com/store/checkout

The page you want your customer to be on after they click your link (Required)

task=add-to-cart-anchor

This tells Cart66 that the link is going to add a product to the cart (Required)

cart66ItemId=4

This is the ID of the product that will be added to the cart (Required)

promotion=5OFF

The promotion code for the promotion you would like to have applied (Optional)

The end result – an example buy now link

http://mystore.com/store/checkout?task=add-to-cart-anchor&cart66ItemId=4&promotion=5OFF

Tips

1. Shorten your URLs: Since the link is fairly long, run it through a link shortening service like bitly or goo.gl
2. Sell with social media: Post your shortened link on your Facebook page or on Twitter.
3. Put E-Commerce in your newsletters: Add “Buy Now” links directly in your email newsletters and even include a promotion just for your newsletter subscribers.
4. Sell with banner ads: Wrap a banner ad images with an add to cart link. Customers will click the ad and will then be right on your checkout page ready to buy.
5. Buy Now Google AdWords: Make your Google AdWords become “Buy Now” links.
6. Run a Duck Feeding Promotion

What You Need

1. Download and install either Cart66 Pro or Cart66 Lite (free)
2. Download and install Types (free)

Note that there is also a paid version of Types that includes Views which makes it really easy to display your custom post types in various formats and it works with any theme. Views will be especially helpful if you have a large catalog of products in your store. With Cart66 and Types with Views you can literally turn any WordPress theme into a well organized, powerful e-commerce store!

Create A Custom Post Type

In this example we’ll create just one custom post type, but you can create as many as you need based on what your selling and how you want to organize it.

1. Navigate to Types —> Custom Types and Taxonomies
2. Click “Add New Custom Post Type”For help understanding all the options take a look at the Types User GuideThe default settings will be fine. For our example we are going to create a “Products” custom post type so enter:Custom post type name plural: Products
   Custom post type name singular: Product
   Slug: products
3. Click Save at the bottom of the page.Now you will have a “Products” tab in the left column navigation of your WordPress admin (probably under the “Comments” tab)

Create Some Products

Click on Products —> Add New and enter the content for your products. These pages are just like any other page in WordPress so go ahead and make use of image gallery plugins, SEO plugins, or any other plugin available for WordPress that you might want to use to design and optimize your page.

Enable Cart66 Product Selector Box

After you design your page with images and copy describing your product, you’ll want to put your Add To Cart button on the page. By default, the Cart66 product selector boxes are only displayed on the pages that need them. So, when you add a custom post type for your products you will need to enable the Cart66 product selector box.

Since we have just created a single custom post type with the slug “products” open the functions.php file of your theme, scroll all the way to the bottom and add this little function.

function cart66_popup_screens() { 
    return array('products');
  }  
  add_filter('cart66_add_popup_screens', 'cart66_popup_screens');

If you named your custom post type with a slug named something other than “products” make sure you use the name of your slug here. If you have multiple slugs you can list as many as you want in the array. Just separate the quoted slug names with commas.

Add Custom Post Types To WordPress Menu

The key here is to make sure your custom post type is checked in the screen options settings. Navigate to Appearance —> Menus and click the “screen options” tab in the upper right corner of the screen. Then make sure “products” (or whatever you called your custom post type) is checked. Once checked you will see a meta box in the lower left with all your custom posts. You can then easily add them to your menu.

According to a recent Newsday article, shopping-cart abandonment rate, on average, is a whopping 70%, Getting shoppers to stay on task requires you to have a superior online user experience.

Use this checklist of shopping cart best practices and you’ll see your sales increase dramatically.

1. Site Flow/Experience
Your checkout process should be completely linear. Having steps within steps confuses and intimidates customers (Paypal comes to mind) as it breaks with their mental model of a linear checkout. This is critical because the mental model of most customers dictates that a checkout process should be linear. Upon seeing the same page twice, most customers would conclude that the website has an error, because this is what happens with validation errors.

Consumers love websites with few screens and fields. They want it quick and easy. The most successful sites limit the amount of customer information required to only the most essential. Only the most dedicated buyers (i.e. there’s no where else to buy the product you must have), will trudge through a seemingly endless number of input fields. Customers feel that their privacy is being invaded when they are required to submit seemingly unnecessary personal information. Users also need to understand at all times where they are in the checkout process. Make sure you build a clearly labeled step-by-step process that guides users through to purchase.

2. Build Trust
Make the sales total of the shopping cart clear upfront. Many users abandon checkout because they get surprised in the process by shipping, taxes, or other expenses, so show the total before requiring any financial information.

3. Quality Product Pages
Your product pages must have high-quality photos, detailed product specifications, and ratings or reviews. Most importantly, the “Add to Cart” call-to-action should be prominent and easy-to-find. Customers won’t add an item to the shopping cart if it isn’t presented in a compelling and straightforward way.

4. Shopping Cart
Many consumers use the cart as a place to review and compare items before they purchase. Facilitate this activity:

• Include thumbnail images of the selected items
• Ensuring product names in the cart link to more extensive descriptions
• Customers should also be able to easily find and do all the basics in the cart: change and update quantities, remove items, proceed to checkout, and continue shopping.

Bonus: The “continue shopping” link/button should always take customers to the area of the site where they were most recently shopping–not to a page at a higher level than where they had previously drilled down to discover an item.

5. Customer Login/Account Sign-up
Allow customers to recover a forgotten username or password without leaving the site or losing their place in the purchase flow. Offer to check off “remember me” so users can return to the site and purchase more easily next time.

Not all customers will want to create an account. Some may be in a hurry to complete a purchase. Offer guest checkout (or account sign-up) as part of the flow. Also allow customers to use email address as a username; it’s fast and easy to remember.

6. Checkout
Customers want to see all the costs before they provide payment information. Give users multiple options for shipping speed, and always provide costs as well as estimated arrival time for each option. Default to the least-expensive shipping method.

Visually reinforce all sensitive payment fields.

Don’t make customers enter information twice. Most customers order products to their home, so requiring both a billing and shipping address doesn’t make sense. Pre-fill billing address with shipping information previously entered. By defaulting the billing address to the shipping address, your checkout process will have many fewer fields, making it less intimidating for customers. Users also reduce the risk of misspelling their address if they have to enter it only once; they won’t rush through the form as quickly, and if there are errors, the customer will have to fix them only once. Additionally, you could hide the billing address fields entirely showing with a checkbox that.

Give users the option to have credit card information stored with the site for future purchases. At this step, site security should be especially prominent to help consumers trust their financial information will not be compromised.

Design a better checkout experience

While there are many more subtleties to designing a good checkout experience, these guidelines go a long way. If you adhere to them, your checkout process will perform well above average.

In a study that he conducted 10 years ago, usability guru Jakob Nielsen concluded that large e-commerce websites violated many basic checkout usability guidelines. Don’t let it be your site too.

With the latest improvements in Web technology and browsers, the potential to create an amazing user experience has increased dramatically. Yet, advanced features shouldn’t be the focus until basic usability guidelines are met. If we add the latest technology just because it’s new and exciting, then today’s abandonment rate of is unlikely to decrease.

Do yourself and your customers a favor by following these guidelines. Once you’ve covered the basics, you can venture into more advanced territory.

Adapted from articles by Smashing Magazine & Inc.

We are happy to announce the release of Cart66 1.5 including the new Advanced Notifications Center. This release marks a major advancement in Cart66 providing new, powerful features to help you keep in touch with your customers and provide a more seamless experience between all the components of your store: your customers, your shipping carriers, order fulfillment centers, etc. Here are the highlights of some of the new features in this release.

HTML Email Receipts

You can now send HTML email receipts to your customers to give your store a more professional feel. Include you company logo, links, and even customize the receipt using our library of dynamic placeholder tags. Using these tags you customize each receipt with your customers name, address information, order status, links to view the receipt online, and much more.

Timed Followup Emails

Want to make sure your new customer is enjoying their purchase? Set up Cart66 to send a followup email a few days after an order is placed. This adds a new level of customer service to Cart66. Send some tips for using your product, remind your customer where your support forum is, or send a coupon for another purchase. There are plenty of great ways to use timed followup emails.

Order Status Emails

Keep your customer in the loop as you process their order. Every time you change the status of an order you can have an email sent to your customer. Did you just ship an order? Cart66 will send the tracking number to your customer. Just configure the email with the tracking number placeholder tag.

Order Fulfillment Emails

Do you drop ship orders or need to email orders to your business partners? Cart66 can now send customized emails on a per-product basis! So any time a particular product is ordered, you can email the necessary order information to the appropriate teams in order to fulfill the order.

Subscription Reminder Emails

If you sell subscriptions or membership products, Cart66 can now email your members to let them know their membership is about to expire. Sometimes these messages are referred to as dunning messages. The idea is you can send an email 1 month then 2 weeks, then 1 week before a membership expires. If the account gets renewed after the first message, then the other message will not be sent. If the customer does not want to renew, we’ve built in an opt-out feature as well.

More Notifications Goodies…

In addition to everything just mentioned, we have included default HTML templates for all of the types of emails Cart66 will send. The HTML email editors support syntax highlighting. You can see live previews of the messages you as you are composing them, and send test messages to make sure everything looks just right. Cart66 can now add tracking numbers to orders with a live link to the carrier website (UPS, USPS, FedEx, Australia Post, Canada Post and DHL). If a customer accidentally deletes their email receipt, Cart66 can now resend email receipts. If you are selling digital products, the download links are now included directly in the email receipt as well as in the online version of the receipt.

Video features overview

Other new features

Create The Gravity Form

Click on the “New Form” link to create a new Gravity Forms form and design the form however you’d like. If you want Gravity Forms to control the pricing of the product, use the “Pricing Fields” that Gravity Forms provides.

Tips For Using The Gravity Forms Pricing Fields:

• Use the “Product” field type to set the base price for your product
• Use the “Option” field type to add options which may affect the product price
• It is best to let Cart66 handle shipping costs

Create The Cart66 Product

Once you have completed designing your product order form in Gravity Forms, navigate to the Cart66 Products panel in your WordPress admin to create the Cart66 product.

Attach The Gravity Form To The Cart66 Product

Select the Gravity Form that you want to attach to the Cart66 product from the “Attach Gravity Form” drop down. This will tell Cart66 to render the Gravity Form as the product order form rather than the standard Add To Cart button.

Gravity Forms Pricing

If you designed your Gravity Form to have pricing information for the product and product options select “Yes” for the Gravity Forms pricing drop down. This tells Cart66 to use the pricing information in Gravity Forms rather than the standard Cart66 pricing fields. Note that you cannot use BOTH Cart66 pricing AND Gravity Forms pricing for the same product at the same time.

Set The Quantity Field

If one of the fields in your Gravity Form allows the buyer to set the quantity for the product, let Cart66 know which field specifies the quantity. This will let the buyer order multiple units of your product from the product order form.

Once you have finished configuring the Cart66 product and attaching the Gravity Form to that product, click “Save” to save your product information in Cart66.

Add The Product To A Page/Post

Navigate in your WordPress admin to the page or post where you want this product to appear and place the Add To Cart shortcode on the page.

When you visit the page (or post) where you placed the Add To Cart shortcode, Cart66 will display the Gravity Form you have attached to the Cart66 product.

What happened?

Essentially what happened was that Alex submitted a support ticket to us describing a vulnerability and his support ticket was mistakenly left in a “Pending” state in our support ticket system. Pending tickets mean that we are waiting on additional information from the customer in order to resolve an issue. So this problem went unresolved for quite some time.

What are we going to do about it?

Yesterday Alex reminded us that this issue had been overlooked. This morning we released an update to Cart66 that resolves the problem. As embarrassing as this has been, it has helped us improve our support system. We have updated our support ticket system so that we can tag all tickets that have anything to do with security or vulnerabilities as “security” tickets. This will provide a quick and comprehensive way to see if there are any tickets concerning security. Now, even if a ticket is “pending” it won’t get overlooked. We will never “solve” a security ticket unless we have actually coded in a fix for the problem.

Often times people resolve their own issues and forget to let us know that they no longer need help. This results in “pending” tickets that are actually “solved” because the person solved their own problem and no longer needs help. Security tickets, however, can’t be treated that way. Tagging all security tickets will keep things like what happened with Alex’s ticket from happening again.

So what was the vulnerability?

The vulnerability was that you could potentially add products to the shopping cart that had invalid product options. This would result in customers being able to purchase products with unintended product options such as more than one option from the same option group. If the product option changed the price of the product, this could result in products with incorrect pricing being added to the cart.

The vulnerability had nothing to do with customers’ billing information or gaining access to any of the private information in your store or WordPress site.

How did we fix the problem?

When a product is added to the cart, each product option that is selected is compared against the product options defined for the product. Server side validation will only allow one option per option group to be selected and that option has to be an exact match for one of the defined options. If an invalid option is detected, the item will not be added to the shopping cart.

The update is available from the plugin updater in your WordPress site as well as in the downloads section of our website.

The apology

Everyone on the Cart66 team is embarrassed that this has happened and we are all very sorry that a serious issue like this one slipped through the cracks. I, Lee Blue, as the owner of Reality66, take responsibility for the oversight. Even though I’m not personally working with support tickets very often it is ultimately my responsibility to make sure things like this don’t happen. I have met with each member of our support team and explained that security tickets are always top priority and we have established new practices to prevent issues like this from happening again. Everyone on our team takes their job seriously. We are constantly fixing problems and adding new features. We know that people, including ourselves, run businesses with Cart66. We will continue to do the best we can to provide a stable, secure, and innovative platform for ecommerce.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you for your interest in Cart66.

New Gateways

• PayLeap
• eWay
• Merchant Warrior

New Features

Updated Promotions

You now have the ability for product specific promotions. Want to apply a promotion to only one (or just a few) products? No problem. You can also have the promotion auto-applied (i.e. Buy $50 worth of product and get free shipping).

Date ranges and multiple codes per promotions has also been implemented. You can now apply the discount to either shipping, products or the entire cart

Check out the tutorial

Google Analytics

Now track your the effectiveness of your marketing campaign with concrete numbers. No more guessing which is your best selling product.

Dashboard Widget

Get instant results on how your store is doing with the configurable dashboard widget

1. Cart66 Recent Orders Widget
This widget is designed to give you a basic overview of the most recent orders that have come in through your online store.  This helps you see order information, status, delivery options, order totals and more.

2. Cart66 Statistics
This widget gives you statistics of your store revenue.  This will give you the orders for the current day, totals for the month, projected income for the month, average daily sales for the last 6 months and more.

RECENT ORDER WIDGET

The recent orders widget will be enabled default when you install Cart66 1.3.  If you have no orders in your system, the widget will look like this:

As you begin to have orders in your system, the widget will automatically show the 10 most recent orders in the pane.

The Recent Orders widget is customizable and allows you to display Order Numbers, Delivery Method, and Status as well as change the number of orders shown. To configure, click on the “Configure” link in the upper right hand corner of the widget. (This is invisible until the cursor hovers over it)

The options will look like this:

Edit the options as you want:

With all options selected, the widget will look similar to the following:

You can also change the number of recent orders displayed:

STATISTICS WIDGET

The recent orders widget will be enabled default when you install Cart66 1.3. The statistics widget has 5 main screens with statistics for your Cart66 online store:

1. The default tab is the Summary tab:

2. The Today/Yesterday tab shows the totals from today and yesterday as well as all orders from today:

3. The Month tab shows each product that has been purchased in the current month with the number of sales and income:

4. The Daily Average tab shows the total income for each of the last six months as well as the daily average for that month:

5. The Estimate tab gives an overview of the current month with a projected estimate for income:

To disable the Recent orders widget or the Statistics widget, just click “Screen Options” on the dashboard and uncheck the widget options from the menu that slides down.

Promotion Name: *Required
Description: Enter a name for the promotion. This name will be displayed to the customer at checkout and in the sales report. Promotion names do not need to be unique.
Example: Summer Sale, Wednesday Special

Promotion Code: *Required
Description: Enter 1 or more codes which will be entered to redeem a promotion. Promotion codes must be unique and are separated by commas and may not contain spaces. They will be automatically reformatted to uppercase.
Example: SALE, 1234567, SUPER_DUPER

Type of Promotion:
Description: Choose if the promotion is a dollar amount or a percentage.
Options: Money Amount, Percentage

Apply to:
Description: Choose the area of the cart to apply the discount. If there are eligible products set, the discount will only apply to them.
Options: Products, Shipping, Cart Total

Amount: *Required
Description: Set the amount of the promotion. Depending on the type of promotion, either a dollar amount or a percentage.
Example: $5.00, $15.21, 37%

Minimum order:
Description: Set a minimum cart total required for promotion eligibility.

Minimum and Maximum Quantities
Description: Set the minimum and maximum quantities required for the promotion to apply. A value of 0 means unlimited and is the default. Note that if you set more than one eligible product and a minimum quantity, all eligible products in the cart must meet the minimum quantity requirement.

Date range:
Description: Set a starting and ending point for the promotion. Either option may be used independently to create a window of eligibility for the promotion.

Maximum Redemptions:
Description: Set a maximum number of times a promotion may be used.

Eligible Products:
Description: Set products which are required for eligibility of promotion. If any of the eligible products are in the cart, the promotion will be eligible pending other conditions being met. If the promotion is applied to products, only those products will receive the discount. Simply start typing the product name in the box and Cart66 will automatically suggest valid products.

Enable:
Description: Select if the promotion is enabled for customers

Auto Apply:
Description: Choose if the promotion should be automatically applied to the customer’s cart when all the conditions of eligibility are met