You might have heard about SureCart, a new e-commerce solution for WordPress built to compete with WooCommerce. But, you might wonder, which one of these two extensions is best for your online store? Can SureCart fulfill all your business needs? Or will you go with WooCommerce, which is already a leader in WordPress e-commerce extensions?
Here, we will discuss all the similarities and differences between SureCart vs WooCommerce. Hence, you can easily understand which one can give you the best results. Let’s start.
Importance of a good e-commerce solution
Picking the best e-commerce solution is crucial for your online store. Check the reasons why you should choose a plugin carefully.
- Speed: Loading and browsing speed is one of the most important factors. Online users do not wait. If your website is taking a few more seconds to load, they will close it and check other sites. According to Google, even the loading of three seconds leads to increases in the bounce rate of up to 32 percent.
A buyer who already knows that your online store is slow, might never even open its link. Marketing and promotions take a lot of effort & money. So, reducing your bounce rate is important.
- Shopping experience: A high-end e-commerce solution offers a seamless experience to your buyers by making the product search, payment, and checkout easy.
- Customizations: You can customize the checkout page and other parts of your store. It helps you to change the appearance of your website as per your brand and product. Plus, the plugin lets you place the checkout page anywhere in your store.
- Marketing tools: A plugin with inbuilt marketing, advertising, or SEO tools is better. It helps you to maximize sales.
What is SureCart?
SureCart is an incredible platform for e-commerce stores, which helps you to sell your products online. SureCart is one of the best plugins for growing online stores because of its scalability. Moreover, this extension is user-friendly. So, you can try it if you want to run your e-commerce store without a lot of learning or training.
Advantages of using SureCart
- Convenient: You can set up your online store within a few minutes using SureCart, even if you have less id zero ideas about technical aspects.
- Affordable: SureCart WordPress is one of the most adorable e-commerce platforms. It has a free forever plan and the premium plans are also pocket-friendly. However, the free version has a limit of 100 products.
- Reliable: SureCart never runs away from high traffic. You can rely on it.
- Features: SureCart has all the tools to create and run a successful e-commerce store. It helps you to sell all the product types, create visually appealing checkout forms, and automate a few things once the payment is received. Payment flexibility, marketing tools, and revenue optimization are some of its other helpful aspects.
- Customer support: SureCart has an excellent 24 by 7 support function. So, you can get the answers to your queries without waiting for long.
Disadvantages of using SureCart
- Less versatile than WooCommerce
- Does not have all the payment options
- Selling physical products has restrictions
- A lot of users do not prefer cloud-based platforms
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is another high-quality e-commerce platform, which is useful if you want to start an online marketplace. This plugin is popular because of its user-friendly interface, flexibility, and valuable features. WooCommerce has everything you need to run a profitable e-commerce business.
Advantages of using WooCommerce
- Affordable: WooCommerce is free to use. The free version has a wide range of features. Its premium editions are also pocket-friendly in the long run. So, WooCommerce is one of the best e-commerce solutions if you want to start a new online store without investing a lot of money.
- Personalization: WooCommerce lets you personalize your online store as per your needs.
- User-friendly: WooCommerce is an easy-to-understand platform, which means it’s perfect for newcomers.
- Customer support: The customer support of WooCommerce is very helpful if you face any problem while using it. This plugin also has significant documentation containing tutorials, guides, and technical resources. Also, you can hire a WooCommerce expert if required.
- Reliable: WooCommerce is an established brand. It has an excellent track record. So, you can trust it without any second thoughts.
Disadvantages of using WooCommerce
Needs additional plugins to offer a high-class experience to your buyers. Most of the plugins are paid, which adds to your overall budget.
SureCart vs WooCommerce – Differences
Do not think of SureCart as a replacement for WooCommerce, because both of them sell your products differently. So, there are some significant differences. Let’s take a look at them.
1. Ease of use
The interface of WooCommerce is almost similar to WordPress, which is outdated. Also, its usage might be difficult for newcomers because many other options and plugins are mixed. On the other hand, SureCart has a modern interface. Plus, it is more user-friendly.
Whatever you see on the SureCart dashboard is related to the product. You do not see any WordPress or plugin-related tools to create confusion.
2. SureCart never slows down your e-commerce store
Have you ever heard the term “Headless”? It means the platform has different backend and frontend systems. SureCart is a headless plugin. In simple words, SureCart has its servers. So, it’s not putting any weight on your online store. Headless technology is used by a lot of other brands like Shopify, Twitter, Stripe, and many others.
A headless plugin is better than a self-hosted extension. How? Check the points below.
Performance and user experience
Without any heavy plugins, your online store loads fast. Hence, it performs better and provides a seamless experience to your buyers. Therefore, you do not have to use a sub-domain to host your store.
Moreover, you do not have to think of backups because SureCart WordPress stores all your transactions. Moreover, your store never goes down due to plugin conflicts. WooCommerce has automated backups, but it’s only available in the premium packs.
Control
A headless platform gives you more control over user interaction, content presentation, and layout design. Therefore, your buyers never face stiff checkout forms. In other words, SureCart is highly flexible when compared to WooCommerce.
Security
SureCart gives you better security. As your backend data is stored away from your website, hackers might be least interested in it. You might think that your data is safe when it’s on your website. But, the reality differs.
Aren’t you hosting your website? So, all the data is already on a third-party platform, unless you own a hosting server. But, SureCart makes everything simple for you. It has all your data and you can export it whenever you want.
3. Product and cart pages.
Have you ever used WooCommerce? What is the first step to set up a shop in this plugin? You have to add all your products one by one to the shop or products page. While adding the products you need to enter their description and images.
All the products you add are displayed on one page. If the buyers browse your store, they can easily add the products to the cart, select payment mode, make the payment, and purchase them. You can also allow your customers to pay recurrently if they wish to purchase a subscription. But, this feature is available as an add-on with WooCommerce, which is available for $200.
But, things are different with SureCart WordPress. You might be surprised to know that it does not have a product page where all the items are listed and you can use the filters to check the available options. Instead, you have to create pages separately for all the products.
One page contains only one product with its images, price, description, and other details. If the user clicks Buy Now, the next page shows a custom checkout page. This page is only for the particular product the user selected.
Therefore, SureCart does not have filters, which could be a letdown for a lot of online users. If you want to add all the products in a single page, then you have to design it separately.
4. Payment gateways
Connecting payment gateways in SureCart is quick and simple. You can activate them by logging in with your ID and password. But, you need to download separate plugins for these gateways in the case of WooCommerce.
Multiple plugins slow down your store and make it prone to errors. Finding the right plugin is another challenge because you see a lot of extensions on the search results page of WordPress. On top of that, not all these plugins are free.
5. Tax calculation
Tax handling is a problem for all the newcomers who want to set up an online marketplace. If you are selling digital products, you have to be extremely cautious while taking into account multiple countries. WooCommerce has extensive documentation on how to manage taxes correctly.
Moreover, it also recommends installing a tax plugin called WooCommerce Tax. This extension is free, but it needs another application to perform, which is JetPack. As we discussed, too many plugins could slow down your store. On the other hand, SureCart WordPress lets you calculate the taxes without installing any third-party software.
Similarly, EU VAT management is necessary if you reside in Europe. VAT is not applicable in any other region apart from European countries. If you need automatic removal of VAT in other nations, then WooCommerce has a plugin, Woo EU VAT number. This extension is not available for free, but it’s not very expensive either. But, you can set EU VAT in SureCart without connecting it to any third-party platforms or paying an additional amount.
6. Checkout page
WooCommerce has a generic checkout page, which is not flexible. Plus, you cannot add it anywhere else. In addition, you cannot even remove or add fields at your convenience. However, SureCart checkout builder for WordPress helps you create visually appealing checkout pages for all your products.
Also, you can embed this checkout form on any page of your website via shortcodes or by adding those in Gutenberg blocks. Such customizations help you to improve the overall experience of your buyers.
7. Option to leave feedback
As we discussed in our SureCart vs WooCommerce review, SureCart does not have a single page to show all the available products. Hence, none of your buyers can leave their feedback after using your items. Therefore, you have to be active on other platforms to know what your audience thinks about your offerings. In other words, you have to be active on social media platforms, Google reviews, and emails to understand more about your existing buyers.
Also, you can add a custom tab in the buyer’s dashboard. Attach a review form with this tab. Once the customer fills it out, you get the email. If you want to showcase some special testimonials, manually add a feedback section to the sale page.
Apart from that, you can leave the comments turned on while configuring the products. But then, you have to approve all the comments manually. Here comes the risk in this option. A lot of spammers or individuals might comment on our product. Such reviews are useless. So, use an anti-spammer with the help of a plugin like Akismet, Titan Anti-Spam & Security, or something similar.
8. Product variations
SureCart WordPress does not allow you to add variations to the products you want to sell. It might not be a big trouble if you have a limited number of items to sell. However, things could be challenging if you own a digital product shop.
Digital items generally have a lot of variations. So, picking SureCart might not be a solid choice if it asks to create hundreds of product pages only because of minor variations. WooCommerce is better in such cases.
9. Budget
SureCart comes with a free plan. It lets you offer subscriptions, installment payments, and sales tax & EU VAT Calculations. Also, you can accept donations. Above all, the buyers can set their pricing on your store.
If we talk about the basic pricing, SureCart WordPress has three different premium editions apart from the free plan.
- Startup – $99 per year
- Business – $199 per year
- Pro – $399 per year
Things are different with WooCommerce. It has a free plan, which does well most of the time. However, you need additional plugins for donation and subscription payments. The donation plugin is available at $99 per year or $8.25 per month. Similarly, WooCommerce Subscriptions that can facilitate recurring payments are available at $239 per year or $19.92 per month.
WooCommerce is available to download for free and offers a lot of functions. It also has two premium packs. Both of them come with a trial period of 14 days.
- Essential – $39 per month or $25 per month if billed annually
- Performance – $70 per month or $45 per month if billed annually
As you can see, SureCart not only saves you money in the upfront cost but also keeps you safe from multiple plugin purchases.
10. Customer dashboard
WooCommerce automatically creates a dashboard for your buyers where they can check their account information, orders, cart items, and more. You can modify its appearance, which needs another paid plugin. SureCart is different in this department.
SureCart lets you create the customer dashboard using your WordPress panel. Its default template looks good. But, you can add more blocks if you want to add a few more tabs. So, you can add multiple sections to showcase new offers, giveaways, latest arrivals, offer credit, and much more.
11. Customer support
SureCart is available for you 24/7. As a businessman, entrepreneur, or store owner, you might need help in the middle of the night or early morning. The support function of SureCart is available all the time for your help. However, you can contact them only via email. Apart from that, it has a YouTube channel, which you can subscribe to get the latest updates about new additions.
WooCommerce gives you free priority support. You can contact the support function via email and live chat. So, getting help regarding your store, its design, the marketing tools, or any other options is not a problem. But, they are not available 24 by 7.
Types of business suitable for SureCart
SureCart WordPress is a good choice for a wide range of shops and individuals. Let’s check them.
Bloggers and digital product creators
Are you a blogger? Or do you sell digital products online? SureCart is the best e-commerce platform to sell templates, worksheets, e-books, and other digital products. If you are currently selling on Gumroad or SendOwl, then SureCart deserves your attention.
Course and membership program developers
If you are in the education and training industry, SureCart could be a perfect choice. It helps you to sell courses, tutorials, and memberships without any restrictions. You can choose to get the payment one-time, monthly, or yearly.
Your buyers can upgrade their plans from their dashboards. Once they upgrade, SureCart automatically changes their pricing structure. It also lets you offer trial periods.
Once the customers buy our course or memberships, they can access the content on a separate site using a user account ID and password. Configuring all these things is easy, so you do not have to worry even if you are new to WordPress and e-commerce.
Service providers
Do you provide any types of services? You can use SureCart to charge an upfront fee followed by monthly subscription charges. For instance, if you are a digital marketer, you can charge $175 as the upfront fee, and then set a monthly amount of $90 for recurring deposits.
Non-profitable organizations and charity
Do you own a business to raise charitable money for the people in need? Or are you running a non-profit company? SureCart helps you to accept the donations. You can set a predefined amount and also leave space to donate different amounts.
FAQs
Does SureCart store credit card details?
Like all other e-commerce solutions, SureCart stays away from storing sensitive information like credit card details. So, all the information is sent directly to the payment gateway in an encrypted session. It never saves anything.
Can I use WooCommerce and SureCart together? Can both the plugins mess up my store?
If you already have a significant amount of products on WooCommerce, you can install SureCart and enjoy the best of both worlds by running them side by side. This hybrid solution is perfect if you want to offer the traditional online shopping experience combined with attractive checkout forms. SureCart also helps you to sell subscriptions.
Is WooCommerce the best e-commerce platform?
A lot of e-commerce platforms help you create an online store, but WooCommerce is one of the widely used extensions. It’s dependable, reliable, and adaptable according to your business. However, this application needs the help of a few more plugins to perform at its full potential.
SureCart vs WooCommerce review– Which is suitable for your online store?
SureCart and WooCommerce are some of the best e-commerce solutions. Both of them offer a wide range of features to help run a profitable online business. So, it’s challenging to pick one of them. However, you can easily make your choice if you know your requirements.
SureCart is a cloud-based plugin, that has inbuilt SEO tools, multiple integrations, high-end customer support, integrated payment systems with multiple options, checkout builder, no-code customizations, and more. Moreover, it helps you to manage your inventory and shipping process.
WooCommerce is an open-source platform, which is designed to scale. It has a zero-code environment. So, you can launch an attractive online store without doing a lot of hard work. This extension has social media advertising, free priority support, built-in payment processing, automatic site backups, automatic tax calculation, mobile application, live tracking, and more.
Consider your business type, budget, and business goals, before you pick an e-commerce solution for your online market. If you need an affordable plugin, try SureCart. It’s easy to set up and gives you more control over customizing your checkout pages. This extension is also perfect if you wish to sell subscription-based or digital products.
On the other hand, if you like traditional selling and need more control over the product page, try WooCommerce. It comes with advanced features. However, keep in mind that WooCommerce is comparatively more expensive than SureCart.
