If it was just as easy to accept credit cards as it was to use PayPal, wouldn’t you want to let you customers pay you with their credit cards? Even better, why not accept credit card payments and PayPal at the same time? Offering both payment options will increase sales. With Cart66 it is as easy to accept credit cards as it is to use PayPal.  People often shy away from accepting credit cards, because it seems complicated to setup and scary to deal with credit card information. Cart66 handles all the security for you so it is just as easy to accept credit card payments as it is to use PayPal.

In this review of PayPal vs Credit Cards we look at the following:

• Pros and cons of using PayPal
• How PayPal can lose or win more sales based on how you use it
• Why you should accept credit cards
• How accepting credit cards is just as easy as PayPal
• Accepting credit cards is no more expensive than PayPal

Read the article: PayPal vs Credit Cards

Around The Web

How To Create Content That Brings Traffic To Your Website
If you are going to write about your business, make sure you are using the right words. In this article we take a look at how to use Google keyword data to help you learn how your potential customers talk about your business. Rank well for the right keywords and you’ll see your traffic skyrocket.

Automated Screenshots of Web Pages In WordPress
This is pretty awesome! I totally didn’t know you could do this and it’s really easy. This article will show you how to take screenshots of webpages – like for theme reviews, demos, etc. – with a shortcode. If you write reviews or find yourself taking screenshots for you blog posts, this will make your day.

How To Add Bar Charts and Graphs To Your WordPress Site
This article is about the free version of this plugin. It looks, to me, to be one of the best plugins for creating chargs and graphs in WordPress because of how easy it is to manage the data points for the charts. If you ever have a need for putting charts in your blog posts, take a look at this.

What To Expect in WordPress 4.6
Last week, WordPress 4.6 beta 2 was released. The full update won’t be released until August 16. In the meantime, take a look at what is just around the corner.

Until next time…

Thanks for reading,
Lee Blue

Last week was a big week. We launched a couple new features, including one of the most anticipated and highly requested features in a long time. Let’s jump right in.

New Features In Cart66

Inventory Management
You can now track inventory at the product level or down to the variation level on any of your products. Watch this quick video demonstration.

Google Analytics For Ecommerce
We have improved the Google Analytics integration with Cart66. Where you used to have to use a Thank You page snippet, now you don’t have to do anything. Cart66 will detect if you have Google Analytics installed on your WordPress site. If you do, we now send along itemized ecommerce details to Google Analytics. You don’t have to make any changes to your site or your settings. If you are using Google Analytics, and it is installed in the head section of your WordPress site then this enhancement is already working for you.

Did You Know…

We are continuing to load up our YouTube Channel with new videos showing how to do all kinds of cool stuff.  Subscribe to get in depth tutorials and helpful insights into e-commerce.

Here are some highlights from this week.

Sell Products On A Payment Plan
If you sell expensive products and would like to have your customers pay in installments, this video demonstration will show you how to get that going.

YouTube Marketing For Your Online Store
Learn how to create awesome marketing videos for YouTube then link directly from the video to a page on your WordPress site. Creating an annotation that links right to the product you are describing is a very powerful tool. This is what an annotation looks like and this article shows you how to do it.

What Is PCI Compliance?
One of the most common questions we get about PCI compliance is, “What is PCI compliance?” If you have about 6 minutes, this quick video will bring you up to speed with an accurate understanding of what PCI compliance is and how it impacts your business.

WordPress and PCI Compliance
Installing an SSL certificate has almost nothing to do with PCI compliance. In this article we discuss the role of SSL certificates and how to avoid mistakes that make securing your site much more difficult so you do NOT end up building your website to do something like this.

Around The Web

Here’s a quick list of some WordPress news we found interesting and helpful this week.

Which WordPress Files Should You Back Up?
Take a look at which files you need to back up along with some recommendations for services and plugins to help you get the job done from WPBeginner.

How To Download Older Plugin Versions From WordPress.org
Have you ever updated a plugin to discover it’s got problems and you wish you could revert back to the previous version? Here’s a quick article showing you how easy it is to do that.

Setting Up PHP and Composer In MAMP
A lot of people use MAMP for WordPress development. In this article Tom McFarlin describes how to get Composer working under MAMP.

Stay Connected

Keep in touch on our blog, YouTube Channel, Facebook, and Google+.

We’ve been creating a lot of new content lately. So this week we’re sending you a list of the top 5 articles for June.

1. Video Tutorials

The most popular page on our site is our growing list of video tutorials. Some of most popular new videos include:

• What you need to know when accepting payments online
• Using Cart66 for event registration
• Selling access to content on your site
• How to sell music on WordPress
• Meet the hosted payment page that makes your site PCI compliant

Check out the full list of videos on our new video tutorials page.

2. Launch Pack

The Cart66 Launch Pack is a service we provide that gets you up and running as fast as possible. Just last week, here’s what a customer said:

You can’t beat this service! Especially if you’re new to setting up an ecommerce site. Dude! I’ve got an error free, fully functioning ecommerce site in a couple hours.

When you get a Launch Pack, one of our WordPress developers will connect your WordPress site to your Cart66 Cloud account. We’ll skin your hosted payment page with your WordPress theme and make sure everything is running smoothly.

To learn more, check out the Launch Pack.

 

3. What Is PCI Compliance Scope?

In this video we talk about what PCI Compliance is and what it means to be “in scope.” We also go over some ways to “reduce scope” to make launching your online business safer, easier, and less expensive. If you accept credit card payments, in any way, this video /  article is important.

Watch this video to learn What Is PCI Compliance Scope?

4. Getting Started With Cart66 Cloud

This getting started guide, shows you how Cart66 is a fundamentally different kind of WordPress ecommerce plugin because of the suite of connected services that are included. These services make Cart66 the most reliable and most secure way to run an online store with WordPress. We put together this article and filled it with pictures and videos to show you how Cart66 works and why we like to say, “It’s Better Together.”

Learn more about Getting Started With Cart66 Cloud

5. WordPress Event Registration Plugin

Did you know you can sell tickets and event registrations with Cart66? In this event registration demonstration video we’ll take a look at the different features to look for in any WordPress event registration plugin and how Cart66 meets all of those needs.

Watch how you can use Cart66 as your WordPress Event Registration Plugin

Around The Web

New Beginner WordPress Tutorials to Help You Learn WordPress
Here is a list of 24 videos to get you (or your clients) up to speed on how to use WordPress. These video tutorials are specifically designed for beginners. There’s also a free getting started guide that you can download as a PDF. If you like the videos, there are ways you can use unbranded versions of these videos for your own clients.

How To Link To An External Site From The Post Title In WordPress
I can’t believe I didn’t know about this. Here are two different ways you can get your post title to link to an external site. Sometimes you may just want to share a link with your readers that links to another site rather than your own post. Here’s how you can do it.
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Finding photos for blog posts is always a challenge. Or, maybe you just want better pics out of your iPhone.  All the photos in this article were taken and edited on an iPhone 6. Environmental adjustments, technical adjustments, and editing are all covered in this great guide to taking better photos with you iPhone. (P.S. almost all of this also applies to other mobile phones as well)

Thanks for reading this email! If there’s any way I can help you with anything, just let me know.

Until next time…
Lee Blue
cart66.com

 

 >> A review of the fundamental differences between WordPress ecommerce plugins

Let’s talk about the fundamental differences between the various WordPress ecommerce plugins. Everybody knows that there are a lot of ecommerce plugins out there. Some plugins focus on digital products while others are designed for physical products or donations.

Here are 7 questions to help you understand the fundamental differences between the various ecommerce plugins for WordPress.

1. What types of products can you sell?
2. What features are in the core plugin?
3. What features do you have to buy as add-ons?
4. What payment gateways are supported?
5. Can you accept credit cards AND offering PayPal at the same time?
6. How do you secure the payments?
7. Do you need a special “ecommerce” theme or does it work with any WordPress theme?

Most of the WordPress ecommerce plugins require you to buy add-ons to get the features you need. For example, most payment gateways tend to be available as premium add-on plugins. Cart66 has built-in support for over 100 payment gateways.

You can also accept credit card payments and offer PayPal as a payment option at the same time.

How Is Cart66 Different?

Cart66 brings everything you need together in one place. All the features are available without having to buy any additional add-ons. All the features are developed by our own team and are seamlessly integrated and always kept up to date. Most notable is that Cart66 comes with a suite of connected services to improve the reliability and security of your ecommerce site.

One of the most important connected services is the secure, PCI compliant, hosted payment page that looks exactly like your WordPress site.

Check out this article for a review of the fundamental differences between WordPress ecommerce plugins

Around The Web

A New Way To Get Great Images
Have you heard of Canva? It is one of the best and easiest ways to get images for blog posts, social media, newsletters, or whatever else you might need an image for. Leslie does a great job giving an overview of how it all works.

Yoast vs All-in-One SEO Pack
This review dives into the differences between the two most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. Nick provides a very in-depth look at both plugins to help you choose what’s right for you and your WordPress site.

What Might Be Confusing You About The WordPress Admin
I help a lot of people with their WordPress sites through support tickets, WordCamps, etc. One of the most common issue is not seeing certain controls in the WordPress admin because they are not enabled in the screen options panel. Bud Kraus digs in to reveal a bunch of other tips and tricks to help you navigate the WordPress admin.

12+ Fastest Loading WordPress Themes
Last week we talked about using minimal ecommerce themes for WordPress. Here is a list of themes that are remarkable because of how fast they load. Adding Cart66 might make them perfect ecommerce themes for your next project.

Thanks for reading and until next time…
Lee Blue

If you are looking to themes for ecommerce features, you might be looking in the wrong place. Unless you have hundreds of products, most of the work you do for your online business is going to be marketing related. You will be writing blog posts, SEO optimization, and making sure your site is running as fast as possible. With that in mind, the marketing features of your theme are probably more important than the ecommerce features. In fact, sometimes ecommerce theme features can get in the way.

Using an ecommerce plugin that bring the features you need to sell your products will do two important things:

1. Keep your WordPress site fast and light weight

 

• Keep your ecommerce features portable across multiple themes

 

Let’s take a look at why a minimal ecommerce theme may be the best choice and how to find one.

>> Minimal Ecommerce Themes for WordPress

New Feature: Archive Products

If you decide to stop selling something and don’t want to have that product cluttering up your list of products, now you can archive that product. This will move the product form your list of products that you are actively selling and put it on the “Archived Products” screen in you Cart66 Dashboard. While archived products are no longer listed among your active products, you still have access to all the orders for that product and all the revenue history remains as well. Archiving products lets you keep things nice and tidy when you are managing the products you are selling.

Around The Web

Setting up email notifications for WordPress updates
Keeping your WordPress site updated is crucial for the security of your site. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to receive email notifications when updates happen.

15 most annoying things about WordPress and how to fix them
Does that “uncategorized” post category annoy you? Ever wanted to change your WordPress username but couldn’t figure out how? What can you do about comment spam? How about improving the WordPress search? Find all those answers and more with this really helpful article.

Syncing content between two WordPress sites
Maybe you have a staging site and a live site and you need to sync content between them. There are already plugins like WP DB Migrate Pro, but that is a little more technical and maybe you don’t need to sync the entire database. Perhaps you just want to sync a couple posts. Checkout this new plugin and see how easy it can be to keep things in sync.

Thanks for reading this email! As always, if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can do to help just let me know.

Until next time…
Lee Blue
cart66.com

Cart66 is now available for as little as $9.99/mo making it a great option for any size store or accepting payments of any kind – such as:

• accepting donations
• selling music
• selling tickets to events
• letting your clients pay their invoices on your site
• and more…

Cart66 provides a PCI compliant hosted payment page that looks exactly like the rest of your site. So, you don’t even need your own SSL certificate.

Building an ecommerce site is just as easy as building any other WordPress site because Cart66 takes care of all of the technical and security details for you. Cart66 brings all the features together with all the security and connected services to give you a fast, reliable, safe, ecommerce platform for WordPress. It’s better together.

Introducing Ember and Fire

Ember: $9.99/month or $99/year (2 months free)
The Ember plan provides all the features you need to start selling including a secure hosted payment page to safely accept credit card payments.

Fire: $29.99/month or $299/year (2 months free)
The Fire plan adds additional, advanced features including inventory management, recurring billing, membership & subscriptions, a secure customer portal, and advanced email notification tools.

Everything is available to try for free.
 

What To Look For In A Payment Plugin

Whether you use Cart66 or not, there are certain things you need to know if you are going to start accepting payments online. Here are few topics we cover in this video.

• What’s the difference between a payment gateway and a merchant account?
• What are aggregate vs individual merchant accounts?
• What do SSL certificates actually do?
• What’s the difference between a firewall and an SSL certificate?
• How can I start accepting payments easily and also securely?

>> What to look for in a payment plugin
 

YouTube Channel is Growing

We’re up to 24 videos and are really happy with the growth and feedback we’re getting for our YouTube channel. We’ve got tutorials and marketing tips alike. Stay up to date by subscribing to our channel.

 

Around The Web

WordPress Is A Teenager
Did you know that WordPress just had it’s 13th birthday on May 27th?

How to change the “reply” text for WordPress comments
Have you ever wanted to change the word “Reply” to something else like, “Your Ideas” or “Leave A Review?” Well, there’s a filter for that and this tutorial shows you how it works.

How to make any WordPress theme responsive
This is a pretty in-depth tutorial. Even if you don’t want to make a non-responsive theme responsive, you’ll learn some cool tips for responsive design in general.

Until next time…

Lee Blue
Cart66 CEO
https://cart66.com
 

Event Registration

Cart66 makes a great event registration platform for WordPress. I say “platform” because selling tickets to events involves a lot of different features. In fact, event registrations can be one of the more complicated things to sell online because it involves:

• • Collecting custom information

 

• • Making sure you don’t oversell the event

 

• • Including some downloadable material

 

• • Marketing the event with discounts and coupons

 

• Accepting credit card payments

Cart66 can meet all of these needs. Here’s a demonstration video and article going into the details of how to use Cart66 as your WordPress event registration platform.

WordPress Event Registration Demo / Tutorial

A Different WordPress Ecommerce Plugin

Cart66 Cloud is a different WordPress ecommerce plugin because, in addition to a WordPress plugin, you also get a suite of connected services. These services improve the reliability and security of your online store. Cart66 also solves the problem of securely accepting credit card payments with support for over 100 different payment gateways built in.

Unlike other plugins where it’s up to you to mash up a wide variety of other extensions and add-ons, Cart66 includes all the features together. In addition, all the security issues are solved with your own secure hosted payment page Come take a look. It’s better together.

Getting Started With Cart66 Cloud

Around The Web

Turn Your WordPress Site Into An App

Ever wanted a mobile app for your business? With wOrona you can get your business into the Apple App Store and on Google Play. Now you can do it yourself for free.

• Turn your WordPress site into an app

Self-Signed SSL Certs For Local Development

Have you ever needed to develop a WordPress site that you knew was going to be running over SSL? Sometimes it is really nice to have your local copy of a WordPress site running over https too. That way you can check to see if you get any insecure content errors before you go live. Here’s a two part series on setting up a self-signed SSL certificate for local development.

• • Add Self-Signed SSL To Google Chrome

 

• Add Self-Signed SSL to cURL

13 WordPress Tips For Beginners

Everybody knows how to turn on permalinks and the benefits of doing that, right? Do you know how to choose a secure password and change the default “admin” username? What about changing the size of the images you upload so they better fit your content area? Learn all of this and more:

• 13 Tips For WordPress Beginners

Stay Connected

Keep in touch by subscribing to our YouTube channel, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Until next time, have an awesome week!

Lee Blue

cart66.com

We’ve got some exciting new features to share with you! This past week we launched 2 new features!

Buy Now Product Bundles

Another new feature is Buy Now links for selling product bundles. If you sell a group of related products, you can create a single link which, when clicked, will add all of the products to the cart and place your customer directly on the checkout page ready to pay for the order.
Watch this 2:48 quick demonstration of how it works.

Tax Free Products

There is a very robust tax system in Cart66 where you can manage tax rates by regions right down to individual zip codes. Cart66 also integrates with taxamo to handle international VAT tax for digital product sales. The problem was that once you set up tax rates, then tax was calculated for all orders. Sometimes, however, you sell both taxable products – like t-shirts – and non-taxable products – like services, event registrations, or donations. Now, you can flag products as tax free! It’s as simple as clicking a checkbox when setting up your product.

We are continuing to build out a library of Video Tutorials demonstrating all sorts of things like:

• Inventory management
• Selling products on a payment plan
• Selling music
• Accepting donations
• Sending email follow ups

Check out the Video Tutorials here.

Around The Web

WordPress 4.5.2 Security Release
There is a vulnerability in Plupload, the library used for uploading files in WordPress. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

4 Tips From Seasoned Bloggers
Joining communities, using services to help share your content, and cool theme recommendations all await you in this article.

In Memoriam: Chuck Mullenweg
We are so sorry to learn of the passing of Matt’s father. It is clear from Matt’s post that his dad was a huge influence in his life, a great dad, and a cool person. I personally met Matt a few weeks ago and, after reading this post, I can see where Matt get’s his coolness from. My prayers are with Matt and his family.

This week thought it might be useful to put together an overview of how to promote your online store. Everybody says you need to get a Twitter account, set up a Facebook page, create a YouTube channel… But usually that’s where the advice ends. It’s not often that anyone shares a plan on how it all works together.

So here is one way you can drive traffic and increase sales for free. There are several steps in the process and you don’t have to do every step. It’s a fairly comprehensive approach for creating and sharing content. Here are some of the main points:

• Blogging: How to overcome writer’s block and create great content
• Email marketing
• YouTube marketing
• Using social media
• Joining online communities to share your knowledge

>> How to promote your online store

If you are new to YouTube, we’ve got a nice introduction to YouTube Marketing for Ecommerce.
 

Around The Web

28 Ways To Secure Your WordPress Website – (great tips in this article)
With techniques for beginners, advanced, and pro users, there is great information in here for everyone. Your almost guaranteed to learn something new.

WordPress Tutorials on Tuts+
Have you checked out the WordPress tutorials on Tuts+ lately? There is some nice stuff on there.

30 Essential Plugins For WordPress Beginners
We do not recommend using Disqus because of privacy concerns, so maybe it’s more like 29 plugins… Nevertheless, it’s a nice list of plugins.
 

Stay In Touch

Stay up to date on Cart66 and WordPress Ecommerce news on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Thanks for reading!
Lee Blue
https://cart66.com