Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette interviews Adam Preiser and Andre Gagnon, co-founders of SureCart, a managed e-commerce platform for WordPress. They discuss SureCart’s user-friendly features, flexible pricing, robust subscription management, and seamless integrations. The conversation highlights how SureCart simplifies online selling for merchants and agencies, offers transparent pricing, and supports both digital and physical products. Listeners ask questions about selling digital goods, reporting, and payment options. The episode concludes with community engagement details and upcoming events, showcasing SureCart’s commitment to merchant success and innovation.

Top Takeaways:

• Accessibility and Customizability Are Core Priorities: SureCart places a strong emphasis on accessibility, including keyboard navigation, screen readers, and focus management. Every new feature undergoes extensive accessibility testing. At the same time, the platform is highly customizable, allowing users to modify templates for products, carts, checkouts, and even customer areas. This is particularly valuable for agencies building stores for clients with specific design requirements.

• Flexibility and Seamless Integration Simplify E-Commerce: SureCart supports multiple pricing options—including one-time payments, subscriptions, and installment plans—and integrates seamlessly with page builders like Elementor and Bricks. It eliminates the need for multiple third-party plugins, offering built-in shipping, taxes, upsells, affiliates, and abandoned cart recovery. Merchants can manage both digital products (like photography) and services, including instant checkout pages for streamlined selling.

• Advanced Reporting and Subscription Management: The platform provides detailed reporting dashboards with KPIs and subscription analytics, making it easy to track sales, refunds, churn, and growth. Subscription management is automated, including failed payment recovery and options to retain customers through discounts or pauses. Integrations with tools like Zapier allow merchants to trigger automated actions and workflows, enhancing customer retention and operational efficiency.
  
• Transparent Pricing, Scalable Plans, and Upcoming Features: SureCart offers a simple pricing model: free plan with a 1.9% transaction fee, or paid annual plans ($179/year for a single store) with all features included and no transaction fees. Plans scale from one store to unlimited stores, ideal for agencies. Upcoming features include starter templates, product reviews, automated fees and discounts, custom report builders, and integration with Razor Pay for international payments. The team maintains a customer-focused, approachable philosophy, prioritizing feedback and ongoing improvements.

Mentioned In The Show:

• SureCart
• WP Crafter
• CartFlows
• Elementor
• Bricks Builder
• Otto Kit
• Zapier

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Adam Preiser (Co-founder, SureCart)
• Andre Gagnon (Co-founder, SureCart)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:27  Hello! Welcome to the Post Status Happiness Hour Live. We didn’t have one last week. I was traveling, so I’m happy to be back and for this week to be talking to Andre and Adam from SureCart. How are you guys doing?

Adam Preiser 00:00:41  Well, we figured if you you weren’t able to last week, you had to get double the guests this week so. 

Michelle Frechette 00:00:45  See how that works so well, thank you for, you know, for making that happen for me. That’s awesome. I was actually out of the country last week and two weeks before that I think we were at WordCamp US.  It’s been crazy busy summer, and that’s a good thing. So it was nice.

Adam Preiser 00:01:02  Traveler, you travel, like, probably ten times more than I travel. I’m such a homebody.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:07  It’s insane. You know, I think just having a cat at home and no kids or, you know, spouse or anything to worry about makes it easy to just like, yeah, sure. I’ll go. 

Adam Preiser 00:01:18  Cats versus dogs. Cats are self-sufficient, but the dogs are a little tougher.

Andre Gagnon 00:01:23  I have young kids, so that’s even different.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:27  That’s true. It’s like as long as. Yeah, exactly.. Are we good? I think we lost Adam. Maybe? Oh, no. Adam’s there. Okay.

Adam Preiser 00:01:45  I lowered the resolution on my camera just because there’s a little choppiness going on, so I wasn’t sure if it was me.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:51  Okay. Very good. Thank you. So we’re talking about SureCart today, which is another form other than the one, the big one people talk about a lot of the time. The one that says, make sure you’ve backed up your entire database before hitting this update. Every time you log into your dashboard. A really great e-commerce solution. And I was all over your website today. I love that every time I switch to off the pricing page to be like, wait a second before you leave. Have you thought about this? Like, you guys have it all wrapped up in spades. I was like, no, I’m still looking. But it was good. But I was looking at it. It seems like you’ve thought of everything, so I want to give you an opportunity. First, introduce yourselves for anybody who doesn’t know who you are and what you do with SureCart. And then we’re going to jump right into it. So, Adam, let’s start with you.

Adam Preiser 00:02:39  Oh, sure. So my name is Adam. I’m one of the co-founders of SureCart. And, most people, a lot of people, some people might recognize me. I have a YouTube channel I haven’t been so active on lately, but it’s the WP Crafter YouTube channel. So if you ever receive an email from us, from SureCart it says Adam, also known as that bald guy on YouTube. So that’s me. But I also happen to be one of the co-founders. But I’m not a technical co-founder. I’m more strategy and marketing and working with all of our amazing merchants that are using our cart.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:14  Fantastic, and Andre.

Andre Gagnon 00:03:15  And I’m one of the technical co-founders, mostly on the plugin side, but, yeah, I mean, Adam kind of had this idea for an e-commerce product, and we launched it together, and here we are.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:30  Excellent. So tell me a little bit about it. What was the reasoning behind creating it? So there must have been a pain point you’re trying to solve for people when you come up with something new, and what has brought us up to where we are today?

Andre Gagnon 00:03:43  Yeah. Let me let me tell you a story. So, I went back when I was a freelancer, I did a lot of e-commerce websites using WooCommerce, and I love WooCommerce. It’s a great product. But what was hard for me as a freelancer is just a solo founder of an agency. I was getting calls on Sunday night that subscriptions aren’t renewing or, you know, middle-of-the-night checkouts not working, things like that. And, it kind of put me off of, of e-commerce altogether because you’re kind of on the hook for everything. That’s that’s one of the great parts about WooCommerce, you have all this control, but it’s also one of the downsides. You have all this control, you know, and it’s all on you. So we wanted to build an alternative that let you build stores for your clients and design whatever you want for your store, but leave the infrastructure and the heavy lifting to us. So we we call it more of a managed e-commerce solution as opposed to, you know, like a self-hosted one. So that’s kind of where we, we join forces and built SureCart.

Adam Preiser 00:04:54  I also have a story with that to my might not be as, relatable as Andre’s, but in 2017 I decided to make a product that ended up launching in 2018, a very well-known product in the WooCommerce ecosystem called CartFlows. And it’s a a plugin you can add to WooCommerce to customize the checkout, have sales funnels, order bumps, totally optimize your revenue, and so having a few years of that and really working with our users with that, in my mind I was like, this should be a little simpler, you know, because there’s constantly like plugin conflicts and, and different things like that are typical of a WooCommerce store.  It’s just the nature of the beast. So we would have a, the sales funnel cart flows plugin. We have a cart abandonment plugin, the most popular WooCommerce cart abandonment plugin, 300,000 sites using it. We have a variation swatch plugin. So you get these sites with all these plugins and then you have other vendors. It can become a challenge to manage. And with e-commerce, it’s so sensitive in the sense that it’s the lifeblood of your business. You know, if there’s a problem, it’s a big problem.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:14  Not to mention, the more you add into your site, perhaps it slows down a little bit.

Adam Preiser 00:06:21  Yes, and becomes more fragile as well when the next update comes and you don’t know. Another challenge with that is like someone would come to us because they didn’t know what was causing a problem. Was it the payment gateway update? Was it WooCommerce? Was it that other plugin that they added from this other vendor? So, you know, you’re just bouncing around trying to find out, like, where is the problem originating, all while you’re trying to run your business. It’s, scary.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:47  Yeah, for sure. One of the in my freelance days, I’m kind of back to my freelance days, but prior to working it, given my earlier freelance days, setting up an e-commerce solution for a customer was perhaps one of those things that, number one, I never knew how much to charge. Like as. As part of my services, because it was going to be quick or it was going to be months worth of, you know, teeth pulling and whatever else. But also, for me, the biggest pain point was setting up shipping and understanding how to set up shipping. So, have you solved that problem for your customers?

Andre Gagnon 00:07:26  Yes, we have solved shipping. And shipping, I think one of the more complex parts about e-commerce is there is all these things that aren’t software, like shipping and taxes and, you know, even like how invoices are formatted need to be different for each country and things like that. So there’s a lot that involved beyond just installing plugins and things like that. So, yeah, it’s definitely something we thought about when we built it intentionally into SureCart. Hopefully we can showcase some of that stuff today.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:57  Yeah, because right now I only sell downloads. Because downloads, I don’t have to worry about shipping. It makes it a lot easier. But you never know. I could maybe start writing physical products. You never know. You never know. So that’s awesome, I love that. When I was working with Give, which is also commerce, because we were collecting money through donation forms, they still do. I’m just not part of the group anymore. One of my most requested meet me on Zoom type meetings was showing customers how to set up webhooks in Stripe. It’s a lot easier to do that nowadays, isn’t it? With a one-button connect and those kinds of things.

Adam Preiser 00:08:37  Yes. Thank goodness. It’s certainly a lot easier now. And, you know, a lot, a lot easier the webhooks. It’s technical. There’s like technical things with e-commerce, which is part of why we built SureCart was to. there’s still some things you got to learn, but.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:54  Of course.

Adam Preiser 00:08:55  It’s nowhere as near as difficult as some of the other options. When it’s reduced to an on or off switch inside of a settings panel.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:04  So I don’t have to hire a developer to help me set up SureCart is what I do. Is that correct?

Andre Gagnon 00:09:13  Yeah. No, no developer needed. That’s sort of a goal. I am historically a designer, so I kind of got into development through design. So I love designing, you know, product pages and, you know, all that stuff, especially when I was freelancing and I really didn’t want to focus at all on the development. And so that’s why I thought, hey, let me build a product that, that I want, that I don’t have to worry about that stuff. I can just focus on the design part.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:42  Excellent. Well, Adam, I know you’ve got it.

Adam Preiser 00:09:45  Oh, I was just going to say I like to call Andre the Triple Threat, actually, But it’s, you know, triple threat. That’s like an entertainment term when someone can I think they can sing, they can dance, and they can act. Or do I have that right?

Michelle Frechette 00:09:57  I think so. I think it is. 

Andre Gagnon 00:09:59  I can’t do it. I can’t do any of those. I can’t sing, dance, or act. 

Adam Preiser 00:10:02  He can’t do any of those. But he has a very rare talent in that he can in an incredible developer, but he’s also has a design eye. So the, the design that you see inside of art, a lot of it started with, with him, even though SureCart is a much bigger team now. You know, we have close to 20 people. So, but he’s that triple threat, and that’s why it’s worked out so well.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:31  Yeah, it makes sense to me. Well, how about showing me how it works? I know you’ve got your computer all cued up. Let me know when you’re ready to for me to bring it online.

Adam Preiser 00:10:39  Sure. If you could do that, that would be great.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:42  You got it.

Adam Preiser 00:10:43  All right. Well, anyone can actually visit the demo store that we’ve set up to show you or anyone that’s interested. What you can really accomplish with SureCart. And we try to use all of the features here. So for example, when you go to our shop page, we are using different collections, variations. When you click into a product, we’ve got different variation images, sizes. We’ve got our beautiful add to cart right here that’s fully customizable. And then you can even jump into our checkout, where we’re showing the beautiful checkout along with dynamic order bumps and that display based upon what has been added to the cart. But since we probably have like some limited time, I’ll just go over a couple things that I think are really nice about SureCart. 

Michelle Frechette 00:11:43  Yeah, let me see.

Adam Preiser00:11:44  Actually, actually, the first thing I will mention.And I’m sure the audience will appreciate this. this isn’t what I was going to say right now, but since I’m on the checkout, we put a ton of effort, and emphasis into a very important topic, which is accessibility. So this would be keyboard navigation, screen readers, and focus management. So, you know, it goes beyond just being able to navigate this checkout fully from your keyboard and fully fill it out. If I had the the the screen reader on, you would hear the announcement of the different fields, in everything, and especially when you just saw a moment ago the, we had the, the slide-out card right here. This has focus locking. So if you’re using the tab to get through this, it doesn’t lose its focus and end up in here in the main canvas. So one of the things we put a very significant emphasis on, the team knows if there’s a new feature, it has to have extensive testing for accessibility or we just can’t release it. 

Michelle Frechette 00:12:52  Perfect. I love that.

Adam Preiser 00:12:52  It’s been, it’s been quite an effort and an energy to make sure everybody’s on board with that, including our QAs. And it’s something that we’re actually proud of. But it’s also aspirational, as you might, as you and the audience might know. There’s always improvements to make, to achieve higher levels of accessibility. So, you know, we’re always striving for that. okay. Oh, actually, I had my tabs all preloaded here. But yeah, I had I had to close my browser. So the first thing I’ll show is the customizability of SureCart. So let me go to the back end here, and I’ll go into our products tab when you are. Let’s go into, for example, this product right here. Every single part of SureCart is customizable at the template levels. So, for example with your products, you can have different product templates. This is something that WooCommerce doesn’t do, actually, out of the box, to allow you to have different designs per product. And it’s really nice. We have this template visual drag and drop template editor, and you can edit, customize the design everything, and you can assign different templates to different products. And it doesn’t just go, it doesn’t just stop there. The slide-out cart, the checkout, all of that, every area of your cart is customizable. And the reason we actually did that. Here, let me jump into the cart. This is my demo site. This isn’t the demo site I just showed. This is just my demo site, I typically use when I make a video. But everything is movable, customizable, using the block editor. So anyone that’s used the block editor is going to be super familiar with this, even though we also support Elementor as well as Bricks Builder with native block integrations with them. The reason we did this, and we put so much effort into customizability, is because we figured agencies are building out stores for their clients. Their clients have specific design requirements. We wanted to make it so an agency can achieve the customized designs that they’re after for their client projects. So literally everything the shop page, the checkout page, everything inside of SureCart, you can easily customize, even the customer area. You can customize that as well. The next thing I love about SureCart and our merchants really love as well is the flexibility. And so I like to show how flexible our pricing system is. So a product can actually have multiple prices, and we have pretty much every base of how you might want to price a product covered. One-time installment plans, I actually love installment plans. I’m like the biggest advocate of people using installment plans to sell things, as well as subscriptions that have set-up fees or trials. Pay what you want. We’ve got almost every base covered when it comes to how you want to price your product, because sometimes. Wellyou sell? Michelle, you sell, digital products? You might want to sell a digital product with a subscription, also with a one-time price. Or maybe if it’s an expensive product, maybe it’s a $300 training course. You might want to sell it in three payments of $100 to make, purchasing it more accessible to someone that wants to spend money with you. We have this ability to have multiple pricing options for your products, and it’s very, very flexible. The next one would be seamless.

Adam Preiser 00:16:50  How seamless everything is. You can literally have a store on WordPress using SureCart with one plugin. This is assuming you’re using the product editor two plugins. If you’re using a page builder. You don’t need to add an SMTP plugin. You don’t need to add a variation swash plugin. You don’t need to add a cart abandonment plugin, or a tax plugin, or a shipping plugin, or an upsell plugin. It’s all seamlessly built in. So for example, you were mentioning shipping, so you click here, you go to shipping, and you just toggle it on. And we have training videos on how to set up shipping. The same goes for taxes. You just click here on taxes, which is traditionally a complex thing. And we’ve simplified it. And one of the advantages with SureCart is we include real-time tax rates, so you don’t have to manage it or worry about it as a merchant. As soon as the customer puts in their address, we’re going to pull down what the tax rate is today, and they change.

Adam Preiser 00:17:54 And so make sure the right tax rate is being charged to them. But it’s more than just these features. For example, abandoned checkout. I actually recently made a video on abandoned checkout. Like, just really encouraging. If you’re a merchant, just toggle this switch. Just click on this switch right here. And the whole campaign of recovering abandoned carts, you know, when someone adds a product to their checkout, they go to the checkout and they get distracted kids or the cat or the dog or something like that, a phone call, this will they put their email, capture it, and it’ll get them back in the checkout for you. You can increase the revenue of your store, with these lost sales, typically about 10 to 20%, depending on what you’re selling. And also, we have an option here to send a coupon. So you can say maybe on that third email, let’s give them 10% off or some incentive to get back in, and complete their order. And this also goes into advanced features. So if I go over here, over on the left, we have order bumps. One click upsells. We have affiliate management, so you don’t need to then bolt on an affiliate plugin with its own UI. It’s just all seamlessly together in a single plugin. All for you. Lastly, I’m going to show integrations. Inside of our settings, we feature some integrations with so many different products in the WordPress ecosystem. This is just what we’ve listed. There’s a ton of products that have integrations that we couldn’t even fit here on this screen, as well is we have native integrations. Want to give access to Learn Dash or some learning tool, membership tool, or something like that. You scroll down here to integrations on a product, and we have them all listed here. These integrations that are native inside of the platform, and I’m not mentioning lots of things like license management if you’re selling a licensed product. So this is the product in a nutshell. And I want to show one thing that we’re working on releasing.

Adam Preiser 00:20:15  Hopefully, it’ll pull up right here. We’re releasing. We’re working so hard to get this out early next month. And that is a focus of ours, of having one-click starter templates that really show the potential of what you can build. So if you see our demo, you’re like, wow, this looks really nice. I like I can customize the gallery, I can customize everything. We want to make it easy for people to start at this point, not start at the point that I’m showing right here, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:20:44  They’re like,know what? 

Adam Preiser 00:20:46  Yes, exactly. So like to really show the potential, it might be hard to, to see this, but this is a one of the demos that we have fully designed and we’re building down here. We have a demo for our furniture store. And this is really going to show the flexibility in the power of what you can accomplish inside of your cart with the flexibility from just from a design perspective.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:13  That’s nice.

Adam Preiser 00:21:17  Anyways, so that’s the demo of it.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:21  Excellent. So I have, we have a question and I have a question also. So Marcus Burnett is with us. First he said hello. Nice. Sorry, I just covered your face up. Adam will pull that up in just a second, 

Adam Preiser: Okay, sure. 

Michelle Frechette 00:21:37 Yeah. So I’m thinking about starting the website with people selling their images on his site. Would SureCart be a good fit for that?

Adam Preiser 00:21:49  Yeah. Why don’t you answer that? Andre, we have variations and all of that.

Andre Gagnon 00:21:54  Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, photography’s just digital products. So what’s nice is, you know, if you use something like EDD, you kind of have to lock down your uploads folder to make sure nobody can access these images and files. And there’s like a complexity there with SureCart., we have a secured file delivery built in. So there’s no configuration there needed. So it makes it really nice and easy to get started. And you don’t have to maintain anything going forward. So it would be a great fit.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:24  You can use watermarked, smaller images for your thumbnails and then download the actual photo and a much larger format higher, higher definition format later. For sure. So one of the things that I’m selling is coaching services like a four-week or a five-week coaching service. And the way I have it set up right now, because I have not put in an e-commerce solution, is that I just have them booked through Calendly. But ideally, I want all of my products, including my services, to be in one, you know, one shop, so that I’m not like having to use special post types, custom post types, and things like that when everything in one spot. Can I do that with this? How would I maybe think about how I would do that?

Adam Preiser 00:23:16  You absolutely can. We actually have a lot of merchants doing the same thing because SureCart has been around for three a little over three years now and we have about 100,000 merchants. But in the early days it’s typically the early adopters, which are typically the web agencies that purchased SureCart and started using it. And many of them are using it personally and for their clients. But for on a personal level, they are using it for creating invoices to send to their clients for services and things like that. But we have a really neat feature that Andre and I actually figured this one out. We call it the Instant checkout. I love this feature. It’s a real easy way to create a product if you don’t want, like that shop page experience where it lists all the products. Instead, you can use what we call the instant checkout. So I’ll show you an instant checkout. Actually, I should show it from the demo, but I forget which product in our demo had.

Andre Gagnon: It should be the courses. 

Adam Preiser: The courses got it. Yes. So let me click on courses. Okay, so we’re trying to show all the power in the demo of SureCart, and we set this up with this pricing table. And when you click on it, one of the options it takes you to this beautiful, elegant, zero effort, what we call an instant checkout page. So, it will pull out the pictures you have added all the information. If you have multiple prices, there is this price selector here, and it’s just beautiful, elegant and instant. So literally you can have this page live on your site that you can send a link to with 60 seconds of your time if you have the images. Actually.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:09  Sure. I love that that looks pretty, pretty seamless.

Adam Preiser 00:25:17  Yes. A lot of our merchants love the instant checkout. It’s been a pretty huge hit, actually. Because there’s no effort, right? There’s no effort to sell something with the instant checkout. And to set it all up, you just create a product. And then here on the top right, it says Instant checkout. You literally just turn it on. Do you want your logo? A couple options, do you want an image, a coupon, the description terms and conditions. Do you want to customize the thank you page? That’s where someone ends up after they place the order. And you have all these options. And then a direct link for that.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:58  Seems super simple. I mean, it looks it’s, I’m guessing it takes a little bit of time to set up, not weeks and weeks, but a couple of hours anyway. Like and you should invest that kind of time. Honestly, make sure your thumbnails are good. Make sure your descriptions are good. You want to make sure you have alt text, your images, all of that kind of thing. So you should set up an e-commerce in ten minutes or you’re not doing it right. You want to take the time and do it right?

Adam Preiser 00:26:23  Correct.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:24  Yes.

Adam Preiser 00:26:25  The full system, correct. Yeah, there’s definitely things to learn. And, that’s actually presents a different challenge that we face. We are very agile, so we have feature releases every month. We’re releasing 3 or 4 new features. We have we have merchants that they’re like, oh, I didn’t know you added that. You know, a couple of months ago, even though we send emails and we make a video when we have a release. We’re always adding new features. The next, release, which is already ready, and I’m testing it. You can add videos to your product, image galleries, and a few other nice things in there. Regarding one-click upsells.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:08  So show us your pricing structure. I’m hearing all of these things that keep getting added. Oh, what happens if I lock in at one price and then you start adding more things? Am I getting all those extra things? Is it. Am I paying for different add-on shows? How it works?

Adam Preiser 00:27:23  Yeah, that’s actually. We want to have our pricing be very simple and very easy to understand. So that’s why we’ve done it this way. And when you see the cost, you might be like, oh my gosh, this is such a, a savings compared to alternatives on the market.

Adam Preiser 00:27:45  So for example, when you come to our pricing page, there’s three packages a one store, a five store, or unlimited stores. And also, I didn’t mention this. We also have what’s called the launch plan. This has no monthly fee. It gives you every single transaction percent transaction fee, and you get everything. But if you don’t want that transaction fee, you could get on instead one of our low-cost plans. And it includes everything. Every plan includes everything. We didn’t want to have different plans with different things, or ever have a doubt in a merchant’s mind that they’re going to have to pay for something. For each of these packages, you can choose to pay yearly, and you can see a single store is $179 for the year, not for the month, for the year. And it gives you, like we’ve done, a comparison of what’s included and what it would potentially cost to replicate those features in WooCommerce and the WooCommerce it hits in about $3000 a year, but with us it’s $179 a year.

Adam Preiser 00:28:55  So that’s just that’s pretty big, actually. So all you have to choose is do you want to pay yearly or do you want to pay once? So and when you pay once, it’s a one-time fee that includes everything. And you can even pay that over the course of 11 months. So one store, five store, or unlimited stores. Now, typically our agency customers get the unlimited store plan, and they add all their clients to that. And there’s also some unique features there for agencies. If you wanted to change how you price your work for your clients, for example, at a service fee, you can do that. So instead of to ask asking your client for $10,000 to build their website and their store, you can say, I’ll do it for $2000 and add a 2% fee to each of your transactions. And now we’re business partners. Now our interests are fully aligned. Yeah, you can you can do that. But it’s just important. Launch plan has a small transaction fee. You don’t want that. Just get on one of the paid plans. Transaction fee goes away. It’s very simple to get started.

Andre Gagnon 00:30:06  There’s no there’s no there’s no risk. You don’t have to shell out all this money just to get your store up. You can build your store.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:15  Right. So for all three of these plans, you’re making some money at the 1.9% transaction, etc., but we don’t have to put lay out any money to begin with. Is our updates included in all three plans? And is support included in all three plans?

Andre Gagnon 00:30:32  The simple answer is yes for all those because we just want, you know, our merchants to launch their stores and start making money, right? So, if you’re on a paid plan, you get priority support over the free plan users. But that’s the only difference in support.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:47  Nice. So then the next question I have is what I’ve heard a lot of people thinking about. And one of the things that Marcus was just talking about. What about setting up a marketplace? Have you thought about scaling this out so that I could set up a marketplace and have different multi vendors within my website?

Andre Gagnon 00:31:04  That’s a good question. We we have thought about that, but I think we decided we really want to be laser-focuse, our scope on a use case for most of the people that reach out to. SureCart. So it hasn’t really it would be a huge undertaking, I think, to have something like that. And maybe even a different product. Who knows. Yeah, I think we just kind of want to focus on what our merchants are asking for currently.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:30  Nice. Very good. I think it looks awesome. I love that you integrate with so many different things. There are. If I remember correctly, did I see three different payment processing options? So you have Stripe, PayPal and Molly I think were the three?

Adam Preiser 00:31:44  Yes. And we’re actually about to, we’re working on Razor Pay that is for the Indian market. And it’s been a little bit of an effort working with Razor Pay, being a US company, to get an agreement in place with them. But we just literally signed the documents this week, and so we’ll be able to launch that. And we’re pretty excited about that. And as you know, Stripe supports payment local payment gateways in 140 countries or something like that around the world.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:18  Yeah. Stripe is pretty prolific as far as PayPal, quite honestly. Right. So yeah, that’s pretty awesome. I do remember. Have a hearing from a country now and then. It’s like, I can’t sell. I can’t use this because you don’t have. And we had like 20 different ones. So you can’t create for the entire world all the time. But you can hit the majority of it and be very successful for sure. I love this. 

Michelle Frechette 00:32:44  So Marcus is saying so selling. I’m not going to put it up on the screen because if I do it, it’s going to cover Adam’s face. But selling photos? Yes, but selling vendor photos? No. Fair enough. I think you still could, Marcus. I think it depends on how you, as the shop owner, want to set up, how you pay out things, like you could keep track of what sells, and then you could just send money off and, you know, good, good accounting practices on your end, but not, not in a multi-vendor marketplace situation.

Adam Preiser 00:33:16  You know, there was one thing I, I left out and I had listed to show you one of the things I’m very proud of is our reporting. We have it set up in a very unique way, where you first get what we coined the pulse dashboard, and it’s seven KPIs of your store, and you can choose what they are. So if you wanted to see so you can see them at a glance how you want to see them. So here’s all the different KPIs. And then there’s different ways of looking at it. So for sales, if I wanted to see net sales, if I wanted to see orders, if I wanted to see refunds, this is a sample store with sample data, by the way. You can.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:56  That’s why there’s no refunds.

Adam Preiser00:33:58  Yeah. That’s why there’s no refunds. That’s right. 

Michelle Frechette 00:34:00  I can’t return my my my fake product that I fake paid for.

Adam Preiser 00:34:07  Absolutely.  And then down here is we’re really strong in subscription. Most of our merchants are using subscriptions, whether it’s like subscribing save for physical products or normal subscriptions for businesses, and we are very strong in surfacing the data. So we’ve got MMR. We’ve got the growth of your MMR. Like we have the churn, we have all the subscription metrics. And then each of these can feed into a full report right here where there’s different dimensions for it. And you can export add columns of data. I wanted to show this because it’s actually a very important part of e-commerce, is the reporting. And having a reporting that surfaces the insights you need when you’re running a store.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:56  Did I see that you also integrate with Zapier? I think I saw that.

Adam Preiser 00:35:00  Oh, absolutely. Zapier. All the integration tools actually integrate with us, all the ones built on WordPress. We even have a sister company called Auto Kit. And we have real deep integration there. In fact, I made a tutorial video for it yesterday. Where you can use a chatbot to say, make a coupon, create an invoice or something like that. Because of these integrations, we’ve pretty much exposed pretty much everything that you can do via an API.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:32  Nice. So that means that you can trigger events through your email system and things like that. So if a subscription lapses, for example, you can trigger events based on what’s happening on your dashboard through Zapier and other means, I love that.

Adam Preiser 00:35:46  Yes. And we actually do. That’s one of our strong points, is the it’s easy to sell subscriptions, but, you know, have a, have a product with the features to sell subscriptions. It’s a little bit harder to have management for of that subscription and retaining those subscriptions. So we’re so strong in that everything’s done for the merchant. If there’s a failed payment, if the credit card on file is expiring, we it’s all automated. Getting recovering those payments for you when you have subscriptions. But you can also do your own custom thing with any automation tool. You like Zapier?

Michelle Frechette 00:36:25 Well, I’ve just used it before, so I’ve seen that happen with, you know, being able to trigger different kinds of events like that. I think, one of the things that I really do like is that being able to follow up on, you know, those failed payments, for example, I found in the past, one of the things that’s the biggest reason for the failed payments was staff turnover at the the location right for the customer and the email address that purchased it is no longer the email address that things are going to. And so sometimes you just have to dig in a little deeper to find out where that churn is coming from before you can fix it.

Andre Gagnon 00:37:00  So if to turn into like a private detective and.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:03  Sometimes you do.

Andre Gagnon 00:37:05  Stock them outside their office and see where they’re.

Speaker 6 00:37:07  Yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:08  Which is why when we started the customer success department at give, we ended up with, I think it was an 84%, renewal rate on subscriptions because we just started calling people and be like, hey, your subscription expired, can we help you with it? They were like, oh my gosh, it did. So yeah, there’s a lot to be said for that outreach. Instead of just going, oh well, we lost one, right?

Andre Gagnon 00:37:27  Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Adam Preiser 00:37:31 Exactly. I was going to show you some of the subscriptions because it’s actually really cool. We make it so easy to click into an individual subscription. You can change the price. You can make it higher. You can make it lower. You can add a coupon to it. You can change it to an entirely different product. We make it very easy to manage subscriptions. And, actually, this is really cool. We have this feature called Subscription Saver, and I remember me and Andre sitting there figuring out what to call it. It’s another one of these. You just click a button and turn it on. And what this does is it triggers a cancellation survey. So when someone clicks cancel, we just have them choose something, pill some additional information. But there’s an option down here that you can also have on to offer them a discount. So maybe someone’s canceling because of a specific reason. Maybe they feel like it’s too expensive. You can offer them a 15% discount or any discount right there on the spot to retain and to save that cancellation. And there’s other non-monetary things. If someone saying, I’m going on vacation. Well, okay. Why don’t we just pause it for two months instead of canceling it? So there’s these extra efforts that you can do, but in SureCart, you just, like, toggle one little switch and you have these options there.

Michelle Frechette: I love it. 

Adam Preiser 00:38:53  So this is part of the retaining of subscriptions that we put a focus on. And you typically find that lacking and and other other products.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:04  So like in other e-commerce solutions, you can create one-off discount codes. I assume you have that as well, that you can share. I love that. I used to love to be able to create a very specific one for one person, one-time use, so it couldn’t be shared out and those kinds of things. I think that’s a great thing to have as well. Yeah. So tell me what else is coming down the line. Whatever it is that you want to share about, what else we can be looking forward to or enjoying about the product. Now.

Adam Preiser  00:39:35  I actually I’ll, I’ll answer this one.  And then if I forget anything, Andre can step in. 

Andre Gagnon 00:39:41  But you’re sharing your screen, so you go ahead.

Adam Preiser 00:39:44  Oh, perfect. Perfect. So I already mentioned starter templates are literally right around the corner. Here’s an example of one.

Adam Preiser 00:39:52  By the way. This is a, you can accomplish this with our product page template feature, very very easily, a full product page. This is actually the product page. So we have a lot of flexibility. So anyway the starter templates are really going to help people see. And this is coming out. We’re going to launch with three starter templates. The next big feature that we are going to be releasing is product reviews. So this would be an automatically trying to capture reviews from customers that place orders and then displaying these reviews inside of your product pages and in other parts of your website. That’s probably been one of the biggest feature requests, and it’s coming. Then we have a feature that I am excited about and I think you might like yourself. It’s called Automated Fees and Discounts. So it’s like the next level of coupons, right? So instead of given a coupon, you can automate adding a fee or adding a discount based on rules. So I’ll give you an example of what you could do with this, because we’re actually building a store internally for this right now, we are having a sliding scale discount based on how many products, different products that you add to the cart.

Adam Preiser 00:41:09  So if you add two products, you get 10% off everything. If you add five products, you get 40% off of everything. And this is part of this automated fees and discounts feature rule. So it’s going to be great for Black Friday. You can just have particular categories of products on sale, specific products where the discounts automatically added in one spot. Not like going in editing the product itself, but it also has fees, which you probably know something a little something about because of fee recovery type of a situation. You know, with donations, that’s very common. So you can add fees. And the next one is a custom report builder that’s deep in development, close to release, where you can build your own custom reports and see your data exactly the way that you want to see it. And Razor Pay. And so what did I leave out, Andre I know I left something out.

Andre Gagnon 00:42:06  No, I think that was pretty good. I mean, I don’t know, that was pretty comprehensive. This is interesting because most usually on the team, I’m the one doing the demos because, you know, I’m the one building stuff. And it’s just so been so fun to see Adam doing the demos, and he did such a great job, I think.

Adam Preiser 00:42:26  Thank you very much.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:31  I love it. That’s awesome. Yeah. I didn’t hear the answer. I’m sorry.

Adam Preiser  00:42:42  No, that wasn’t the answer. I guess I listed everything out. I didn’t leave anything for Andre.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:49  Oh, just silence.

Adam Preiser  00:42:53  I left him speechless.

Michelle Frechette00:42:54  No, no. I said, are you planning a Black Friday sale this year?

Adam Preiser 00:42:57  Oh, you know what? We didn’t hear that. It didn’t come across.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:01  Yeah. We’re having a little bit of a glitch. Sorry about that.

Adam Preiser 00:43:05  Okay, so that makes sense. Yes, we absolutely are. We absolutely are. We do. Every year we’ll have a Black Friday sale. We don’t typically have sales. I don’t think we’ve actually had to sell since Black Friday, so I think that’s pretty much the only sale we, we participate in each year. We usually start it like the Monday before Thanksgiving and we run it through maybe the Tuesday after Cyber Monday.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:35  Nice. We’ll have to get it up on the Post Status Black Friday List. So I’ll send you the page with the information to fill out for that. So, Marcus says.

Andre Gagnon 00:43:45  Are we are we already close to Black Friday? It feels like this, like, year just flew by, didn’t it?

Michelle Frechette 00:43:51  It’s almost October. I know, it’s crazy. I always say it’s not too soon. You got to start planning like June for Black Friday if you really want to do it well. 

Andre Gagnon: That’s true.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:01  Marcus says he loves the. Marcus loves the modern look and feel and speed of SureCart and says it’s a great product. So. Yeah. Actually, if I do this now, I can show you. There we go. Now, I’m not going to cover up Adam, so.

Adam Preiser  00:44:18  Oh, perfect. I can go back.

Adam Preiser 00:44:19  Oh, hey. Oh, I met Marcus for the first time. Last, what was the two months ago now? It’s been like. Yeah, we’ve been back. No, it was last month. Yeah, it was last month was WordCamp US. And we like to go to all the WordCamps, by the way. Well, actually, let me rephrase that. We go to the US WordCamp, all of us from SureCart. We’re usually easy to find. We love talking to our merchants, and we love hearing their successes. And if there’s something that isn’t in SureCart, we love hearing that too, because I’ll tell you, we talked to a lot of our merchants, agencies, this last WordCamp, and then we end up having a dinner together. Andre, me, and our other partner, Ben, and we say, okay, we got to make sure we build this for this person, and this person, and this person. And I think that’s why a lot of merchants love us. We’re approachable, normal people. And we try to do our best to listen and accommodate you.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:20  I love that. So, if people are interested, they just go to SureCart.com they’re at the. I noticed at the bottom of the of the home page, you’ve got all of the different social channels that people want to follow you on socials as well. They can do that. See what’s going on with SureCart. Yeah. I’m excited. I think I’m going to give it a try. My next question is, if I start at the free version with the 1.9%, you know, transaction fees, then, and I want to upgrade, does it automatically go away, or am I still paying you the 1.9% plus I just paid you $179 a year or whatever it is?

Andre Gagnon 00:45:58  Yeah. As soon as you upgrade, the transaction fees go away.

Michelle Frechette 00:46:00  So I had a feeling that I wanted to get it out there.

Andre Gagnon 00:46:04  That would be mean, wouldn’t it? Like, take your money and then.

Michelle Frechette 6 00:46:07  They’d be like, oh no, we didn’t. Think of that. No I’m sure you did.

Andre Gagnon 00:46:12  Hey, it’s good to ask. You never know.

Adam Preiser 00:46:15  What’s really nice and unique about that is like, if if you want to launch your store, right. If you consider okay with WooCommerce or another, you’re you’re paying money upfront whether your store is a success or not. So you have a risk, a financial risk. But with SureCart, we’re able to give you every feature so you don’t start your store without the tools that you need. You start if you want to have affiliates day one. Well, the feature is right there. You want to sell subscriptions. It’s there. All of that. You don’t have to shortchange the potential when you’re starting up, and it’s just really easy to switch. And then it’s real cheap to switch. You know, or inexpensive. It’s very inexpensive. Yeah. We want to have a good value.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:01  I think that’s great. I also love the fact that you can scale it. Right? So if I start out and I’m just selling, you know, $49 downloads, and I’m selling maybe one a month, that 1.9% is very attractive to me to still have all of the features. But if I start suddenly selling $600,000 coaching services, I might want to change that pretty quick, because I’m going to start losing more money than it would cost on an annual basis. So having the option to upgrade I think is fantastic.

Andre Gagnon 00:47:30  Did you say $600,000 coaching?

Michelle Frechette 00:47:34  I wish.

Andre Gagnon 00:47:35  I was like wow.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:37  I mean, six $1,000.

Andre Gagnon 00:47:39  That’s impressive.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:42  I mean, that would be great. 

Michelle Frechette 00:47:48  I wish I was that sought out.  No, no, n,o no. Six dash a thousand.

Adam Preiser 00:47:54  It’s aspirational.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:57  Can I accomplish this next year? We’ve just given me so many ideas. I love it.  But so this is great. So if people are interested again to go to SureCart.com find all the information there. From the free to the multi-plan, multi-site, annual fees, and also one-time purchase. So there’s everything people could possibly want. It’s right there. And if people have questions they head up the contact form. Is that the best way to get in touch with you all?

Andre Gagnon 00:48:27  Yep. Any time of day we have people all over the globe. We can talk to anyone, anytime.

Adam Preiser  00:48:35  We have a Facebook group, people. There’s, I think, 8,800 merchants in there that are asking questions, and we try to help there, but real specific things. We ask people to go to the helpdesk.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:50  Sure. Absolutely. Makes sense. Awesome. Anything else you want to say before we close down for the day?

Andre Gagnon 00:48:57  No, just, I guess. Thanks for having us on. And, you know, I didn’t know you until maybe two weeks ago, and it’s been like really great getting to know you.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:06 Likewise.

Adam Preiser00:49:08  I guess I’m surprised because she’s, Michelle is a social butterfly at events. She’s, like, very welcoming, I guess, as the word. You know. She is. 

Michelle Frechette 00:49:24  Yeah. I’m starting to think of myself as WordPress Grandma.

Andre Gagnon 00:49:31  Grandma? What? 

Speaker 6 00:49:39  Thank you. Thank you.

Andre Gagnon 00:49:39  You don’t look 57. 

Michelle Frechette 00:49:40  I feel every minute of it. But that’s another story. That’s for another time. But, no, I think it’s it’s wonderful. And, Adam, of course, our paths have crossed before. Andre it’s so nice to get to know you as well. I don’t know if you guys will be at WordCamp Canada in October or where we’ll be. See you next?

Adam Preiser 00:50:03  Oh, I think I’m going to go to India. The. What is that? WordCamp Asia in India. I just applied for a visa for 12 months because I thought it would be nice.  To go out there, but I think that’s that’s in like six months. I think it’s quite some time away.

Andre Gagnon 00:50:23  I think we lost Michelle there for a second. 

Michelle Frechette 00:50:33  April. Yeah.  And so I’m not sure what’s.

Adam Preiser 00:50:40  Sorry if we have blank faces. I think it’s a little choppy. Sorry.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:44  It is. It’s my my my apologies as well. We’re going to end the stream here. You two hang on for just a minute, so we can talk for just a minute after we close everybody else I don’t know who’s going to be my guest next week, but hopefully we’ll be back with a guest next week. And we’ll see you then for the Post Status Happiness Hour