When it comes to WordPress stores, Woocommerce is certainly the most popular. But second to that, I think, is SureCart. But there’s a really important point about SureCart that you definitely need to know about in advance before you jump in, and you neither are okay with it or you’re not okay with it. Let’s go ahead and talk about it. Okay, so let’s talk about SureCart, okay? I don’t want to be clear here. This is absolutely not a video where I’m saying something bad about SureCart. If you’re expecting that, you found the wrong video. But the point that I want to make to you is very, very important And like I said, it’s either important to you or it’s not important to you. Woocommerce obviously has its share of frustrations out there. It can be a little bit beefy depending on how you’ve got it set up. It has a lot of extensions that I have to go on to it to get it to do things. For example, subscriptions, which is still a crazy thing that you need a fairly expensive plugin to get it to do something so basic as subscriptions. But you’re going to probably have other extensions on there as well.

It can become, like I said, a little bit beefy. And so a lot of people end up getting a little frustrated with WU Converse. Also, the interface, frankly, has some things about it that could definitely stand to be improved. There’s no doubt about it. And so people go looking for alternatives, and the biggest alternative out there right now is SureCart. Now, I don’t use SureCart. I have used it some, but not for my own stuff. I have a couple of clients that use it. One of them actually is a guy who I set up in a different way using Woocommerce and everything, and he elected on his own to switch over to SureCart, and that’s totally fine. But here’s the big thing about SureCart, that I’ve had conversations with people who just did not know this. And that is that it’s basically a SaaS app, it’s software as a service, whereas, Woocommerce is completely and totally self-hosted. And that’s a pretty big difference. It’s not a bad thing, okay? And in fact, there’s definitely some good points to the design of SureCart. There’s definitely aspects of Woocommerce that come with additional overhead head because it’s all running on your local server.

And when those things are put onto a SaaS system that’s hosted in the cloud, it can be not only developed easier on their side, but it offloads a lot of that stuff off of your site, your server is not having to run at all. So there’s definitely some pluses to it. And it was a strategic decision that they made, and I totally understand it. But you, as a site owner, need to understand that as well, that when you put the SureCart plugin inside of WordPress, it’s basically a bridge to their cloud application, and it is storing some data on your actual site. However, the guts of your store are definitely dependent upon their cloud service. And if you stopped paying for their cloud service, your store would cease to function. That’s just the way that it is. And so the only reason I wanted to make this video is because I have had conversations with people Some of them, you would think they would have known this because they were literally in the business of WordPress, like me, and they were not aware that SureCart is basically a cloud application with a WordPress Bridge plugin.

And so you’re cool with that or you’re not cool with it. I’ll tell you why I’m not cool with it, personally. I like the fact that Woocommerce is fully self-hosted, which means it’s fully in my control. It means that even my subscriptions are run in-house on my own setup, okay? And that when I’m triggering even a rebuild, it’s my site that triggers that, and it just uses Stripe as the credit card processor. I like the fact that it’s all in-house, and then I can control it, and I can move it anywhere that I please. I can host it anywhere, please. But also, I don’t have to pay anybody to get it to work. Even if you’re paying for the support licenses for Woocommerce extensions, Because those extensions are GPL open-source license, they will still work if you’re not paying for them. They don’t cripple the code. And in fact, frankly, there are ways where you can get the code through the GPL open-source license without paying for the support license. So I’m not going to get that much more into that topic, but it is possible. And so the whole keyword here is that you’re flexible.

You could do with it what you want. You could turn Woocommerce into anything you want. You You don’t have to wait for the developers of the plugin to make it happen, because chances are there’s some extension out there that already does it the way that you want it to do, or because it’s so extensible, because the code is all in-house, you can modify it. Yes, it can get a little nerdy to do it, but you can, and that’s the idea. So the fact that it’s a sovereign application that you own and control, and you can modify essentially every single aspect of it if you please. That’s why I use Woocommerce and why I usually recommend it to my clients. The other thing, too, I want to make mention of here is the fact that switching e-commerce platforms is a real pain in the ass. It’s just not something that you would ever enjoy doing. And so this is not one of those things to where I’m using Woocommerce, and then suddenly I just want to flip over to SureCart. I mean, yeah, you can do it, but it’s going to definitely be a process. You’re probably going to lose data along the way, especially with order history.

It’s probably not going to come over super clean. Then if you decide that once you’re on SureCart, you don’t want to do the bill anymore for it, getting back out of SureCart is going to give you the same speed bumps trying to get out of that, because switching e-commerce platforms is very much not fun. So it’s one of those types of things that when you’re going into it, you want to think ahead. And the reason I use Woocommerce is because I thought ahead in the fact that I figured, if I own and control the entire platform, and I know that Woocommerce works with everything, almost any other WordPress plugin that integrates with Woocommerce, with e-commerce in any capacity is going to work with Woocommerce because it’s such a standard bearer, I know that I’m not going to have any problems. With SureCart, because it’s a SaaS application with a WordPress plugin as the Bridge, not everything will work with it. A lot of things do. There’s a lot of integrations now for it. And in fact, I believe the new version of the SureCart plugin even brings a lot of those products and everything into a custom post type, so you can even query them and stuff inside of page builders.

They’ve done a fantastic job with them. But at the end of the day, you’re still reliant on them to make those features that you may or may not There’s probably going to be use cases of things that you wanted to do that it just doesn’t do. And what you need to do is essentially ask them for the feature, and they’re either going to do it or they’re not going to do it. Whereas with Woocommerce, you just have so many different things out there available for it, plus all the hooks and developer options and all that, you could probably make it do exactly what you wanted to do. So that’s the main thing, sovereign self-hosted application versus a cloud application. That’s the difference. Again, it’s not a bad thing. And in fact, SureCart is a lot nicer to use than Woocommerce. The interface is much better. The subscriptions, the affiliate stuff, all that stuff is built right into it. They’ve done a great job with SureCart. It’s just that you need to know going in that it is a cloud-based application, and as long as you’re cool with that, have at it. I mean, it’s got a lot of great things over top of Woocommerce.

But if you’re anything like me, and that being able to control everything is important to you, and having that flexibility down the road, you’re probably still going to want to stick with Woocommerce, because it is what’s going to do those things. You own and control your entire store, and you could do anything that you want with it, and that’s super important. And you’re not locked into any bill. You can literally not pay anything to any Woocommerce extension or anything, and your store is still going to work. It will not break. It will still continue to chug along. Okay, that’s the main point. I’ll make one other just final point here. It’s like the old Spider-Man saying, with great freedom comes some responsibility, right? That’s the way Woocommerce is. You got a lot of freedom. You could do so many things, but it also comes with the responsibility that you’re going to have to deal with some of the stuff that goes along with Woocommerce. So the plugin maintenance, the extensions, all that stuff. It’s not particularly complicated. I’ve been using I’ve used Woocomers for a long time, and it’s pretty damn trouble-free, I got to say.

But you have to deal with it. Whereas SureCart, it’s just easy. They take care of all those updates. You got somebody to talk to when you have a problem with it. That’s what people pay for with SureCart. And so it really comes down to what you’re going for. Personally, I’m willing to be a little bit more responsible for some of my own stuff in order to have that great freedom. That’s why I use Woocommerce. All that being said, I also wanted to end off by inviting you, if you’re not already subscribed to my weekly newsletter, sent out on Monday mornings, it’s called the WP Edge. It’s an email newsletter designed for business owners that use WordPress. If you power your business, whether it’s a simple business, where it’s like a brochure-style site on WordPress, or you got a full-on membership site, the WP Edge is a mix of strategy as well as tech, designed again for business owners that use WordPress. If you want to learn more about that, and of course, get subscribed so you don’t miss the next issue, head on over to thewpedge. Com, and I will see you there.