What's New in SureCart

We are happy to announce that SureCart is now powering over 30k websites.

That’s 50% growth in just 78 days 👏!

What’s even more exciting is how fast we have arrived here.

Here is a brief snapshot of our growth milestones:

• July 20th 2022 – SureCart Launched
• December 21st 2023 – Powering 10k Websites, which took 591 days
• April 30th 2024 – Powering 20k Websites, which took 124 days
• July 17th 2024 – Powering 30k Websites, which took 78 days

While the entire SureCart team is proud when we hit these milestones, we know that our work has just begun.

Let’s face the facts, we know we are the underdogs here. But that is where we thrive.

It is fun being the fastest growing ecommerce plugin for WordPress though.

Everyone loves an underdog!

P.S. Stay tuned for SureCart 3, the first beta will release this month.

We’re excited to announce SureCart 2.29, bringing you more control over free trials and preventing customers from taking advantage of multiple free trial offers.

Stop Free Trial Abuse

Have you ever worried about customers repeatedly signing up for free trials? This latest update gives you the power to say “no more”! You can now restrict customers from purchasing multiple free trials, ensuring a fairer system for everyone.

To enable this feature simply go to Settings > Subscriptions > Scroll to Purchase Behavior > Enable the option.

New:

• New: Subscription setting to prevent customers from purchasing multiple free trials.

Fix:

• Fix: Instructions sometimes not showing in popup for manual payment methods.
• Fix: “Not Found” error when adding a cart icon to a menu and showing it even when there are no items in the cart.
• Fix: Auto-fulfill not working for test processor.
• Fix: Products, product collection, and upsells missing trailing slash causing canonical url issues in some cases.
• Fix: SureCart form shortcode not saving in Thrive Architect for some users.
• Fix: Aria-label strings are not translated properly.
• Fix: Remove product caching on admin product list page to prevent stale inventory data.
• Fix: Ensure product sku or id is present in product microdata for better facebook support.

We’re thrilled to announce SureCart 2.28, which brings updates to streamline your checkout process and give you more control over your subscriptions!

Empowering Your Customers

• Payment Flexibility: Customers can now remove their default payment method, giving them greater control over their checkout experience.
• Simplified Checkout: Collect both billing and shipping addresses directly at checkout, making it even easier for your customers to complete their purchases.

Effortless Subscription Management

• Seamless Price Updates: Merchants can now manually update subscriptions to the latest price version with ease, ensuring a smooth transition for both you and your subscribers when pricing changes occur.
• Clearer Trial Language: We’ve updated “Free Trial” to simply “Trial” throughout the plugin, accommodating both free and paid trial periods for greater clarity.

Plus, we’ve made several improvements and fixes to enhance the overall performance of SureCart.

New:

• New: Added a setting that allows customers to remove their default payment method.
• New: Added the ability to collect both billing and shipping addresses at checkout.

Improvement:

• Improvement: Users can now manually update a subscription to the latest price version in the event of a pricing change.
• Improvement: Change Free Trial default text throughout plugin to “Trial” to account for paid trials.

Fix:

• Fix: Update processor setting url.
• Fix: Resolved an issue where creating new prices did not clear the form when the drawer was closed.
• Fix: Fixed placeholder images for slide-out cart line items in the admin interface.
• Fix: Fixed an issue where a modal was incorrectly triggered when an item quantity was out of stock on the checkout page in certain instances.
• Fix: Fixed an issue where some shortcodes did not work with 0 instead of false for some attributes.

We are pleased to announce SureCart 2.27, which adds the most requested improvements to our Affiliate Platform, overrides.

When you create an affiliate program for your store, there are 3 main options you set for all affiliates:

• Commission rate
• Recurring commission length, if selling subscriptions
• Lifetime commissions

These are all set globally, but what if you want to:

• Give certain affiliates a different commission rate?
• Give certain affiliates recurring commissions or lifetime commissions?
• Give certain affiliates a different rate on specific products?

All the above and more are now possible with affiliate overrides.

The best part is that you don’t need to learn anything new to use these options. The Affiliate Platform is integrated into your store and has the same user interface that you already use.

Visit a specific product to override the 3 main options for that product.

Visit an affiliate profile to override their options or to give unique options for specific products.

It’s all very easy and seamless.

New:

• New: Individual product commission rates.
• New: Individual affiliate commission rates.
• New: Affiliate + product combination commission rates.

Improvement:

• Improvement: Conditional form block and order bumps block now allowed on free accounts.
• Improvement: Remove nonce from order confirm page GET request to allow dynamic linking.

Fix:

• Fix: Issue with abandoned checkout stats sometimes incorrectly defaulting to USD.
• Fix: Ensure order bump display condition rule field is required to prevent misconfiguration.
• Fix: Attaching and affiliate to a product was not working for affiliates without a last name.
• Fix: Ensure post types have correct capitalization in admin.

Last year we sent out a user survey to all the merchants using SureCart. We wanted to know what matters to them and what they want to see in SureCart.

Most of the results were expected because we truly make an effort to listen to all of our users and take action. After all, we are making SureCart for you.

For the past 6 months we have been working on your feedback, and we plan to release SureCart v3 this summer.

What Is SureCart v3?

The main goals that we aim to achieve are:

• Extensive no-code visual customization options, so you can effortlessly achieve any design you can imagine
• Significant speed improvements leveraging new technologies recently added to WordPress
• Pave the way for native page builder integrations for Bricks Builder first, and maybe Elementor second

A lot will change under the hood for v3, and we want to release it all at the same time.

We will have an extended beta period because if you have custom CSS changing the style of SureCart components, you may need to adjust your custom CSS.

We are moving away from the Shadow DOM. This will make a lot of things easier, but it could introduce some styling conflicts with your theme and plugins. So we need to proceed carefully.

What the release will include:

• Convert the product pages to a custom post type. This will open up the floodgates to custom fields, custom query loops, and so much more
• Shop page converted to the Interactivity API, and eliminating the Shadow DOM. The product list block will be all new with expanded customization options and child components.
• Product page converted to the Interactivity API, and eliminating the Shadow DOM. All blocks are all new with expanded customization options.
• Cart converted to the Interactivity API, and eliminating the Shadow DOM.

The checkout and customer area will not be converted just yet. This will happen later in the year. We just need some time to rethink both.

To understand the depth, these conversions basically mean we have rebuilt everything from scratch for performance and customizability.

The benefits will be:

• Massive speed improvements
• Massive customization options improvements
• Paves the way for us to build page builder integrations
• And so much more…

The wait will be worth it.

And here is the first sneak peek of this new version of SureCart.

You will see the unique layouts and designs you can accomplish as well as the instant load time.

These are some layouts the team quickly put together to test how far you can go customizing the design.

We can’t wait to see what our merchants build.

We are pleased to announce SureCart 2.26 which adds a popular feature request from our users, subscriptions for manual payments. In addition, you can use manual payments with installments and upsells.

We are happy to introduce a new feature: bulk affiliate payouts. Paying your affiliates will be made more efficient with this streamlined process.

This update brings exciting news for software developers who rely on SureCart to license their products. Now, you can benefit from license activation limits specifically tailored to individual prices. Stay in control of your software licensing with this latest update!

New:

• New: Ability to set manual payment methods as usable in subscription, installments and upsells.
• New: Generate bulk affiliate payouts for all affiliates from a specific time period and minimum amount.
• New: Exclude specific prices from showing up in the subscription upgrade section of the customer dashboard.
• New: Override license activation limits for a specific price.

Improvement:

• Improvement: FSE themes now use a FSE template for the store checkout upon activation.

Fix:

• Fix: Cancelling a Mollie payment method now allows customers to checkout again.
• Fix: Merchant UX dead end where variant overrides can be set when there are multiple prices.
• Fix: Repeat payment label now matches the capitalization of other fields.

Today we added a new email to further help to manage and retain subscribers on autopilot.

If a subscriber’s payment method is about to expire, they will receive an email asking them to update their payment information.

This will help minimize the number of payment failures at renewal time.

We are pleased to announce SureCart 2.25 which brings refinement to the prices UI for product prices to better match the UI for product variations.

Also, to better prepare for the future, we are moving the product price options to a slide-out panel where we have more room.

Improvement:

• Improvement: Price creation/edit UI now accounts for the larger number of options available.
• Improvement: Add live mode toggle to abandoned checkouts page.
• Improvement: Add ability to cancel a subscription that is already pending cancellation in the admin.

Fix:

• Fix: Issue where deleted checkouts could sometimes not be handled correctly.
• Fix: Product page slideshow not loading when double quotes appear in file name.
• Fix: Issue where deleted checkout and dashboard pages could not be restored if the options table was cleared.
• Fix: Ensure we collect shipping addresses for some Stripe payment element payment methods that require a shipping address.
• Fix: Issue with tax id input defaulting to “other” if no tax ids are selected as defaults.
• Fix: Issue where clearing account cache on connection screen could sometimes clear out api token.
• Fix: Thank you page shortcode not pulling in order correctly.
• Fix: Issue where google eCommerce events were not giving priority of Google Analytics over Google Tag Manager when both are active.
• Fix: PHP warning that appears when adding a customer payment method when WordPress debug mode is active.
• Fix: Race condition where upsells are sometimes not redirecting after successful checkout.
• Fix: Typo in timezone settings list.
• Fix: Correct the webhook url documentation link.
• Fix: Add the updated url for the affiliate portal.
• Fix: Edge case where formatting currency on some php installs without a number formatter class could cause an error.

We release a steady stream of updates that bring new features to our merchants.

The one area that we have wanted to take to the next level for our merchants is the UI/UX of our platform and this includes the affiliate portal.

Platform UI

We have redesigned the user interface to make it easier for you to find settings and options.

This lays the foundation for some long term plans we have for SureCart.

Affiliate Platform Changes

As you know, we have been refactoring our entire affiliate feature.

This month, we added the affiliate management experience to the plugin, making everything seamless and integrated.

Now is the time to level up the remaining parts of the affiliate platform.

Our objectives with the changes are to:

• Make the affiliate portal branded to the merchant
• Simplify the affiliate signup process
• Simplify the affiliate login process

Affiliate Portal

For the affiliate portal, we are keeping this hosted for you, so there is one less thing for our merchants to be distracted by.

The affiliate portal will now have this new elegant design that is dedicated to your brand. This means no more store switchers.

Important: The login URL is changing to yourstore.surecart.com.

In the case of ZipWP, the new login will be zipwp.surecart.com

We suggest updating any login links you may have on your website as well as notifying your affiliate partners. If your existing affiliates log into the old location, they will be shown a notice with the correct login URL.

Affiliate Signup

We spent time to simplify the affiliate signup process.

The old flow was:

• Affiliate signs up
• Merchant approves or has auto approve on
• Affiliate gets an email to register their account and create a password

The problem with this was affiliates would be confused by the email to register.

The new flow is:

• Affiliate signs up
• Merchant approves or has auto approve on
• Affiliate logs in via an emailed security code

So we eliminate the registration step and automatically complete the setup for them.

Affiliate Login

The affiliate login has a new elegant look and simplified login.

Now affiliates can log in with a security code we will email them, ensuing a smooth and secure login process.