by: AskPat 785 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 785 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
Awesome. Thank you so much, and here's today's question from Jason.
Jason Rogers: Hi, Pat. This is Jason Rogers. I run a WordPress website. I'm setting up a shopping cart, and I'm trying to figure out what would be the best shopping cart for my website. I need it to print invoices, print shipping labels, calculate shipping prices for different areas of the country (I’m in the US), and also collect emails and then communicate with an email manager, like InfusionSoft, Emma, or ConvertKit. What shopping cart would you suggest for this type of thing? Thank you so much, and I hope to hear from you soon. Cheers.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Jason. Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate this. There's a lot of shopping cart options out there. Specifically for what you're going to do, which is all the shipping and the printing of labeling and labeling and all that stuff, which I know is different than digital delivery (that's a whole other level of fulfillment there), I would recommend you check out a tool called ShipStation. I got very familiar with them this year, or actually last year, when I started selling t-shirts off of SPI. There's a t-shirt that I sell at www.ServeFirst.io, and we use ShipStation on top of our Shopify account, which is the ecommerce platform there that we use to sell those shirts.
ShipStation collects information from those ecommerce platforms. Actually, what's really cool with them is they will connect with Shopify, Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Squarespace, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, pretty much anything you could think of where you sell stuff online. ShipStation collects that information in terms of customer information, address, and they'll print the label for you. What's really cool is they'll connect with USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, OnTrac, and other carriers, and you can set it up so that they can actually find at the time of the sale which carrier would be the cheapest option and print different labels for you depending on that. So it's a really cool tool. They sponsored the Smart Passive Income podcast last year at some point, and I've gotten very familiar with them. Plus, the team over there seems to just love their jobs, and it's such an amazing tool.
I had also mentioned Shopify, which is an ecommerce platform you can use. All these things I'm going to mention, they kind of connect and integrate with a lot of other things that can help you. WooCommerce seems to be a popular ecommerce platform that can integrate with a lot of other things that you're working with.
There's also one other shopping cart that I want to mention called SamCart. SamCart is Sam, which is just a fun fact. Sam stands for “sales and marketing.” SamCart is a company that I'm actually an advisor for now. I've gotten very familiar with them and their team. Brian and Scott, who are brothers, who founded the company, are amazing and super smart. What I love about SamCart is they're very marketing driven, so it's all based on, or a lot of it is very much with marketing in mind. So things like one-click upsales and sales pages that convert very highly, that sort of thing, tracking, those are all integrated very well. They do specialize in digital product delivery, and that's kind of what they started with, but they've also dove into the physical product realm. They also have integrated dynamic shipping rates and things like that. I don't believe they print the labels, but that's where ShipStation can come into play. There's also some great options from SamCart as well, so you can check that out at www.AskPat.com/samcart, which is my affiliate link if you want to check that out.
Jason, hopefully that helps. It gives you a lot of information there and gives you a good place to start, so check them out and see what works for you. Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. For anybody else out there who has a question, send it over at www.AskPat.com. Like Jason, you'll get an AskPat t-shirt if your question gets featured here on the show. Jason, we'll send that to you in the next month or so. Thank you again.
I appreciate you all for listening in, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Until then, here's a quote to finish off the day and have you think about. That is from Robert Frost, and that quote is, “The only way round is through.” All right, guys, take care. See you in the next episode. Bye.