Paykickstart

When you’re starting an online business, you need to carefully choose the shopping cart software (or eCommerce solution) you will use. But honestly, comparing platform features and pricing is time-consuming and confusing. 

This review aims to help make the selection process a bit easier for you. It covers some of the platform’s key features and how these can help you launch or quickly expand your online business. 

I also cover three alternatives–Shopify, ClickFunnels, and Sellfy. Aside from pricing, in this review, I highlight some similarities and differences between PayKickstart and these sites to help you discover the right solution for your business.

But before diving into the product features, you need to get clear about what you’re looking for in an eCommerce solution. Keep reading this review to discover what's best for you.

What You Must Consider Before Buying a Shopping Cart Software

Before you even start spending hours researching platform features and reviews, you need to think about the features you actually need. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and every software has a unique offer. So instead of looking for the “best” software, prioritize finding a cart solution that best fits your goals and needs.

Here are a few things to ask yourself:

• What are you selling?

Are you selling physical products? Digital or virtual products like ebooks, software, or online courses? Memberships or subscriptions? Or are you offering a combination of these, such as books, online courses, and memberships? 

Choose a software where you can sell all your products/services, especially if you have a lot of items. This saves you time, effort, and money, so you don’t need to migrate to another platform and learn new tools just to expand your online store.

• Who are your current and ideal customers? 

If you’re eyeing a regional or worldwide market, find a software that offers the checkout page in multiple languages and currencies. But don’t just be impressed by how many languages or currencies the software has. Make sure they have the currencies and main languages in your best-performing markets or target countries. 

Another thing you need to check is whether they have a broad selection of payment methods. If they are offering very limited options, this can affect your sales. You are likely to lose potential clients who want to buy your product but can’t pay using any of the options provided. This is one friction in your buyers’ journey that you want to minimize.

Also, check if the software’s payment methods include the most popular online payment options in your target countries. For example, if your eCommerce clients are in Europe, look for the preferred options in the region. Based on the table below from Ecommerce News, you want payment options that include PayPal, VISA, and MasterCard, as well as Dankort, VISA Electron, Sofortuberweisung, WebMoney, and iDeal.

Top 3 Payment Methods in Europe, per country. (Image Source: Ecommerce News)

• Is it flexible?

As a customer, I hesitate to pay for a product I have never tried. For memberships or subscriptions, I need to know there’s an easy way to opt-out or downgrade my plan. I don’t want to get stuck paying for features that I may no longer need.

As an entrepreneur, you always need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Offer them the same flexibility that encourages you to buy or try a product. So go for a cart software that will allow your customers to easily upgrade or downgrade plans. If you’re offering SaaS or other virtual products, find a shopping cart that lets you offer trials for free or charging for them.

• Does it have essential tools to help you grow your sales?

Shopping carts can do more than just help your customers order and pay an item. They can be handy marketing tools too. When reviewing  software, take note of features like: 

• Easy one-click upsells
• Automatic follow-ups on abandoned carts
• Discount coupons or gift cards
• Targeting and retargeting capabilities
• Affiliate marketing (if this is a key component of your overall marketing strategy)
•  Analytics

• Does it have the integrations you need?

Especially if your online business is already up and running, you want a shopping cart software that you can conveniently merge into your current operations. You don’t have to migrate everything to a new system and start from scratch. 

So ensure that you can integrate the shopping cart software with tools you’ve already been using such as Authorize Net, especially email marketing, payment, and webinar platforms. 

PayKickstart: A Shopping Cart and Affiliate Management Software

Like other eCommerce solutions, PayKickstart has several features to help digital entrepreneurs boost their sales and revenue and automate their businesses. 

But it’s more than just a shopping cart. It has powerful tools to help entrepreneurs run affiliate programs and support their partners.

It’s an impressive solution for businesses who are promoting multiple types of products or memberships and running affiliate programs. 

But entrepreneurs who need a single platform that has built-in capabilities for storefront creation, email autoresponder, and order fulfillment may need to explore other solutions. (See some of the alternative software we cover below.) 

Take note that PayKickstart’s Basic plan only allows you to sell up to 5 products. If you want to sell more products, you need to upgrade to one of their higher-tier plans. You can also explore other eCommerce solutions.

PayKickstart: Features & Benefits

A Software for All Types of Products

If you need a platform for multiple products–physical products, software, online membership, and/or services–you can manage all these under Paykickstart. This lets you have multiple income streams within one business. Once you upgrade to their higher plans, there’s no cap to the products you can add or the sales funnels you can create. 

Plus, Paykickstart is easy to set up. You and your team can have seamless operations even with zero coding or technical knowledge, this makes possible to use Paykickstart to everyone.

Worldwide Reach

If you are targeting an international audience, Paykickstart can help ensure that your site is accessible to multiple markets. You can choose from up to 32 currencies.

Additionally, Paykickstart offers automatic translation for checkout pages, widgets, and embed forms for up to 19 languages. It is also looking to add 6 more languages, allowing you to further customize your site to a specific region. There are as well several checkout templates to make it easy to build your checkout page.

Image Source: PayKickstart

Flexible Options for Your Customers

PayKickstart offers multiple subscriptions or purchase options to your customers. You can:

• Create free or paid trials

Especially if you’re offering a service or membership, trials allow you to showcase your product’s features to your target audience. PayKickstart lets your customers “test drive” your product and see if it’s the right solution for them before they part with their money.

• Accept Split Payments

If you have a high-ticket product, you may want to offer your customers the split-payment option. You can easily do this in PayKickstart, by enabling the feature in your specific product’s settings. You can even extend this feature to your paid trials.

• Offer one-time or recurring subscriptions 

Aside from products with one-time payments, you can provide your customers' programs that require recurring payments. To boost your payment collection and minimize revenue losses, PayKickstart allows you to choose what happens in case of failed payments through their subscription saver. You only need to select these settings once, then PayKickstart will handle following up on payments or automatically canceling subscriptions.

• Provide your customers with upgrade/downgrade options

Aside from customizing their payment options, your clients can upgrade or downgrade their subscriptions. This lets them gradually increase spending based on their needs instead of immediately committing to an expensive plan they may not yet need. 

With the downgrade option, you can keep some of your clients from cancelling their subscription altogether. Instead of abandoning your program, they can move to a lower tier that meets their requirements or fits their budget.

These upgrade and downgrade options can be managed manually by your team, through the PayKickstart API, or by your customers through their billing portal.

Boost Your Conversions

PayKickstart has built-in features to help you increase your conversions. With these conversion boosters, you can:

• Set up One-click upsells

You can increase the value of each customer through one-click upsells. But for this strategy to work, you want your buyer’s journey to be as easy as possible. With Paykickstart, your customers need to input their PayPal or credit card information only once. After this, they can buy upsells or one-time offers with a single click. 

• Include order bumps

Aside from one-click upsells, you can also use order bumps to boost your revenue.

• Follow-up on abandoned carts 

Your visitors may have added items to their carts but decided to think about it or got distracted and never came around to clicking the Buy button. Don’t be too quick to dismiss these potential clients as lost sales. 

PayKickstart allows you to send a Pending Order email to remind these visitors about items in their shopping cart and finish the transaction. To make the process as convenient for your customers as possible, they will only be asked to fill out the fields they did not answer during their previous login.

• Allow discount coupons

If you want to provide discounts in a marketing campaign, you can easily create coupons in PayKickstart. Simply select the campaign, product, decide if you want the discount to apply to the first charge or rebills, set a start and end date, and indicate the maximum allowed redemption.

• Include manual orders

On top of online orders, you can also process orders made over the phone through PayKickstart’s offline order feature. Just head over to the Utilities – Manual Transactions section to create a new buyer profile and add an online or offline payment option.

Grow With Affiliate Management

If you are looking to grow your business through an affiliate program, you can take advantage of PayKickstart’s comprehensive affiliate software center. 

Affiliate Features

• Lead tracking and fraud protection, ensuring you only give commissions for verified leads
• Set up delayed or instant commissions
• Implement second-tier commissions, so your affiliates can earn from the sales of other affiliates they have invited
• Allow affiliates to generate lifetime commissions or earn per campaign
• Organize affiliate contests
• Easy affiliate payout through Paypal Mass Pay or bank transfers

Support for Your Affiliate Partners

• Track traffic sources through unique tracking links or sub-IDs: This allows your affiliates to monitor which platforms are generating the most or best leads.
• Easy access to marketing materials, including banners, vendor contests, and unique affiliate links they can use to promote your products or services.
• Affiliates can offer bonuses to those who buy using their affiliate links. This allows you and your affiliate to add more value to customers and strengthen brand recognition and trust.

Image Source: PayKickstart

Integrate With Other Platforms

Many entrepreneurs use a host of platforms to operate their online business. PayKickstart lets you conveniently integrate your shopping cart with other services. These include:

• Payment integrations

PayKickstart integrations with payment gateways let your customers pay through PayPal, credit cards, and wire transfers, whichever is most convenient for them.

Image Source: PayKickstart

• Email marketing integrations

PayKickstart’s integration with a growing list of email marketing services allows you to use your shopping cart software to grow your email list, nurture long-term relationships with your buyers, and boost customer lifetime value.

Image Source: PayKickstart

• Webinar integration

If your product or service includes webinar hosting, you can easily integrate the service you are using with PayKickstart. 

Image Source: PayKickstart

• Membership integrations

PayKickstart also integrates with over 10 membership platforms. With this feature, you can conveniently add customers to your membership programs and provide them with their login details.

Image Source: PayKickstart

• Fulfillment integrations

Today’s customers expect quick updates and product delivery. PayKickstart’s integration with fulfillment partners like ShipStation and ShipOffers helps you ensure that customer orders are processed, packed, and shipped even while you’re on break. You and your team don’t need to be online all the time to efficiently run your eCommerce business 24/7.

• Other integrations

You can use PayKickstart + Zapier integration to connect other services like Facebook Pages, Slack, Quickbooks, and thousands of other apps. This lets you automate repetitive tasks, create efficient workflows, and even set up notifications for you and your team so you don’t miss any task or important update.

Image Source: PayKickstart

If you need custom integration, their developers can handle it for you. 

Other Business Management Features

• User management

Depending on their role in your business, you can customize your team members and partners’ access to campaigns and data.

• Partner contracts 

With this feature, it’s so easy to formalize agreements with your partners. You can automatically split payment gateway fees and specify revenue-sharing agreements (percentage or fixed rates). 

You can even strengthen partnerships by giving your partner credit for subscriptions made before the contract period and letting them add buyers to their own email services.

• Mobile access

If you want to run or monitor your business on the go, you can do so with PayKickstart’s mobile apps. Download their app on your iPhone, iPad, or Android devices so you can quickly process affiliate requests, manage transactions, and view campaign performance.

• Tax charging

PayKickstart’s sophisticated system allows you to charge taxes during checkout. 

• Performance tracking

PayKickstart has built-in metrics to help you analyze your business performance. You can monitor your sales, traffic, conversion, and funnels, and use the data to grow your company, increase investment in specific traffic sources, or zero in on high-converting products online. 

You can even automate surveys to get feedback from customers who buy from you or cancel their subscription.

What Entrepreneurs Are Saying About PayKickstart

Here are a few positive reviews from entrepreneurs who have shifted to PayKickstart.

Sendlane CEO Jimmy Kim, shared that they’ve been using PayKickstart for a lot of processes.

Jeff Hunter of VAStaffer and 9010 Life highlights how the platform has helped boost his revenues while saving him both time and resources.

Judith Conroy of Chikara-Reiki-Do also lauded PayKickstart’s customer service.

PayKickstart Alternatives: A Brief Comparison With Shopify, ClickFunnels, & Sellfy

Shopify

Shopify may be a better solution for you if you’re not running an affiliate program and you only want a one-stop-shop for storefront creation, web hosting, inventory management, and order fulfillment. 

With Shopify, you can provide discounts (same with PayKickstart) and gift cards. You can leverage their blogging platform to educate your buyers, let them leave product reviews, integrate with social media, and sell on Facebook

Shopify’s checkout page is also available in over 50 languages, which is almost triple the languages offered in PayKickstart. It also has a mobile commerce shopping cart, accepts multiple settlement options, and integrates with more than 100 payment gateways. With Shopify, you can even process bitcoin payments, which you cannot yet do in PayKickstart. There are also several checkout templates ready-to-use.

Learn more about Shopify’s plans, as well as Shopify Lite and Shopify Plus on their website.

ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is a landing page and sales funnel builder with multiple features to help you market and grow your online business. It’s a comprehensive solution when you need a tool that focuses on lead generation, marketing, sales, and fulfillment. 

If you want a more flexible subscription and affiliate system, however, PayKickstart is a better solution. PayKickstart makes upgrading and downgrading plans easier and has a dunning/subscription saver feature so you can minimize revenue losses.

In terms of affiliate management, ClickFunnels offers delayed commission and sales tracking. However, it does not have handy features like instant commission options, marketing materials for your affiliates, tax management, and fraud protection, and a mobile app where you can approve or decline affiliate requests on the go.

If you want to combine the best features of both platforms, you can actually integrate ClickFunnels or Zapier with PayKickstart

You can learn more about ClickFunnels’ tools by visiting this page.

Sellfy

If you’re just starting your online business and want a simple platform to host your storefront, sell unlimited products, run email marketing campaigns without integrations, and offer pay-what-you-want options to your customers, Sellfy is a good choice for you. Like PayKickstart, you can use it for physical and digital products and for managing subscriptions.

You can view Sellfy’s features and pricing here.

Conclusion

Ecommerce solutions allow you to easily sell products and services even without much technical know-how. But to find the right software, you need to identify the features that are a must for your business.

If you want a beginner-friendly shopping cart software that has comprehensive subscription management and affiliate center, PayKickstart may be the solution you’re looking for. 

To test drive their Basic, Professional, or Premium plan, sign up for their 14-day free trial.