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I want you not to go but you should…
Sorry for the bad Dave Matthews parody. I had a surprise in my inbox this morning -Cartfly is going to start charging for the use of their service in the middle of May, and that song immediately popped into my head. You heard that right. They’re pulling aNING and forcing all of their existing customers to either pay up or go somewhere else. (Full disclosure -I have a personal interest in all of this, as I was a contractor, and eventually the Lead UI Developer, onCartfly andSellit from inception to bankruptcy back in October of ’09.) Their move away from “freemium” to just plain “premium” makes sense, since the bankruptcy of the company and subsequent dismissal of nearly all of the development team left them needing some kind of income to survive in this brave new world of limited venture capital. I just hope they can survive this in a market where products likeECWID (short for e-commerce widget) are still free, backed by the superior catalog management of X-Cart, and work on mobile.
I use Cartfly, should I abandon ship and use ECWID?
Probably not, but you should definitely explore your options, if for no other reason than to find a more stable basket to put your e-commerce eggs in. Cartfly won’t have a free option anymore, but the paid version is only $5.99 a month. In true NPR Fund Drive style, they remind us that it’s only the price of “two cups of coffee.” A tired analogy, but more than true. That’s less than the cost of one of my quad venti mochas from Starbucks. Cartfly is probably still the cart of choice for complete novices, especially considering the added services offered by Sellit (if you can afford the cost of just 9 cups of coffee a month). It’ll be interesting to see if this works for them!