CartFlows Review (2021) – Is it really the best funnel builder for WordPress?

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A sales funnel is a complex path consisting of a sequence of pages and conditions based on how the user or potential customer interacts.

To get the maximum conversions out of your funnel, you need the right mix of bump offers, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells displayed at the right time.

There are many tools like Convetri, ConvertPages, and checkout tools like ThriveCart and SamCart a few more to set all these up. 

ThriveCart especially offers an incredible value for money with just a one-time payment needed and you can use it for a lifetime without any recurring charges.

Get the Lifetime Deal of ThriveCart here 

However, try to achieve all these complex set up in WordPress and it will be an absolute nightmare.

Either would need so many different tools and hope they all connect and sync properly or the tools available are simply do not work as intended. 

CartFlows tries to solve this huge problem and lets WordPress users have all the functionality to build a complete sales funnel as good as if not better than what you can build with hosted tools like ClickFunnels and Kartra. 

Quick Navigation

Getting started

Unlike the likes of ClickFunnels and Kartra, one of the primary requirements to get the most out of CartFlows is to use a high-quality hosting provider.

I personally use Chemicloud for all my WordPress projects as they have excellent server speed and exceptional support, but any good and reputed hosting as per your personal preference should do the work. 

Once the hosting account is set-up and WordPress is installed, it is essential to install Woocommerce for the checkout pages in the funnels and a page builder to build the actual pages. Woocommerce subscriptions might be needed as well if you plan to sell recurring subscriptions. 

CartFlows has templates for Divi, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, and Elementor. It is possible to use the Gutenberg blocks but using the page builder gives the best experience out of CartFlows. 

One of the best things about CartFlows, when compared to the likes of ClickFunnels and Kartra, is that as it is based on WordPress you are just a plugin away from adding practically any functionality you need in your funnels.

Pages & Flows

The first thing to do after the plugins are installed is to add the products via woocommerce. Remember that a separate product has to be set up for each step in the flow. For example, if your funnel consists of the main product, an upsell and a downsell, three products have to set up within woocommerce.

Then, just import the complete funnel from any of the available templates. Typically most of the templates come with the landing page, checkout page, upsell and downsell pages. Therefore, once you edit the pages as per your liking with your content, the funnel with all the pages could be up and running in no time.

Try CartFlows Pro to build your sales funnels 

The next step would be to connect the products set up in Woocommerce with the corresponding pages. It is important the name the products and pages properly to identify easily while connecting both together.

Once the products and pages are connected, the entire funnel is done after you connect your payment processor, either Stripe or PayPal.

Smart Funnels

Smart funnels is a really unique feature in CartFlows that will definitely help in increasing the conversion rates of your funnels.

In a typical sales funnel customer journey, the funnel starts with an order page and then to a series of upsell and downsell pages. What happens is, depending on the choice of the customer in each of these upsell or downsell pages, the next step goes to the same page which will be the subsequent upsell page.

With smart funnels, every time a customer selects an option in an upsell and downsell sequence, they can be directed to different upsell pages based on their answer. This enables building unique funnel paths for different customers based on their journey in the funnel. 

For example, in the first upsell page, if the customer chooses yes, they can be directed to upsell flow 1, and if they choose no, they can be directed to upsell flow 2 with completely different products, pages, and pricing. This is super effective as it gives various options for different types of buyer persona. 

This can be easily done within CartFlows. Once all the offer pages are built and named properly, the sequences can be built as different funnel paths by selecting the conditional redirecting feature. 

Checkout Offers

This is another excellent feature in CartFlows that allows making special bundled offers to your product checkouts at specific discounts.

The special bundle page appears immediately after a customer places the order for a specific product. This bundle could be additional colors and sizes at a heavily discounted price. The special bungle offer page is completely customizable with custom text for accepting or declining the offer. 

Checkout offers is ideal for sellers in certain countries as it is possible to make checkout offers with some payment processors that do not allow one-click upsells.

Cart Abandonment Recovery

One of the major challenges for any e-commerce business is to recover the cart abandonments as much as possible to extract the maximum business from the traffic.

CartFlows achieves to minimize cart abandonment by having neat, proven, and conversion-optimized checkout pages with minimum friction points and enhanced customer trust.

The checkout pages can be completely customized to match your brand and remove any field that is a mandatory requirement demanded by the payment processor. This way, the checkout process is nice and smooth for the customer without any obstacles that might distract and deviate them to leave the page. 

The trust factor is enhanced by the feature to add testimonials in the checkout page and also by the nice graphics of money-back guarantee images in the checkout page templates. 

This makes a huge difference as even a 10 to 15% improvement in the abandoned cart recovery will bring a significant increase in the revenue of most e-commerce stores.

CartFlows also has a separate free WordPress plugin that can be installed be installed on any woocommerce store. The plugin can be found in the WordPress repository.

Once it is installed, it adds a new menu item to woocommerce called "Cart Abandonment". All the settings and the follow-up emails can be set up here to recover the maximum number of cart abandonments.

Templates

One of the really strong points of CartFlows. All the templates look modern, responsive, and absolutely gorgeous. The founder of Astra WordPress theme was involved in the development of CartFlows and it shows off in the quality of templates. 

All the templates are neatly organized under different categories like landing pages, checkout pages, upsell pages, downsell pages, and thank you pages to make the selection easier while building the funnels. 

A/B Split Testing

CartFlows makes it incredibly easy to split test your funnels.

In the list of flow steps, you can just select the A/B test option for any single step. A duplicate version of that particular step is set up automatically.

It is possible to set up any number of duplicate versions to split test multiple variations.

Once this is done, every element of this particular step can be easily split tested. 

Integrations

This is a strong aspect of CartFlows. As it is a plugin that sits on the top of woocommerce, you can use all the official woocommerce extensions and integrations.

Therefore, unlike other funnel builders, it is not required to keep waiting for the release of native integration with your favorite tool as there is a very high chance that there is a woocommerce extension or integration. 

However, WC subscriptions would be needed to enable recurring subscription payments and one-click upsells are only supported by PayPal and Stripe.

Pricing

CartFlows scores highly here as well. The pro version of CartFlows costs just $ 349 per year. 

Compared to other hosted solution funnel builders in the market which typically cost anywhere between $99 to even $297 per month, CartFlows is incredibly cheaper and offers more flexibility as it is based on WordPress. 

As woocommerce is a free plugin and free version of the elementor page builder is enough, just by adding a good quality hosting for $5 to $8 a month and you get a fantastic funnel builder for less than half the cost of similar products in the market.

There is a free plan as well with lesser features, but at just $349 per year, the pro plan is totally worth the money.

Support

There is live chat for any pre-sales questions on the pricing page before signing up and also a dedicated support ticket system. 

Live chat response was quite fast and there is also a very active Facebook group where the co-founder himself responds to many queries regarding the product. 

The help and support documentation is quite decent with a lot of helpful articles. The more impressive place is the official YouTube channel that has many tutorial videos covering most of the important features. 

The official website has a changelog of features for both the free and pro plan. The planned feature updates are also well documented which makes it really useful for someone considering purchasing the pro plan to see if the feature they need is on the plans or in development.  

Negatives?

Surely there are a few. 

As a WordPress based product, it needs a lot of time to maintain the funnels once they are built with the plugin and theme updates when compared to standalone SaaS solutions. 

The second major feature missing is a built-in affiliate program set up. This is also essential for the online course and digital product sellers and an additional plugin like AffiliateWP becomes essential. 

Also, if you want to sell subscription-based products, it becomes essential to use Woocommerce subscriptions that cost additional money. 

Best alternatives

Although CartFlows is one of the cheapest options to build sales funnels, there are definitely some alternatives that offer more robust features.

LaunchFlows

Pricing - $50 per year for one website and $150 per year for unlimited websites.

LaunchFlows is a WordPress plugin similar to CartFlows that helps you build sales funnels with Woocommere. 

It is compatible with all the major page builders for WordPress and you can build upsells, downsells, order bumps & variations, multi-step checkouts, etc. 

There is a Lifetime Deal currently for $199 that lets you use the plugin for unlimited sites. That is an incredibly good deal with a lot of value for money. 

Grab the Lifetime Deal of LaunchFlows - Available for a Limited Time

Upsell Plugin

Pricing - starts from $97 per year.

Pros - WordPress-based plugin similar to CartFlows but doesn't require WooCommerce, unlimited upsells & bump offers, subscription included with PayPal & Stripe integration and hence saves $199 a year that costs for WooCommerce subscription, works with all major page builders.  

Cons - No page templates included and therefore needs some experience to build pages in WordPress.

Upsell Plugin is a WordPress plugin that lets you build sales funnels in WordPress without WooCommerce as the products can be directly set up within the plugin itself. 

It also comes with a built-in subscription payment support as well and supports Elementor, Divi, Thrive Architect, and Beaver Builder to build the pages. 

ThriveCart

Pricing - starts from $495 paid one-time. 

Pros - Extensive set of features and Integrations, A/B testing, limited period lifetime pricing where you just pay once and use the tool for the lifetime.

Cons - The Page Builder works well but is not the most powerful.

ThriveCart still remains my favorite checkout cart software for the extensive array of features it offers at a very affordable one-time pricing. 

There are several advantages of using ThriveCart when compared to CartFlows. Some of them include,

• It is a hosted SaaS solution and hence you don't need to worry about the hosting needs and the speed of the page loads. 
• As it loads separately as a standalone tool, there is no real possibility of slowing down your main website if it is on WordPress.
• Integrates natively with a wide range of third-party tools in various categories like email marketing, pop-up & form builders, shipment providers, e-commerce tools, learning management systems, membership portals, CRM's, page builders, payment gateways, etc. 
• Managing subscriptions doesn't need any additional costs, unlike Woocommerce where you have to invest more in Woocommerce Subscriptions. 
• Powerful A/B testing.
• Built-in affiliate module to manage all your affiliates and hence no need to invest in any additional affiliate plugin. 
• Detailed and intuitive statistics & analytics. 
• One-time lifetime pricing for such a powerful tool saves a ton of money for your business. 

Grab the Lifetime Deal of ThriveCart

Samcart

Pricing - starts from $49 per month.

Pros - Excellent conversion optimized designs, extensive A/B testing features, built-in affiliate program.

Cons - Can be expensive for many if powerful features are not needed. 

Samcart is built for one thing in mind and that's conversions. It has one of the best A/B testing features among all checkout page builders. 

Although it is expensive, serious marketers appreciate the robust and powerful set of features it offers. 

PayKickstart

Pricing - starts from $29 per month. 

Pros - Subscription management, powerful affiliate management, extensive reporting, availability of mobile apps, integration with a wide range of payment gateways. 

Cons - No A/B testing.

PayKickstart has an incredible array of features for a variety of use cases. It is a very good platform for subscription billing and offers detailed reporting. 

It offers a wide array of features covering the use case of the majority of marketers and lifetime pricing makes it a great deal until available.

The support team is excellent as well with super quick response times through the live chat.  

Get an exclusive 30-day free trial of PayKickstart

Conclusion

Is it a good enough alternative to the page builders like ClickFunnels and Kartra or the other shopping cart solutions mentioned above?

Well, if you are comfortable with working in the WordPress ecosystem, absolutely yes. The templates are really good, the support is fantastic as the community is pretty small and the co-founder communicates directly with the users many times in the Facebook group to interact and provide solutions.

Build your sales funnel in WordPress with CartFlows

However, to get the best out of CartFlows it is absolutely vital to use good quality hosting and the recommended page builders along with a fair bit of experience in WordPress. 

Have you used CartFlows or any other funnel builders and which one do you like the most? Share your thoughts and experience in the comments. 

FAQ

What is CartFlows?

CartFlows is a WordPress plugin that can be used along with Woocommerce to build sales funnels and checkout pages.

How much does CartFlows cost?

The CartFlows pro plan starts from $199 per year.

Is there a limit on the number of funnels built?

No, with CartFlows pro you can build an unlimited number of funnels.

Can CartFlows be used as standalone solution without WordPress?

No. CartFlows needs to be installed on a WordPress website.