Cart66 Review 2026: Discontinued and Replaced by WP EasyCart

Cart66 was, for over a decade, one of the better all-in-one WordPress shopping carts — a genuine alternative to WooCommerce for people who wanted to sell without assembling a dozen extensions. If you are researching it now, the important thing to know before anything else is that Cart66 is no longer sold. The vendor has retired the product and directs new customers to WP EasyCart instead.

This page exists because plenty of stores still run Cart66 and plenty of people still search for it. Rather than review a product you cannot buy, it covers what actually happened, what it means if Cart66 is currently taking your payments, and how the realistic replacements compare in 2026.

What the vendor says

Cart66.com is still online, but it no longer sells anything. The homepage leads with "Cart66 is now WP EasyCart" and a section headed "Cart66 Retired," explaining that the product "served as the all-in-one WordPress shopping cart designed for people, not just developers for over a decade, but times change."

The pricing page carries no plans at all. In place of a price table it says: "Times have changed and so has Cart66. WP EasyCart is now the go to solution for your WordPress eCommerce needs. Pricing is lower than the old cart66 plan and there are tons of really great, new features."

The free WordPress.org listing went first. Cart66 Lite was closed in the plugin directory on 27 January 2016 and is not available for download; the directory records the reason as unknown. So the free on-ramp has been gone for roughly a decade, and the commercial product has now followed it.

One thing we could not verify: whether existing Cart66 licence holders still receive security patches, and whether an end-of-support date has been published anywhere. If you are running Cart66 in production, that is the question to put to the vendor directly through the support page, which is still reachable.

If you are still running Cart66, read this part

A retired ecommerce plugin is not an emergency, but it is a deadline. Unmaintained code that handles payments, customer records and addresses is the worst category of technical debt to leave sitting. Plan the move rather than reacting to an incident.

Do these in order:

• Take a full backup first — files and database — and confirm you can restore it. A backup you have never tested is not a backup. Our WordPress backup plugins guide covers scheduling and, more importantly, testing the restore.
• Export everything while the plugin still runs. Orders, customers, products, subscriptions and coupon history. Do this before you deactivate anything, not after.
• Write down your payment plumbing. Which gateway, which account, which webhooks, and — critically — whether you have active recurring subscriptions. Recurring billing is the single hardest thing to migrate, because the subscription lives at the gateway and your new plugin has to adopt it.
• Inventory your URLs. Product and category URLs from the old cart will change. Anything ranking or linked externally needs a redirect, or you will lose the traffic along with the platform.
• Rebuild on staging and test a real transaction end to end, including the order confirmation email, the receipt, tax calculation and the customer account view. Our WordPress migration walkthrough covers the mechanics of working on a copy safely.
• Only then cut over, and keep the old database export somewhere safe for as long as your tax rules require you to retain order records.

WP EasyCart: the vendor's own successor

Since Cart66 points everyone here, it deserves an honest look rather than a hand-wave.

WP EasyCart is an active product. Its WordPress.org listing, "Shopping Cart & eCommerce Store," is on version 6.0.0, was last updated on 18 September 2026, and holds a 90% rating from 206 reviews. Active installations sit at around 3,000 — which is the number to keep in mind. It is a real, maintained plugin with a real support operation, and it is also a very small ecosystem next to WooCommerce.

Pricing is refreshingly unusual: licences are one-time purchases, not subscriptions, and they do not auto-renew. You renew manually before expiry at the then-current rate, and multi-year licences lock in the price.

• Free — Stripe, Square or PayPal, customer reviews, basic shipping and tax setup, order emails and packing slips. The catch is explicit: a 2% application fee is added to every payment, and you do not get coupons, downloads, subscriptions, B2B features or membership content. Support is community forums only.
• PRO — from $69 per year (that figure is the lowest rate, reached with a five-year licence). Unlocks the core feature set: 30-plus payment gateways, coupons and promotions, abandoned cart automation, TaxCloud tax automation, live shipping rates from USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Canada Post and Australia Post, advanced product options, order editing and refunds from the admin, and unlimited support requests.
• Premium — from $89 per year. Everything in PRO plus the extensions and apps: Facebook and Instagram shops, QuickBooks Desktop, MailChimp eCommerce, ShipStation and Shippo automation, Stamps.com, BlueCheck age verification, Avalara AvaTax, AffiliateWP, and desktop, iOS and Android management apps with order push notifications.

There is a free trial with no credit card required, and a 14-day no-questions-asked refund window.

Two honest caveats. The 2% fee on the free tier means "free" is only free at very low volume — at $2,000 a month in sales it costs you $40 a month, which is more than the PRO licence. And WP EasyCart is emphatic that it replaces WooCommerce rather than extending it: you can import products from Woo, but accounts, the cart and the checkout all have to be rebuilt. It is a platform choice, not a bolt-on.

The realistic alternatives

Three paths make sense, and which one is right depends less on features than on who maintains the site.

• WooCommerce — the default for good reasons: the largest ecosystem, the deepest pool of developers who can help, and an extension for essentially everything. The cost is complexity and the habit of solving each new requirement with another paid plugin. Our roundup of the best WooCommerce plugins is the shortest route to a sane stack, and WooCommerce themes covers the front end. If you sell across borders, multilingual ecommerce plugins is the next stop.
• WP EasyCart — the closest philosophical match to what Cart66 was: one plugin, most things included, less assembly. Best if you are a small store owner who valued Cart66 precisely because it was not WooCommerce, and you accept a smaller ecosystem in exchange for fewer moving parts.
• A hosted platform — if the real lesson of Cart66's retirement is that you do not want to be responsible for ecommerce software at all, moving off WordPress for the store is a legitimate answer. You give up ownership and pay monthly; you stop having migration projects forced on you by someone else's business decisions.

Whichever you choose, our WordPress ecommerce guide works through the platform decision properly, and if you are keeping payments simple, integrating Stripe with WordPress covers taking card payments without a full store.

The lesson worth taking from this

Cart66 was not bad software. It was well regarded, it had loyal users, and its all-in-one approach solved a real problem that WooCommerce still does not solve elegantly. It was retired anyway, because the company behind it decided to put its effort somewhere else.

When you pick an ecommerce platform, you are betting on the vendor's business as much as on the feature list. The practical defences are unglamorous: prefer software with a large independent developer pool, keep your order and customer data exportable in a format you could actually use elsewhere, and treat "can I get my data out?" as a feature you evaluate before buying rather than a question you ask during a migration.