The concept of a sales funnel is popularizing day by day.

Businesses are making a fortune out of it as they have time and money to learn and use these expensive tools that help you to make sales funnel on the go.

But…

What if I tell you that you can make unlimited sales funnels on your WordPress website, without any monthly charge.

Yes, a tool called cartflows has made it possible,

So in this cartflows review, we are going to see what are the features that we get with this tool and we will also compare it with the most popular funnel builder out there i.e Click funnels.

So if you are ready to learn how we can make unlimited wordpress sales funnel

Keep reading…

What is Cartflows?

So before we just start talking about what cartflows can do for your website, why don’t we take some time to first understand what exactly cartflows is.

Cartflows is a wordpress plugin that helps us to make a fully functional sales funnel with upsell, down-sell, and order bumps to increase the average order value of a customer.

It is compatible with woocommerce and all of its addons which means if you have an eCommerce store with woocommerce you can now sell your products more convincingly

Cartflows comes in 2 packages, one is free for every WordPress user i.e you can make a basic sales funnel using a free version of cartflows.

But if you want the power of sales funnels to work its charm on your business you must go with Cartflows pro.

As cartflows pro allows you to make more complex and profitable funnels inside of wordpress.

Let’s understand cartflows pro in-depth because that’s the foundation of this entire article.

What is Cartflows pro – A brief overview of Cartflow vs Cartflows pro

Although both of these packages of cartflows plugin help us to make sales funnels.

But there is a significant difference in what kind of sales funnel we can make with them.

Once you learn how to use cartflows pro properly, there is an endless possibility of what kind of funnels you can make whereas in Cartflows free version you can only make basic funnels

Here are some of the features of cartflows pro

• One-click upsell
• Order bumps
• Checkout offers
• Sell Subscriptions
• 2-Step Checkout Form
• Unlimited Funnels
• Use it up to 30 Websites

While we talk more about these features we will get to know each of them in more depth, for now just understand why cartflows pro is a must-have if you want to make wordpress sales funnel

With that note, let’s understand what is a WordPress sales funnel

WordPress sales funnel explained

So if you are with me till this point you must be already aware that we are talking about making a sales funnel inside of wordpress using a plugin called cartflows.

But how will it work? What is the moving mechanism for my funnel? Where will my leads go?

There are so many questions that are still not explained.

So in this section, we will talk about all the moving pieces of a wordpress sales funnel

There are 5 major tools that you need to make sales funnel in your wordpress website

1. WordPress hosted in a Fast server (cloud hosting) like digital ocean, Bluehost, Siteground.
2. Woocommerce Installed and activated to perform e-commerce activities such as product management and payment processing.
3. Page builder plugins like elementor, thrive  architect, Divi, Brizy to create beautifully designed pages
4. Cartflows pro plugin to create funnels
5. Email CRM such as Mailerlite, Getresponse, etc to collect leads

So these are the basic requirements for making a sales funnel inside of wordpress you can look at the diagram below to get an idea of why we need these tools.

Now that you have got an idea of what we need to make a wordpress sales funnel.

Let us expand on a few important components to get a better understanding of why do we need them to make funnels.

Cartflows woocommerce friendship

“ A good friend worth a Million Dollars “

Ever heard that phrase?

I am sure you did because we are going to prove it, after learning about the cartflows-woocommerce friendship.

I have told you there are 5 major components of making a wordpress sales funnel and woocommerce is one of them.

Let us understand why?

Cartflows is a sales funnel builder and when we talk about online sales there are few terms that you must be aware of like – Product inventory, invoice, Payment gateway, Refunds, and all these other technicalities that are needed to sell a product online.

Cartflows do not manage all of them, for managing all these features you must have a woocommerce plugin installed on your WordPress website.

In other words without woocommerce (or similar plugin), you cannot make wordpress sales funnel.

Using woocommerce we manage our store, but using cartflows we make funnels for products we have in our store.

So this was one of the 5 major tools that you need in order to make wordpress funnels, however, there is still one more very important aspect of making wordpress sales funnel that I want to share with you.

We just talked about cartflows woocommerce friendship that takes care of all technicalities for eCommerce stuff,

But what about the design stuff, funnels have a lot to do with the design of the page 

With that in mind let’s start a conversation about Cartflows Elementor friendship.

Cartflows Elementor Friendship

Admit it we all hate a crappy looking web page,

And guess what we do when we land on one of such pages.

We immediately ran away from that website.

Do you want to make your wordpress sales funnel look like them?

I am damn sure your answer will be NO

We already know funnels have a lot to do with the design of the pages, in the last section we have seen how cartflows woocommerce friendship takes care of all the technicalities for online store and in this Cartflows Elementor friendship we will see how elementor takes care of the design aspect of our wordpress sales funnel.

Remember those days when the only way to make a custom wordpress page was either from using a theme or custom code it,

Those days are gone! Now we have page builders and one of them is ELEMENTOR

“ Elementor is a drag and drop page builder that helps us to create beautiful looking pages without writing a single line of code ”

Means every step in our wordpress funnel can be designed using elementor, you can have a well designed 

• Landing page
• Checkout page
• Upsell page
• Down sell page
• Thank You page

And any other page that you want to ‘EDIT WITH ELEMENTOR’

If you have no idea about this page builder you can watch this video below

However, I want to inform you, elementor is one such option to design wordpress pages you can also use other page builders to create a good quality page design.

So these are 2 major tools that you need along with cartflows pro to make wordpress funnels, it cannot be compromised so make sure to pack your arsenal with these tools.

Now that you have understood the basics and requirements of a wordpress sales funnel. Let’s dive straight into making them.

Yes, we are going to talk about- how to make a wordpress sales funnel using cartflows. 

Cartflows Sales Funnel – Cartflows tutorial

Alright this is the part you were waiting for, in this section we are going to kick asses of all those expensive funnel builder softwares because I am going to teach you to make cartflows sales funnel in a ridiculously simple fashion

So if you will follow this video you will get to know there are only 3 main features that we need to understand in the cartflows plugin, so in the next section, we will be discussing them in brief.

Cartflows landing page

So the first step in the process is to make a landing page or the sales page.

Once you will create a new flow you can start making your page using any page builder like elementor or other.

Just keep in mind that you will have to paste the link for the next step in the flow i.e our checkout page.

So simply hit edit for the landing page inside of the flow

Then copy the short code and hit ‘EDIT WITH ELEMENTOR’.

Now you can design your sales page/ cartflows landing page in any way you like, but remember to paste the link to the next step in the flow.

Cartflows checkout page

Now that you have configured your landing page it’s time to make your checkout page for the funnel to collect some cash.

Creating checkout pages in cartflows used to be difficult but with their latest update, they have made the process less daunting.

Here’s how we make out checkout page in cartflows

#STEP 1- SELECT A PRODUCT

When you will click on the edit icon inside of flows you will have this page

From here the first step in the process is to select a product and its variation and other important settings, you can also manage checkout fields, order bumps, checkout offers from this setting.

#STEP 2- EDIT WITH ELEMENTOR

Now that you have selected the product and configured its settings, time to go for the design part for your checkout page.

Simply click on the button ‘EDIT WITH ELEMENTOR’ and start designing your checkout page, you can also use the template that I have provided to speed up this process

#STEP 3- CONFIGURE CHECKOUT FIELDS

So far you have configured your product settings, you have designed the page now its time to add checkout fields on the page.

There are a couple of ways to do that using cartflows 

• Use Cartflows Shortcode: You can drag and drop shortcode elements from elementor and paste the shortcode that is provided in the checkout settings of the cartflows and you will have your checkout fields.

• Use Cartflows Checkout Element: With their latest update cartflows now have integrations with elementor page builder means you can drag and drops native cartflows elements directly to your canvas, so you can also use them to import checkout field

Now that you have a checkout field on your elementor canvas you can design it any way you like.

So this is how we make cartflows checkout pages, there is one more page setting that you should learn if you want to make good wordpress sales funnels.

Cartflows Upsell Page

You can argue… But for me, this is the most amazing feature of cartflows – ‘ONE-CLICK UPSELL’.

All the veterans in the field of sales funnels know money is made on this page.

So let us see how we can make this one-click upsell page in cartflows.

The first step in the process is to add a upsell step in the flow page

Then click on that edit page icon to start configuring our upsell page.

First, you will be asked to add a product that you want to offer on the upsell page. Go ahead and add that product and give any discounts that you want to give to your buyers.

Now from here, there are a couple of ways to proceed to make your upsell page. Either you can use the shortcodes provided by cartflows or you can use cartflows elements inside of elementor canvas.

However, I will be only showing you one process that I feel is easy for you to understand and follow.

So once you will configure product settings on the upsell page you will get two links

• Offer accepting link – This means if someone will click on that link the upsell offer will be added to their cart total.
• Offer Decline link – This means if your visitor will click on this link they will not be redirected to the thank you page without that offer

So our goal is to design an upsell page and add these links properly and hey, don’t forget to make that thankyou page.

So this was the complete process to make a sales funnel using the cartflows plugin.

The plugin is powerful RIGHT?

But power attracts rivals and rivalry demands comparisons …

So in the next section, we are going to compare cartflows with the leading Funnel builder software in the market.

Let us see where the new wordpress funnel builder stands.

Cartflows vs Clickfunnels

I am not going to waste your time by doing a sloppy comparison of these two tools or by splitting over technical kinds of stuff

We are just going to compare these tools in 2 aspects

1. What are the features we get?
2. Pricing of these two tools

Simple- “ what we get and how much we pay”

Now before starting this comparison, just a quick recap about the ‘CLICK-FUNNELS’

Clickfunnels is a SAAS based platform that allows you to make powerful sales funnels on their platform.

And I am comparing it with cartflows because cartflows also does a similar job but in a different fashion.

So let’s start the comparison.

Cartflows vs Clickfunnels – Features

Here we are going to talk about the features of both the funnel builder, just to let you know both of these funnel builders can make your funnels but in a different way. So I request you read this section very carefully to fully understand the effect and usage of these two tools.

Let’s start the comparison based on 5 major features:

• Page load Speed –  Clickfunnels does a great job in providing good page speed and sleek page design but we are limited by the services of the developers of click funnels to improve our page speed.

Whereas in Cartflows page speed depends on your wordpress installation factors, i.e your hosting, your page builder code, CDN, Caching plugin, image optimization. But here you are independent to increase your speed as much as you want, you can deploy a cloud server on services like AWS, Digital ocean for your cloud hosting, you can use caching plugins like wp Rocket or Swift Performance. There is no end to the optimization you can do with your wordpress installation.

• Sales Funnel Design and Templates – This is where click funnels have their specialty, they have some of the highest converting sales funnel templates in the market because most of them have been tested by some of the best marketers on the planet, and not only this they have an active community that shares their top-performing funnels with other in the marketplace. So this is an advantage that you have when using click funnels.

Whereas in Cartflows you get basic templates for different page builders and you have elementor or thrive architect or DIVI providing you with additional page layouts and templates, so here even though templates are not that great, you are not dependent on any individual for the templates, there are major page builder companies along with cartflows who are providing you with page templates and you can always design one from scratch (as shown in the video above)

• Payment Collection/processing – Both of these tools are excellent when it comes to collecting payments online, Click funnels have their native payment processor that can be connected with all major payment service providers such as stripe or PayPal.

Whereas Cartflows use woocommerce to collect and process payments online, so it’s not the service of cartflows that we are dependent on but the services of almighty Woocommerce that we are talking about. Now you know why there is no other service out there that does a job as good as woocommerce.

In short, both of these funnel builders are good at collecting online payments 

• Digital Products Support/ Membership platforms – when we work online sooner or later we realize to have exponential growth in our business we must have our own digital product to sell. So now the question is whether this software can help you to do that.

Click funnels have a native membership tool that allows you to sell subscription-based products and create a member’s area for your buyers.

In cartflows, you can sell subscriptions based products but to create membership products and a members area you will need to have other membership plugins installed.

So I would say click funnels does a better job in this field.

• Email Services and Support – “EMAILS ARE LIFELINE OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS”  You will hear this term again and again.

And to be honest, you need email marketing in almost every step of the process, be it order confirmation or follow-up you need emails to do it properly.

So do these funnel builders have that power to support your business?

Click funnels has an inbuilt solution for email marketing called ‘FOLLOW-UP FUNNELS’ if you are ready to spend $297 per month or you can always have other email marketing tools like getresponse, Mailer lite, etc.

Whereas in cartflows, they do have a plugin to send abandoned cart emails, but you will still need to set up your SMTP servers, which can be technical for most of us.however you can use any email marketing tools and integrate it with woocommerce and can have a CRM for your sales funnel.

There are so many other factors and features that differentiate these funnel builders, but these are the 5 major concerns when you want to have a sales funnel.

So this is what you GET, Now let us see how much money it will cost from our pocket in order to use these services.

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Cartflows vs Clickfunnels – Price Breakdown

Well for the starters I can say- “ There is a difference in driving a Ferrari than driving a Honda “ 

You generally get what you pay for, but in this case, click funnels deliver a bit less than what we pay ( $97/month )whereas Cartflows gives us way more than what we pay ( $9.98/year).

Let us understand the pricing of these tools one by one –

• Click funnels Price Breakdown – for using click funnels to make your sales funnel you will need to pay 97$ every single month for their basic plan. Here you will get full access to the software and you can make up to 20 sales funnel.

However, if you are ready to spend $297 per month you can make unlimited funnels and you also get their follow-up funnel ( email marketing tool ).

They also have a platinum plan but that is more of an educational package, so there is no comparison of that plan.

• CartFlows Price Breakdown – Unlike click funnels CartFlows does not charge you monthly rather they charge yearly, So cartflows will cost you around $299/Year. Sounds a lot? Let me break it down for you.

I have told you that you can make unlimited funnels for only $9.98/year, you might be wondering how I got this price?

Well if you buy a license for Cartflows pro for $299 you can use it on 30 websites and for each website there is no limit on how many funnels you want to make and if you will do the math correctly you can literally make unlimited funnels for almost $10/Year for each website, Now that is dirt cheap if you ask me.

However, as cartflows is a wordpress plugin, so you will have to have an active wordpress installation which means you will have to pay for hosting bills (still less than paying $97/ month)

So this was the price break down for both of these tools and in my experience click funnels has a more premium appeal to it, you have templates that have been tested, you have a community that is open to help, you have powerful tools, so basically you get what you pay for ( kinda like the honda and Ferrari example I gave earlier).

However, when you are using services like Clickfunnels, you are paying monthly rent for that digital property, you will have to obey their complaints, whereas when you make funnel in your wordpress website you own them, it’s yours and only yours, you don’t need to follow rules or any other terms.

“There is a difference between owning a house and renting it”

With that, I would wrap up this Clickfunnels vs cartflows debate, but as we are here to talk about the cartflows plugin, I will share my 1-year experience using it.

What are the things that I like and what are things that I absolutely hated about this tool

Cartflows pros and cons

No matter what you do and how you do there will always be room for improvement, that’s life and we all live in the same way, trying to do best with what we have.

This plugin Cartflows is one of its kind, however, it is still not perfect.

So in this section, we are going to talk about what is its drawback and what are its advantages.

Let’s start positive and talk about its advantages.

Cartflow pro advantages

Here are the 5 major advantages of this plugin-

• You can make any type of sales funnel with every feature ( one-click upsell, order bumps, down-sell, thank you page ) that a premium funnel builder can make using the cartflows plugin, That’s the power we are talking about here.
• You can use any page builder with this plugin, So even if you hate elementor and love DIVI you are in for a treat of making some amazing Sales funnel.
• No monthly fees, as I said earlier making funnels with Cartflows is Dirt cheap.
• Regular updates and amazing support, this is where most of the developers fail, they don’t give us regular updates and support is something they promise but never deliver.
• Everything is organized inside your website, even if you make 100s of sales funnels on your website, you will never feel lost as this plugin does an amazing job in organizing pages of your sales funnels.

So these are some of the advantages of using the cartflows plugin as your sales funnel builder, with these positive aside it does have some major disadvantages, let’s look at them

Cartflow pro Disadvantages

Here are 5 major disadvantages of the Cartflows plugin-

• Making sales funnel using another page builder apart from elementor can be difficult, with their latest update, cartflows now have integration with elementor page builder, making the process easy for us, but if you are using other page builders get ready for some headaches.
• Very limited templates, I have been using this tool for more than a year now, and their template library never seems to get improved.
• Must have a woocommerce plugin to sell products using cartflows, that is one more problem that I faced with cartflows, what if I only want to sell 3 of my courses using funnels? You still need to dump in that woocommerce on your server. 
• Bad pricing plan, even if making funnels are $10/website/year, there is no way to buy it for only one website, you will have to buy a license that will work on 30 websites, I think it’s time for Adam from wpcrafter to think about the pricing plans again.
• Data tracking, anything that you can track, you can improve, but Cartflows does not have a good tracking system, well I am sure they will improve this in their future update.

So these are some of the major disadvantages of the Cartflows plugin, and Lord o Lord, as I am looking back to what I have to say for the Cons, I feel I have been a bit too harsh on them…

Or you can say  – I have been brutally honest about the tool and my experience with it 

So with that, I feel I have provided all the information that I have in my brain and it will help you to make a better decision on whether this tool is for you or not.

Now let’s quickly jump to the conclusion section and wrap this article.

Cartflows review – Conclusion

So we are finally at the end of this article and I am so glad you stayed with me right till the end.

And what I feel about this tool is clear, if you are looking for a cheap and in-house solution to make sales funnels you can go with this tool.

But if you want more professional tools for your funnel solution, you can go with click funnels.