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What’s New at Cococart: April 2023 Edition

The first quarter of 2023 has been major for us folks over here at Cococart. While we can’t unveil every single thing we’re currently working on—though we’ll certainly drop some hints here and there soon—here’s a list of everything we’ve shipped in April just for you.

Collect customer reviews 

When you buy from a new brand, what do you normally find yourself doing?

Chances are you not only research information about the product and business but you also look out for reviews from previous customers.

You wouldn’t be alone. Findings from Bright Local have shown that about 97% of people will rely on other people’s reviews before making a purchase.

A whopping 92% hesitate to even make a purchase without at least reading a review first.

Less customers in recent years never check online for information about a local business. (Image source)

The proof’s in the pudding—and that’s why we’ve made it our mission to make this year the year that local businesses like you accelerate your sales.

Our newest addition to Startup and above plans is Reviews. Automatically collect and display any testimonials and feedback from customers after they make a purchase.

To enable, simply go to your Cococart dashboard and find the Reviews page under your Orders tab.

Available for: Startup and up 

Get paid faster with our improved PayPal integration

You asked, we listened: customers can now make payments through PayPal immediately after placing an order.

When you connect your Cococart shop to your PayPal account, customers will find the familiar PayPal pop-up to log in to their account and make payment. 

What this means is you as a merchant no longer have to manually check for orders paid through PayPal. Our platform does this for you, and marks orders as paid.

How to enable PayPal payments on Cococart

If you want to enable the PayPal integration to your Cococart shop, simply follow these steps:

  1. Head to your Payment Settings.
  2. Scroll down and toggle on the PayPal option.
  3. Select Automated so you no longer have to verify PayPal payments manually.
  4. When chosen as a payment method, customers will be redirected to the secure PayPal checkout page before being redirected to your store.

Of course, if you still prefer to manually verify PayPal payments, you can opt for the Manual PayPal connection

Available for: All users

Try out our premium features for 7 days

Want to take some of our recent premium features out for a spin before committing to a new subscription? 

Now you can.

Some of our features are now available for a free 7-day trial—so you can get full access without ever paying a cent!

We’re confident that these premium features will be an absolute game changer for your business. But if you want to see how they’ll pay you back in dividends, then you can try them at no cost for a full week before you switch to a new plan.

Available for: Buy Us a Coffee and up

Start accepting bookings on Cococart (early access)

It’s always been our mission here at Cococart to empower local businesses to take their operations online.

And as you, our merchants, grow, so must we. 

One thing we realized is that in order to really uphold our mission of making it easy for businesses to run their sales and operations, we need to start moving in a bigger, braver, bolder direction.

You’ll soon start to see exactly what we mean, but for now, here’s a taste: we’ve built a tool that lets businesses take Bookings and Reservations for their online store.

This new tool is still in beta, so there’s a lot of improvements we’ve yet to introduce. However, even in early development, we’re so excited to see many businesses unlock new ways to manage their operations online.

Wondering exactly what this new early-access tool can do? We list some important ways you might be able to take your business to the next level.

For restaurants, cafés, and retail shops

If you’ve got a retail space and wished you had a way to manage table reservations, then this new Bookings feature will absolutely blow your mind.

Restaurants, cafés, and other businesses that need to manage foot traffic to their physical locations can now enable Bookings on their Cococart stores.

Set up a maximum capacity per booking to manage how many people can be in your space at once, then let our platform do the rest.

For online classes, workshops, and coaching sessions

With the new tool to introduce Bookings to Cococart, this means we now have better support for businesses that sell classes, workshops, or even one-on-one coaching sessions.

For now, you can add only one type of booking event to your Cococart store, but we’re working to introduce the ability to let you add more than one soon.

If you want to take bookings one-on-one with customers or clients, set maximum capacity to 1.

We’ll be working on a lot of improvements to this to give you more flexibility and customization, but for now, take our Bookings tool for a spin and let us know what you think!

For in-person and at-home service businesses

If you have a service business—say, you’re a salon, a spa, or do at-home services for clients—our Bookings feature is built for you too.

You can offer one kind of service on Cococart for now, and customers can see your available days and times. 

So whether you offer a service that customers walk in to, or you visit your customers’ homes to give them a service, you can avoid the email or DM ping-pong of customers asking when they can book and you checking your calendar to send them available times.

What’s coming soon to Bookings?

Like we mentioned, this tool is still in early beta and will see a lot of improvements down the road.

Here are some of the things we’ll be releasing in future versions of the product:

  • Add multiple event or booking types
  • Improved date and time picker for customers

How do I get early access to Bookings?

Interested to test this feature out on your Cococart store? Send us an email with the subject line: “I’d like Bookings access, please!” and our friendly merchant success team will be right with you.

Take your business further with Cococart

Did you enjoy these latest updates? We’re hard at work to give you more and deliver the best possible value.

Also, we hope some of these improvements also give you a peek at where Cococart is going and how we’re evolving to be a better, more powerful, more complete suite of tools for local businesses like yours.

See more:

What's New at Cococart: May 2023 Edition

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