Over the past few years, I’ve sold a bunch of digital products and SaaS, and one thing I kept running into was how barebones Stripe’s hosted payment links are. They work—but they’re not optimized for conversion.
So I built Caart (https://usecaart.com): a tiny layer on top of your Stripe payment links that adds things like:
- Countdown timers (urgency)
- Testimonials (social proof)
- Purchaser counts (FOMO)
- Abandoned cart recovery (via email)
- Support for one-time & subscription payments
- …and more coming soon
The goal is to give you all the conversion-boosting stuff without needing to install a full checkout flow, mess with APIs, or hire a dev.
It’s super simple: connect your Stripe account, customize your Caart page, and go live.
We just finished building it and I’ve been using it for my own sales pages and saw a clear lift in conversion, so I figured others might find it useful too.
Would love any feedback, especially on what you’d want it to do next, or what feels overkill.
We need more early users so we launched with ridiculously cheap pricing just so we can shorten the feedback loop while we learn what works and what doesn't. So for the time being it's $95 for lifetime access. We just want to see if people like it or need it.
Hey Jason! Great to hear from you man. You were always hustling your butt off as well! Haha. I always remember seeing you there around the clock, as we do!
I really appreciate the kind words and thanks for the Adventure Cafe shout out. It means a lot!
Yes! It was indeed rolled into LivingSocial as an effort to differentiate from Groupon at the time in the height of the daily deals craze. We were essentially an in-house tour operator / adventure travel company for LS.
I came on board shortly after the Urban Escapes acquisition as part of the team that was scaling the UE model for LS in NYC.
Urban Escapes was rebranded as "LivingSocial Adventures"
This hasn't hurt us in any significant way, at least yet.
Google also gives a lot of credit to how a business is reviewed in travel and because we have hundreds of 5-star reviews between TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google+ and many more internal reviews on our site we've only seen our rankings rise recently. We focus on having the best reviewed product in each of our categories and it seems Google has rewarded us for that.
It's something we're definitely on the look out for though, absolutely
Kyle here! Founder of SA. These are all good points. As Damian mentioned we test all of these tools and they all do significantly increase conversions on our site.
It's something we've discussed internally quite a bit. I wish it were as simple as, hey we have this great product and that's all we need to have, but alas these tools are necessary to help us grow the business.
Another important thing to consider -- You have to look at our site through the lens of the travel industry. Deciding you're going to book an all day excursion or 5-day vacation is a big commitment and people have a lot of questions. They tend to revisit the site again and again before converting because there is a lot to consider. That's why we have pre-triggered chats, which BTW only trigger if you meet certain parameters. For example, if you spend more than a certain amount of time on a product page, visit specific pages where we see a lot of drop-off, or on your 2nd or 3rd session. We don't bug people at random, we bug them in a very carefully and meticulously measured way :) If we were a SaaS business for example we would optimize differently. I might even go as far as to say some (maybe not all) of what appears to be annoying to an outsider can help assist the end user.
All of that being said, I totally understand where everyone is coming from here and to be honest I don't think there is a single comment here that I disagree with. Ultimately, we have to test things and keep what works. If it doesn't work we always get rid of it, eventually.
Over the past few years, I’ve sold a bunch of digital products and SaaS, and one thing I kept running into was how barebones Stripe’s hosted payment links are. They work—but they’re not optimized for conversion.
So I built Caart (https://usecaart.com): a tiny layer on top of your Stripe payment links that adds things like:
- Countdown timers (urgency)
- Testimonials (social proof)
- Purchaser counts (FOMO)
- Abandoned cart recovery (via email)
- Support for one-time & subscription payments
- …and more coming soon
The goal is to give you all the conversion-boosting stuff without needing to install a full checkout flow, mess with APIs, or hire a dev.
It’s super simple: connect your Stripe account, customize your Caart page, and go live.
We just finished building it and I’ve been using it for my own sales pages and saw a clear lift in conversion, so I figured others might find it useful too.
Would love any feedback, especially on what you’d want it to do next, or what feels overkill.
We need more early users so we launched with ridiculously cheap pricing just so we can shorten the feedback loop while we learn what works and what doesn't. So for the time being it's $95 for lifetime access. We just want to see if people like it or need it.
Happy to answer anything!