Want to set up a WooCommerce side cart on your store?

Caddy is a smart side cart WooCommerce plugin that includes features to not just create a basic side cart, but also make your side cart work for you to boost conversions.

For example, you can include a free shipping meter to increase order value, upsell recommendations, and more.

In our full hands-on Caddy review, we’ll share more details about the features of this plugin and show you how you can use it to add a side cart for WooCommerce.

Let’s dig in!

Caddy Side Cart Plugin for WooCommerce Features

The main feature of Caddy is that it helps you add a WooCommerce side cart to your store. If you’re not sure what I mean, here’s an example of a side cart:

When it’s not expanded, the side cart is visible as a bubble icon, which Caddy lets you fully customize:

However, I think that what makes Caddy unique when compared to some of the other WooCommerce side cart plugins is its focus on adding “smart” features.

These features have two main focuses:

1. They help you boost your revenue.
2. They create a better shopping experience for customers.

Obviously, there’s some overlap between those two goals, but let’s break them down in separate sections.

Features to Boost Revenue

• Free shipping progress indicator – Caddy will display a progress bar that shows how close a shopper is to reaching the minimum order for free shipping. This encourages shoppers to add more products to reach the minimum, which can boost your average order value.
• Upsell recommendations – whenever a shopper adds an item to their cart, you can upsell targeted products based on that action. These are based on the linked products in WooCommerce and you can also set fallback products.
• Special coupon offers – shoppers can access special coupons and discounts based on the items in their carts. To do this, they get a special Offers tab in the cart interface.

In the screenshot below, you can see the free shipping meter and the upsell recommendations:

And then if the shopper goes to the Offers tab, they can see a list of eligible offers:

Users can easily apply the coupon by clicking the button. Then, the coupon and its discount will appear back in the cart tab:

Features to Improve Shopper Experience

• Sticky side cart interface – the main sticky side cart offers a much easier way for shoppers to check their carts. They can access it from any page while they’re shopping – no need to open a dedicated cart page.
• Built-in wishlist – shoppers can save products to their own wishlists and then view those products from a dedicated tab in the side cart interface.
• Apply coupons in cart – shoppers can apply a coupon straight from the side cart, which lets them see what discounts they’re eligible for. This is in addition to the dedicated Offers tab that we mentioned above.

If a shopper clicks the Save For Later button next to an item in their cart, that item will show up in the Saved Items tab of the side cart.

You also have the option to add “Save Product” buttons to the shop page and single product pages to let shoppers save items that way. If a shopper clicks either of those buttons, the product will also show up in the Saved Items tab of Caddy:

Other Notable Features

Beyond everything that you saw above, you just generally get a good number of options to customize the cart behavior and design. here are some examples:

• Choose from 7 different cart icons for the bubble.
• Customize all of the colors.
• Change the bubble position.
• Choose whether or not to automatically open the side cart after someone adds an item to their cart.

Finally, Caddy also offers two optional add-ons that you can use to further extend the plugin:

• Google Analytics integration – add Google Analytics event tracking to track users’ behavior, such as adding coupons, starting the checkout, moving products from cart to save later (and vice versa), clicking on upsells, and more.
• Announcement bar – add a customizable announcement bar at the top of the side cart. You could use this to promote deals, share important information, and so on.

Caddy comes from Tribe Interactive, which is a WooCommerce growth and development agency. I think that’s pretty relevant because the plugin comes from people whose actual job is to help create more high-converting WooCommerce stores.

How to Set Up a WooCommerce Side Cart With Caddy

Now that you know what Caddy offers, let’s look at what it’s like to set up your WooCommerce side cart using Caddy.

For reference, I’m using the premium version of Caddy on my site, but the basic experience will be the same for the free version. More on pricing later.

Once you install and activate Caddy on your site, you can access its settings by going to the new Caddy area in your WordPress dashboard.

There are only two tabs in the settings area:

1. General Settings – control everything about the display behavior and features.
2. Styles – fully customize the colors and icons of your side cart using built-in settings. If you want to go beyond the built-in options, you can also add custom CSS.

Let’s go through the settings areas.

1. Configure General Settings

Here are the options that are available in the General Settings tab – some of these require the Pro version.

Display Behavior

The Display Behavior area lets you control basic settings such as what to do after a shopper adds an item to their cart. You can either open the side cart automatically or display a notification (or do nothing).

Product Recommendations

The Product Recommendations area lets you enable and disable the built-in product recommendations feature to upsell or cross-sell products.

If enabled, you can configure how to show products. You can also manually exclude products and set fallback products in cases where you haven’t configured any Linked Products in the Product data box. This feature relies on the core Linked Products settings – you don’t need to manually set up new links just for Caddy.

Free Shipping Meter

These settings let you configure the free shipping meter, which is a great way to boost your average order value by encouraging shoppers to increase their order totals to earn free shipping.

Note – you must set up a free shipping method in the WooCommerce shipping settings to use this.

Offers

These settings let you configure the special in-cart coupon offers feature.

You can set up these discounts by linking to one or more coupons that you want to be eligible in the cart. It hooks into the regular WooCommerce coupon system, so you’ll need to have added some coupons via WooCommerce for them to appear here.

Messaging

The Messaging settings let you control the text content that appears in your cart. For example, you can customize the welcome message and also the product recommendations text.

There’s also a 100% optional Caddy branding setting here. If you do display the Caddy message, you can add your Caddy affiliate ID to potentially earn some money on referrals if someone wants to add Caddy to their own store.

Save Button Options

The Save Button Options lets you configure the optional “save for later” feature, which is kind of like a built-in wishlist in your side cart.

If you enable this, you can also add a save button on the shop page or single product page, as we showed you earlier in our Caddy review.

Bubble Positioning

Finally, the Bubble Positioning setting lets you control the position of the bubble icon that shoppers will use to open their carts (when the cart is minimized).

You can place it at the bottom (where most live chat widgets appear) or at the top. 

2. Configure Styles

Once you’ve configured the general settings, you can jump over to the Styles tab to configure how your side cart looks.

First, you can choose the cart icon to use inside of the Caddy bubble (the bubble that appears in the bottom or top right of your store).

Below that, you’ll get options to configure the color of pretty much every single element in Caddy.

The screenshot above does not show the full list – you can adjust everything.

If you want to make additional customizations, Caddy includes a dedicated field for you to add custom CSS.

And that’s it for configuring Caddy! It’s pretty easy to use.

Caddy Plugin Pricing

Caddy has a basic free version at WordPress.org along with a premium version that adds more features.

Here’s a comparison table that shows the feature differences between Caddy free vs Pro:

In general, I think serious stores will want the premium version. However, the free version can work fine for simple side carts or just getting a feel for how the plugin works.

If you want the premium version, you can either pay yearly or pay monthly:

• Yearly – $79 per year.
• Monthly – $12 per month ($144 per year in total).

Both pricing options are for a single site. Caddy does not currently offer multiple site licenses, so you’d need to purchase a separate license for each WooCommerce store where you want to use Caddy.

There are also two optional add-ons that you can purchase to further extend Caddy:

1. Google Analytics add-on – $49 per year – this lets you add Google Analytics event tracking to Caddy so that you can track shopper behavior in Google Analytics.
2. Announcements Bar add-on – $19 per year – this lets you add your own custom announcement bar to the top of the Caddy side cart.

Final Thoughts on the Caddy WooCommerce Side Cart Plugin

Overall, I think that the user experience on the Caddy WooCommerce side cart is quite good.

Caddy makes it easy for shoppers to access their carts and the design looks very nice, even with the default settings.

It also goes beyond most other side cart plugins when it comes to the extra features such as a free shipping meter, product upsells, coupon offers, saved items, and so on (though you’ll need the premium version for most of these).

If you want to add a user-friendly side cart to WooCommerce that can also boost your revenue, I think it’s a good option to consider.

You can test it out using the free version, which will let you fully experience the basic side cart. Then, consider upgrading to the premium version to access the more advanced features.