YAK (Yet Another Kart) is a fully featured and free shopping cart solution for WordPress. It’s been in development for a very long time and it continues to be updated regularly.
YAK is a great solution for a small size web shop that wants to take advantage of advanced payment processors but isn’t planning to have a massive catalog of products.
Installation
Because YAK is freely available from WordPress.org, installation is easy and can be done from your WordPress site admin panel.
Technical Support & Documentation
YAK is free but the developer is still happy to answer users questions on WordPress.org forum. There is not a question there that he doesn’t address.
As for documentation, it’s only available through the YAK Handbook, which is a 25 dollars ebook. But that 25 dollars is all you have to invest with YAK. There are no premium add-ons or anything like that. Everything’s included for free.
How It Integrates with WordPress
You can add products with YAK by going to a post writing screen and entering the product details in there. You’ll then have to use shortcodes to display the product details within the post.
The process is pretty smooth.
Ability to Specify Product Variations
The way YAK handles variations is not very scalable. If you have many products, each with a few variations, you may find YAK’s handling of variation a little disorganized. It is, however, workable.
For each variation you create, you can specify a quantity, its own price, weight and SKU.
Shipping and Tax Management
YAK allows you to specify a sales tax rate for each country that you ship to. For U.S. and Canadian merchants it is possible to specify a tax rate per state and province.
Shipping settings in YAK are flexible too. First, you assign countries to shipping zones, then for each zone, you’re able to specify a total fixed cost, cost per first item and subsequent items, or cost per 100 grams and subsequent 100 gram increments.
Unlike some of the other shopping cart plugins, YAK has no live integration with any shipping carrier.
Admin User-Interface Design
YAK creates four menu items under WordPress Settings and three menu items under WordPress Tools, which I think is a lot, compared with other plugins. What’s worse, the menu items under tools, such as orders, products, and sales reports, they don’t even belong there.
That said, the layout of the screens are well done and easy to understand and use.
Accepted Payment Methods
YAK supports PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, Authorize.Net, and Google Checkout.
Selling Digital Downloads
While it is possible to sell downloadable products with YAK, the process feels a bit crude. For example, you have to upload your files manually to a non-web accessible directory. Then you give YAK the full path to the file after you have created and published the product.
Uploading and selling a digital product with YAK requires visiting several screens and performing some tweaks that some users may find intimidating.
Offering Discount Coupon Codes
In YAK you can create various types of promotion codes. The discounts can either be percentages or fixed amounts. The discounts can be applied to shipping only, or product price only. You can specify it so that the discount only applies after the cart contents quantity or value exceeds a certain threshold. Each promotion can also have an expiration date.
Sidebar Widgets
YAK has only one widget, the YAK Order Panel. It provides the basic shopping cart functionality, i.e. showing cart item count and checkout link.
Themes and Styles
There are no themes available for YAK. You will have to create your own. While there is no documentation on instructions on how to create a YAK theme, you can take a look at the included ui.css to learn what elements YAK allows you to style.
Affiliates Management
Currently, there is no affiliates management software that integrates with YAK.
Multi-Language Support
YAK is available in Czech, German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovakian, Swedish, Thai, and Chinese. You can also modify these translations or create your own translation for your own language.
Who’s Using It
Some brick and mortar stores use YAK to power their online shops. Take a look at these sites: Jenny Mills Jewellery Shop, 52Teas.com, NQA.org, Rebecca Roth Jewellery, Kipp Abresch Studio, and ManTeas.com.
Money Matters
YAK is completely free. There are no paid modules or anything like that. However, you’ll most likely need to buy the YAK Handbook to really understand how to run your YAK-powered online store. The Handbook is a small $25 purchase.
