BoxCart – Local Pickup & Click and Collect Ordering vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

BoxCart is a standalone click and collect ordering plugin for WordPress. Give your customers a polished pickup-ordering experience with configurable time slots, a modern card-view storefront, customer accounts, and a built-in admin dashboard – all without WooCommerce. Whether you call it local pickup, click and collect, store pickup, or order ahead, it is the same idea: customers order online and collect in person, at a time that suits them. BoxCart handles the whole flow, from storefront to time slots to order management, without the weight of a full e-commerce platform. Built for: farm shops, bakeries, butchers, delis, greengrocers, fishmongers, florists, coffee roasters, pizza shops, meal-prep kitchens, and any business where customers order ahead and collect. What you get in the free build Click & collect ordering with configurable time slots on your pickup schedule. One pickup location with its own address, collection instructions, opening hours, and per-slot capacity. Card-view storefront with category filters, search, and mini-basket. Sell by unit, weight, or pack – offer multiple quantity options per product, such as single units, 500g, 1kg, or a 6-pack. Customer accounts with order history, plus optional up-front registration. Admin order management with a status lifecycle (pending, processing, ready, completed, cancelled). Order export to CSV from the orders screen, filtered by date, status, and location. Transactional email templates (order confirmation and status updates) with branding controls and a live preview editor. Plus a new-order admin notification. Cash on collection and bank transfer payment methods. 5 Gutenberg blocks and 5 shortcodes for embedding BoxCart anywhere – products, basket, checkout, account, mini basket. Developer-friendly – 50+ action hooks and 35 filter hooks, CSS custom properties throughout, zero external PHP dependencies. Cache-resilient – pages render as empty shells that hydrate via AJAX, with a bypass cookie for customer sessions. Compatible with Cloudflare, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, and similar. Translation-ready with a .pot file included. GDPR-aware – self-hosted fonts, optional full data cleanup on uninstall. Why BoxCart? Standalone – no WooCommerce required. A single, focused plugin with its own data model. Time-slot ordering baked in. Configure your schedule, slot length, and capacity. Customers see live availability. Developer extensible – documented hooks, filters, and CSS custom properties. Not a stripped-down demo – the free build is a complete, working click & collect store. Paid Pro upgrade (optional) A paid Pro build is available from boxcart.dev with additional features: Multiple pickup locations Stripe card payments (with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, Klarna, PayPal, Afterpay) Table-view storefront Members-only pricing (hide prices and the add-to-cart button from logged-out visitors) Customer favourites and one-click reorder Two-way order messaging Customer-side order modification Holiday closures and per-date capacity overrides Printable pick lists & packing slips Sales reports CSV product & category import/export 195+ customisation settings Pro is optional – the free build will continue to receive updates and is genuinely useful on its own. Live demo Three demo stores at demo.boxcart.dev – a greengrocer, a bakery, and a butcher – each configured differently to show the range of what BoxCart can do. Documentation Full documentation at docs.boxcart.dev covering every admin workflow and the developer API. External Services This plugin uses the Freemius plugin framework (https://freemius.com/) for optional anonymous usage tracking, licence handling for the paid Pro upgrade, and update delivery for Pro customers. Freemius is a well-known WordPress plugin distribution platform and the integration is entirely standard. What data is sent, and when: When you activate BoxCart, you are shown an opt-in prompt asking whether to share anonymous usage diagnostics. You can skip the prompt – the plugin works either way. If you opt in, Freemius receives: your site URL, admin email, WordPress version, PHP version, plugin version, activation/deactivation events, and non-personal environment data (e.g. active theme, locale). You can opt out at any time from BoxCart → Account. If you purchase the Pro upgrade, Freemius also handles your licence key, renewal state, and update delivery for the Pro build. BoxCart never sends your customers’ data, your orders, your products, or the contents of your store to Freemius or anywhere else. Endpoints contacted: api.freemius.com, wp.freemius.com. Freemius’s own privacy policy and terms: https://freemius.com/privacy/ https://freemius.com/terms/

For years, almost every WordPress site I ran ended up with a different plugin just to send email. I never really chose them. I installed whatever looked fine at the time, because honestly there is no clear winner. Most of them advertise features I don’t need, or hide the basics behind a paywall. At one point I simply wanted to see the emails my site had sent, or failed to send, and even that asked me to upgrade. That felt wrong. So I decided to build the simplest and most honest email plugin I could for WordPress. You pick one provider, set it up once, and every email your site sends goes through it. Everything is logged, so you always know what happened. No upsell maze, no ads, nothing basic locked away. That is Meow Mailer, and all of this is free: One provider, set up once. Pick the one you use and forget about it. No confusing multi provider routing. Import from your current SMTP plugin. Already set up with WP Mail SMTP or Easy WP SMTP? Meow Mailer notices and copies the provider, credentials and sender over in one click, so switching never means digging out your API keys again. A fallback for when it breaks, free. Name a second provider (or plain WordPress, which needs no setup) and it steps in only when the first one refuses an email. Your mail still goes out, the log tells you exactly who failed and why, and an alert lets you know your main provider needs a look. A real email log, free. Every email in a clean table with recipient, subject, provider and status (sent, failed, offline, pending). Click any row to read the full message, see the error, and resend it. Many plugins charge for this. Here it is free. Stays out of the way. Until you pick a provider, Meow Mailer doesn’t change how your email is sent, so activating it never breaks what already works. It still logs everything WordPress sends on its own, so you get the log from the moment you activate it. Never miss a failure. A dashboard warning appears when emails fail, so silent problems don’t go unnoticed. Dismiss it once you have had a look and it stays away until a new email fails. Failure alerts by email, free. Get told when your site stops being able to send, instead of finding out from a customer. The alert is sent by WordPress itself rather than your provider, so it still reaches you when the provider is the thing that broke. One alert per hour at most, however many emails fail. Alerts on Slack, Discord or Teams, free. Paste a webhook URL and the alerts and the weekly summary are posted to your chat as well, so finding out that email is broken never depends on email. Handy when you look after a lot of sites. Individual emails are never posted anywhere: this tells you about your site, not about the people it writes to. Weekly summary, free. A short email with what was sent, what failed, and the most common errors. Nothing is sent on a quiet week. Control WordPress’s own emails. Switch off the notifications WordPress sends by itself: new user registrations, password and email change confirmations, comment moderation, automatic update reports. Password resets are never affected, so nobody gets locked out. Background sending. Email goes out after the page has loaded, so your visitors never wait on the mail server. Offline mode. Capture every email in the log without sending. Perfect for staging and development. Filters and export. Filter by status and provider, search by subject or recipient, and export to CSV. Test and resend. Check your setup with an HTML or plain text test, and resend any logged message in one click. Auto prune. Keep logs forever, or delete anything older than 7, 30 or 90 days. Multisite ready. Set your provider up once on the main site and let every site of the network use it, or leave each site to configure its own. Email logs always stay per site. Light and private. No bloat, no tracking. Your credentials can live in wp-config.php instead of the database. What Meow Mailer will never do No open or click tracking. Other email plugins advertise it as a premium feature. It works by putting an invisible pixel in every message and rewriting every link to pass through a redirect, which means logging when your recipients read their mail and what they clicked. That is surveillance of the people your site writes to, it is personal data you then have to account for under the GDPR, and rewritten links make your email look more like spam, not less. Meow Mailer does not do it, and that is not a gap waiting to be filled in a Pro version. There is no Pro version. Supported providers Generic SMTP, Mailgun, Brevo, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO, Mailjet, Resend, MailerSend, Maileroo, Gmail / Google Workspace (OAuth 2.0), Microsoft 365 / Outlook (OAuth 2.0), and Zoho Mail (OAuth 2.0). About Meow Apps Meow Mailer is part of the Meow Apps family of plugins, focused on doing one thing well with a clean, modern interface. External services Meow Mailer contacts an external service only after you choose and configure an email provider. Until then (the default “None”) and in “Offline” mode, it sends nothing anywhere. When you pick a provider, your outgoing email (recipients, subject, body, headers and attachments) and the credentials you entered are sent to that provider so it can be delivered, and only when your site actually sends an email. For Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho Mail, Meow Mailer also contacts their OAuth servers when you connect and refresh your account. Nothing else is ever sent. You choose a single provider. Generic SMTP talks only to the server you configure. For the others, please review their terms and privacy policy: Mailgun (terms, privacy), Brevo (terms, privacy), SendGrid (terms, privacy), Amazon SES (terms, privacy), Postmark (terms, privacy), SMTP2GO (terms, privacy), Mailjet (terms, privacy), Resend (terms, privacy), MailerSend (terms and privacy), Maileroo (terms, privacy), Gmail (terms, privacy), Microsoft 365 (terms, privacy), and Zoho Mail (terms, privacy). Development Meow Mailer is open source. The full source, including the React code used to build the admin interface, lives on GitHub.