I’m building a new WooCommerce plugin business, and I’m doing it out in the open. Every real step, including the boring ones, gets written down here.
I’m at the beach for most of this summer, so there’s no fixed schedule and no daily promise, but I’ll do my best whenever there’s something worth sharing.
The first real decision was the brand name (and domain name). I thought that part would take ages, but thanks to… AI, it ended up shaping how I think about the whole project. Here’s what happened and why I landed on CartRules.
The Idea Behind the Plugin
The plugin started from one specific problem. On plenty of WooCommerce stores, some products should never sit in the same cart as certain others, or a customer should only ever be allowed one item from a group, whether that’s one product, one item from a category, one from a tag, one from a brand, or a mix of several rules at once.
Existing plugins mostly handle quantity caps, price limits, or weight limits, one product at a time. What I wanted to build is closer to a rule engine: pick a group, a category, a tag, a brand, even a custom taxonomy, and say only one item from that group is allowed in the cart at all, or set up more specific exclusions between groups.
My First Choice: OnlyOneInCart.com
The obvious name was the literal one. OnlyOneInCart.com said exactly what the plugin does, no explaining required. Someone searching for a way to stop customers combining two items from the same category would land on that name and immediately get it.
I liked that a lot. It’s the kind of name that basically writes its own homepage headline. For a single, focused plugin, that’s close to ideal.
Why I Changed My Mind
The question that stopped me was simple: what if this works, and I want to build something else off the back of it? A name that only describes one specific feature doesn’t leave room for that. I’d either be stuck, or I’d have to rebrand later and lose whatever traction I’d built.
Around the same time, I also ruled out CartLimits, my other shortlist option. Turns out there’s already a plugin called Cart Limits for WooCommerce, sold directly on the official WooCommerce Marketplace. Using a near-identical name for a competing plugin, on the same marketplace, was an easy no.
Landing on CartRules
CartRules won because it doesn’t box me in. It still points clearly at what the site is about, cart behavior and rules, without locking the brand to one single feature.
The bigger reason, though, is what this name quietly opens up. I’m not planning to build every possible cart rule or cart limit plugin myself. But CartRules doesn’t have to be just my plugin’s homepage. It can become a proper hub for cart rules and limits, my plugin front and center, alongside other people’s plugins that solve related problems, some of it likely affiliate. That wasn’t the plan when I started this week. It is now.
What’s Next
Next up is actually building the site and getting the first version of the plugin working end to end. No promises on timing, I’m still at the beach, and some days building anything at all just isn’t going to happen.
But the name is locked in, and that alone makes the next steps easier to think about. More soon, whenever soon actually is.
Leave a Reply