Ecommerce Software Review: 3dcart

/ Zach Heller
3dcart Home Page.PNG

One common question for business owners is which eCommerce platform should I be using? There are so many different options to choose from, and ultimately it can impact how successful your business can be.. 

Every platform comes with different benefits and drawbacks and offers a variety of price points, making some options more viable for your business than others.

Today, I am reviewing one of the original eCommerce platforms: 3dcart. This company advertises that you can “build an online store that ranks higher and sells more” with their software, and I wanted to dig in to find out..

Overview: What is 3dcart?

3dcart was founded in 1997 by Gonzalo Gil, who remains CEO of the company to this day. Gonzalo had previous experience designing custom solutions for online merchants who required advanced functionality out of their shopping carts. Using what he learned, Gonzalo combined all of the most sought-after features into an eCommerce platform called 3dcart. From the beginning, 3dcart was designed with customizability and optimization capabilities in mind. Today, 3dcart has grown to support over 22,000 merchants and is one of the top ten eCommerce platforms around.

As a SaaS (software as a service) eCommerce platform, 3dcart doesn’t need to be installed onto a server. Additionally, hosting and domain name registration is included in the service. 3dcart boasts a guaranteed 99.9% uptime and hosts sites on PCI certified servers.

3dcart Plans & Pricing

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They offer a 14-day free trial with any of their paid plans so you have some time to test out the solution and determine whether it's right for you.Keep in mind though that you cannot make any sales during the free trial, so its purpose is purely to become familiar with the platform and decide if it’s right for your business.

3dcart’s service offers five main paid plans. Each plan, with an increase in price, comes with progressively advanced features for use on your online store.

  • Startup Store: $19 per month, up to $50k sales per year.

  • Basic Store: $29 per month, up to $100k sales per year.

  • Plus Store: $79 per month, up to $250k sales per year.

  • Power Store: $129 per month, up to $500k sales per year.

  • Pro Store: $229 per month, up to $1M sales per year.

There are some features that are included in every plan, such as responsive design, built-in SEO tools, social media integration, and reviews. However, for features like newsletters, abandoned cart reports, and integration with Amazon and eBay, you’ll need to upgrade to the plan that offers them.

In addition to their base plans, 3dcart offers a few specialized plans depending on the eCommerce model and size of your online store. Their Dropshipping plan only costs $9.99 per month, but it has much more limited features compared to the Startup Store plan. This is because the Dropshipping plan is designed for the dropshipping model only, which may not require every advanced 3dcart feature.

The 3dcart B2B Ecommerce plan, on the other hand, will run you $379 per month. This premium plan comes with advanced functionality specifically designed for business-to-business online stores.

At the top end of the spectrum are 3dcart’s Enterprise Ecommerce plan, of which there are three. These plans are designed for enterprise-level online stores and come with several add-ons that are normally an extra fee.

  • Enterprise I: $499.99 per month, up to $5M in sales per year.

  • Enterprise II: $999.99 per month, up to $10M in sales per year.

  • Enterprise III: Custom Pricing, up to $10M sales per year.

3dcart Features

3dcart comes with a number of built-in features that help the platform stand out.. The service comes with all of the basic features you’ll see in any SaaS eCommerce platform: a shopping cart, website builder, secure hosting, and more. Ibroke down all of their more advanced features into a few categories to take a closer look.

Payment Processing

3dcart integrates with over 160 payment gateways on its platform. They support some of the most popular options, including Authorize.Net, Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Additionally, 3dcart supports digital wallet and cryptocurrency payment options, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Bitcoin. If your online store could be considered “high-risk” by most mainstream payment gateways, 3dcart also integrates with high-risk payment processors that will work with your business.

Payment options are also available for many international merchants.

SEO & Marketing

Out of all other features, 3dcart advertises their advanced SEO suite of tools that’s available within their platform. A few of their most prominent SEO features include:

  • Custom & Canonical URLs

  • Custom Meta Titles & Descriptions

  • Heading Tag Hierarchy on Product Pages

  • Robots.txt Control

  • Automatic XML Sitemap Generation

  • Rich Snippet Optimization

Aside from SEO, 3dcart includes a wide variety of built-in marketing tools that are usually relegated to third-party services. For example, you can post articles using the built-in blogging module or send out emails to customers using the included email marketing tools. However, some of these features may feel a bit limited, so third-party options could be better for your business if you’re looking for more advanced marketing.

Inventory & Shipping

3dcart’s built-in inventory management software is designed to streamline the organization of your products. You’re able to import and export products in bulk via CSV files, which is helpful if you’re moving to 3dcart from another platform. 3dcart also allows for unlimited products, categories, and product options, making it ideal for larger stores with lots of products that have many different versions.

On the order management and shipping side of things, 3dcart has a lot to offer. You can choose to send out status updates to customers regarding their orders and print shipping labels directly from the software. 3dcart also includes a built-in RMA system, making it simple to process returns within the platform.

3dcart Website Builder

For many website owners, the design of their site is one aspect that they pay the most attention to. 3dcart offers built-in site customization tools that you can use to edit any of their eCommerce themes. The themes are built on their proprietary Core Template Engine.

3dcart’s theme store offers both free and premium themes (ranging from $149 to $199), the latter of which includes extra functionality such as parallax scrolling or an Instagram feed. While most themes offered are designed by 3dcart themselves, there are also a few themes designed by third-party designers.

Themes built on the Core engine can be edited in the following ways:

  • Theme Editor: Customize your theme’s colors and fonts.

  • Drag n’ Drop HTML Builder: Add content and images to specific areas on the home page and other content pages.

  • HTML & CSS: Every theme gives you access to its code, which you can edit freely to your liking if you have more advanced customizations in mind.

While the Drag n’ Drop HTML Builder does allow you to move elements around in a modular fashion, not every element on the page is able to be moved. Certain elements, such as the homepage carousel and featured products sections, remain static in their place depending on the theme.

Compared to other eCommerce platforms, some merchants have stated that customizing themes can get quite technical with 3dcart. This is due to the coding required to make more advanced edits to your website; for this reason, it may be a good idea to have some coding background before working with a 3dcart theme.

Integrations & Apps

3dcart also plays nicely with third party apps and services.. Within the 3dcart App Store, you’ll find hundreds of apps (both free and paid) that can further specialize your online store. 3dcart offers several of their own proprietary apps in the app store, but many of these are included in higher tier plans as well.

3dcart integrates with some of the most popular eCommerce applications, from marketing to shipping. Here’s just a few of the apps that they offer:

  • Mailchimp

  • HubSpot

  • Printful

  • AliExpress

  • Avalara

  • AdRoll

  • ShippingEasy

  • ShipStation

  • AgeChecker.Net

  • TargetBay

If there’s an application that you’d like to integrate with 3dcart, but isn’t available on the app store, you also have the option of developing a custom integration with 3dcart’s API (available on all plans).

Customer Support

If you ever run into an issue with your 3dcart store, or if you need guidance when making changes, there’s several support channels available to you. 3dcart’s US-based support is available 24/7/365 via phone with additional support through live chat, tickets, and email.

For self-service support, 3dcart has an extensive knowledge base of helpful materials that can instruct merchants on how to use nearly every feature included in the software. Additionally, they publish articles on a regularly updated blog and glossary of eCommerce terms to help teach merchants more about eCommerce.

The Verdict

At the end of the day, 3dcart is a feature-packed eCommerce platform that emphasizes the freedom to customize everywhere you look. From product options to search engine optimization, the platform gives you access to a somewhat-overwhelming amount of functionality that you can tweak to your liking.

Most of the criticism surrounding 3dcart focusses on it’s ease-of-use, which may be due to the sheer number of features available or the limited web design customization tools. However, at the end of the day, 3dcart is a comprehensive and affordable platform that you should consider in your search.

/ Zach Heller/ Comment
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Zach Heller

5 Influencer Marketing Best Practices To Increase Your ROI

/ Zach Heller

The following is a sponsored post.

Influencer marketing allows businesses to thrive on social media platforms. As a marketing professional looking to boost your ROI, you need to consider launching influencer marketing campaigns. Consumers typically listen to other consumers over brands themselves, which is why influencer marketing is so effective. However, some companies jump head-first into this trend and struggle to launch profitable campaigns. If you want to avoid such a situation, read this post and learn the top influencer marketing best practices. 

Choose Influencers Based On Relevance

To start planning an influencer marketing campaign, you need to choose the best candidates. Begin your search by looking up users who align with your business already. Those users are the ones who are likely to already have followers that fit into your target audience. Thus, they are great candidates for when you want to increase your own following. Their followers will resonate with your brand when they post about your products and/or services. Find influencers who post about products and/or services similar to your brand. Search for candidates who have followers who constantly engage with their posts as well. If you find qualified individuals, you will succeed at influencer marketing. 

Reach Out To Micro-Influencers

When choosing candidates for a social media marketing campaign, reach out to micro-influencers through the Scalefluence platform or directly though campaigns. Most marketing teams go wrong when they assume that the best candidates are those who have massive follower counts. While it can be advantageous to sponsor larger macro-influencers, the ones with smaller follower bases usually influence their followers the most. More so, micro-influencers demand much less capital compared to larger scaled users. In terms of ROI, these smaller influencers could be the best value for your campaign. As a result, you can save capital and gain more organic traffic at the same time by utilizing this influencer marketing best practice. 

Show Influencers Appreciation

Furthermore, teams that show their influencers appreciation launch successful campaigns. Influencers who feel unique and rewarded are more motivated to produce quality work for their brands. Fortunately, you can show influencers appreciation in simple ways. You can show them a sneak peak of your upcoming product line. Offer them special influencer-only items and discounts. Consider sending them personalized gifts with their product packages. These types of actions build a strong relationship between you and the influencer which could lead to other profitable opportunities in the future. If you show your influencers appreciation, they will reciprocate the favor by earning you more followers. 

Require Influencers To Disclose

Another crucial factor of every influencer marketing campaign is disclosure. The Federal Trade Commission demands all influencers to label each sponsored post as such. Therefore, you need to include this requirement in your list of influencer rules. However, you can provide your influencers with some leeway. Inform them of the options they have on various social media platforms. For example, Instagram allows influencers to meet the Federal Trade Commission standards by using their paid partnership tags. Facebook and YouTube also offer their own tools for disclosing involvement in paid partnerships or advertising. Keep this influencer marketing best practice in mind when launching a new campaign. 

Ask Influencers To Be Honest 

Lastly, the best influencer marketing campaigns revolve around honesty. When influencers provide their followers with their true feelings regarding a brand's products or services, their followers can tell. As a result, their followers feel better about purchasing products or services from the brand mentioned. You should advise your influencers to use their own positive experiences with your products/services when posting sponsored content. Ask them to refer to their likes and any interesting elements they discover. Keep influencer marketing posts lively and truthful to attract consumers. Often times, an honest post or review can significantly increase your overall conversion rates. Use this best practice to your full advantage.

Influencer marketing is an applauded strategy for marketing teams looking to boost conversions and increase their social media following. To achieve these goals, you need to choose influencers who align with your brand. Your influencers should also be on the micro level so that you can save capital and resonate with more consumers at the same time. By showing influencers that you appreciate their efforts, you give them more of a reason to post quality content for your brand. Require your influencers to disclose that their posts for you are sponsored. Moreover, ask your influencers to be honest in their content about your products/services. Use these influencer marketing best practices to scale your company through social media marketing.

3 Tips for Optimizing Your Landing Page for Lead Generation

/ Zach Heller

How many leads do you get out of your landing page? Have you even started to think about it? If not, that’s a problem. And if you’re not figuring out how well your landing page is working when it comes to search capability, then you’re missing out on quite a bit of sales data, and potential sales, too.

That whole process is called optimization of your landing page. You want to call attention to the page and use it to create some sort of action. You also want to be able to test options with the page so that you can learn more about your customers.

To optimize it, you have to do a number of different things. You have to get people to interact with the page and you have to create some links so that you can maximize your attention ratio. You have to make the action seem urgent — like, they need to do it now. What else? This graphic explains it.

3 Key Tips for Optimizing Your Landing Page for Lead Generation

Data Analysts are a Marketer’s Best Friend

/ Zach Heller

Marketers today need to be comfortable with data. They need to be able to understand what the data is telling them and how to make decisions based on that. The best hunches or instincts in the world cannot compete with data-driven strategies. Not in 2019.

But you and I are not the experts. We didn’t go to school to learn how to work with data (though perhaps more marketing coursework in the future will involve data analytics and statistics).

That’s why we need to befriend the people who are experts.

Data analysts and data scientists are the folks who know how to make sure your company is collecting the right data, how to review and sort through that data to get answers to critical business questions, and how to present their findings in a way that makes it easy to make business decisions.

For marketers, this skill set is a godsend. Here are just a few of the key ways marketers can work with data analysts to achieve better business results:

  1. Build real-time reporting by advertising channel that lets you view return on investment at the high level across channels and dive deeper within each channel to improve optimization decisions

  2. Gain a deeper understanding of how customers are progressing through the buyer journey and identify opportunities within the sales funnel to improve the likelihood of conversion

  3. Build more robust buyer personas with first-party data collected by your company that will help your sales team prospect more effectively and influence future branding and messaging decisions

  4. Isolate the impact of key pricing and promotional campaigns in order to determine the ideal pricing strategy that drives maximum profitability and sales

  5. Connect your data with key advertising platforms to derive greater value from AI and machine learning going forward, letting algorithms take the lead of spending decisions in order to maximize efficiency

Every marketing organization today needs people who are fully engaged with the data their company and their customers are generating. This data is a treasure trove of information that can be used to guide decisions at every level of the company.

As a marketer, you would be smart to spend more time with your company’s data analysts and data scientists, leveraging their incredible skill set to help you do more.

Keys to a Successful Product Launch

/ Zach Heller

There are some products that take a long time to gain traction in the marketplace. Those are the exceptions for two reasons:

1)      There are few companies that can afford to sustain a new product that does not gain immediate traction

2)      Newer products will often improve upon prior iterations by the same company or competitors and so will crowd out older products with little market share

And so we can determine that most successful products are successful early in the post-launch phase of their life.

Product Lifecycle

A typical product lifecycle has four distinct stages:

1)      Launch

2)      Growth

3)      Maturity

4)      Renewal or Decline

These are the same, more or less, as the lifecycle for a business. And each phase involves a number of key decisions that a company must make to succeed.

In order to effectively get to the growth stage, first you have to have a successful product launch. If you are responsible for getting your product out the door and into the marketplace most effectively, here is a checklist you can use to improve the likelihood of a successful launch.

Product Launch Checklist

  • Has the product been fully tested and come through without any bugs?

  • Have you tested your product with customers to ensure it solves a real need in the market?

  • Do you have buy-in from senior leadership throughout the company?

  • Do you have sales and revenue targets for the first 30, 60, 90 days after launch? Do you know what to do if you fall short of those targets?

  • Has the advertising budget been approved that you need to meet your sales expectations?

  • Have you communicated with all departments so that they know everything they need to know to better serve the launch? Marketing, sales, customer support, finance, analysts?

  • Have you given the marketing team enough lead time to have all of their campaigns built and ready to deploy on day one?

  • Have you done press outreach to gain publicity around the launch?

  • Is the messaging on your website ready to go live?

  • Do you have a plan? Is there a document that people across your organization can refer to if they have questions?

So much of the success of any product is in the launch. The more planning you do in advance, the more you can ensure that both the product and the marketing are ready to go, the better your odds of a successful launch.

Best of luck!