1Shoppingcart has been a long time volume leader in the online shopping cart software world. But being the incumbent volume leader is really never a static condition when discussing anything in the high tech world.
So let’s take a detailed look into the bowels of the software, so you can better understand the entire process and complete a full 1Shoppingcart review.
1Shoppingcart Review – General Overview
There are several aspects to any system so it’s important to review from a 30,000 foot vantage point, and then we’ll drill deeper and review the details of each module.
First you will need to understand the difference between the basic online shopping cart systems. Essentially there are 2 types of technologies:
1. Buy Now Button – This technology operates independently of the website, and only comes into play when a web visitor actually clicks on the “buy now” button or link.
2. Template System – This type of technology actually becomes your website with your products and website control residing within the shopping cart system.
1Shoppingcart uses the “buy now” button technology, and this type of online shopping cart system is best suited for websites with a high content to product ratio. In other words, if you have 1 product and a full page of text or videos / audios to describe the product and highlight the benefits, then this type of technology is well suited to your business.
On the other hand, if you’re selling thousands of “generic” name brand products that simply need a sentence of text, an image and price, then you would likely be better off with a template system.
If you’ve cleared that decision point, the first thing you’ll want to do is to have a shopping cart to sell your items. The basic shopping cart aspect of 1Shoppingcart is very robust, and is easily linked to your website or blog or anything thing else via a simple hyperlink. Easy to create, easy to integrate, easy to manage.
1Shoppingcart enables you to perform recurring payments with your products, but to operate this function you’ll need to have a payment processor other than PayPal as 1Shoppingcart does not allow recurring billing via PayPal.
If you choose their Professional version, or pay an additional fee on top of the basic version, you will also have the ability to perform a post sales up sell in order to sell more items to your customers. This type of an up sell is often referred to as a “one time offer”, or shortened to: “OTO”. Up selling is an amazingly simple method of earning more revenue per customer, and is a highly advised business practice both online and offline.
To date, 1Shoppingcart only offers a post sales up sell, and not a pre-sales and post sales up sell process. Having the post sales up sell system is a good function, but the best shopping carts now offer the ability, and flexibility, to perform as follows:
Pre-sales up sell (up sell happens before the customer gets to the initial checkout) Post sales up sell (up sell happens after the initial product sales checkout) Pre-sales and post sales up sells in the same check out process. This combination option is the most powerful option of them all. When you can offer a pre-sales up sell and a post sales up sell, you can then do a “soft” sale before the customer completes their initial check out, and then a more aggressive post sales up sell with 1 click check out after they have already purchased their initial selection(s).
1Shoppingcart Review – Affiliate System
The most successful online marketers all have 1 thing in common; they make heavy use of their affiliate programs to build an army of hungry sales people, all working on 100% commission, to sell their product. 1Shoppigcart does offer an integrated affiliate system as part of their professional program, and from a tracking standpoint it does an adequate job. But because of the age of the system, there are some glaring shortcomings with their affiliate system:
1. Cookie Tracking – Cookies are now easily and routinely deleted by the latest web browsers i.e. FireFox, IE8, Chrome & Safari
2. Affiliate Credit – No ability to choose if you want the “last click” to receive credit or the “first click”.
3. Progressive Commissions – Not available.
4. Affiliate Payment – Probably the worst part of the entire system, and definitely an industry laggard. Calculating and making payment is all manual and very cumbersome. Attempting to manage a large affiliate team with this system will quickly become a full time job.
1Shoppingcart Review – Autoresponder System
No shopping cart system is really complete unless it seamlessly and automatically operates with an autoresponder system. 1Shoppingcart offers 2 methods of linking the shopping cart system to an autoresponder:
1. Internal autoresponder – This system is included with the professional version.
2. External autoresponder – 1Shoppingcart allows you to integrate AWeber into your system instead of using the internal system.
If you have a very small list and do not really intend on marketing to this list, then the internal autoresponder system is adequate. But, if you plan on growing a large list, as you should, then you must seriously consider using the AWeber system, even though it will add additional cost to your system.
Using Aweber instead of the 1Shoppingcart autoresponder will give you a much better deliverability rate, and this is a critical item when considering email marketing.
In Summary
1Shoppingcart can be a good way to start your online business, but the age and lack of modern functionality may limit all but the most basic user.
