1Shoppingcart Review from a Neutral Perspective

Posted by Andrew C.
2
May 2, 2016
720 Views
This 1Shoppingcart review is actually one of the most difficult online shopping cart reviews that I’ve had to do to date because it’s hard to figure out what to review 1Shoppingcart for.

Examining 1Shoppingcart is a lot like trying to describe the personality of Sybil from the famous 1976 movie about the woman with the multiple personality disorder. It’s really difficult to understand exactly what 1Shoppingcart is, and who they are targeting as their primary customer base.

For this 1Shoppingcart review to make sense, I need to go back in history a bit and provide some background information.

Around the year 2000, 1Shoppingcart created a fairly basic and fairly easy to use online shopping cart system consisting of 3 major components:

  • Shopping cart
  • Auto responder
  • Affiliate system

And the purpose of the shopping cart was primarily for information marketers that needed a way to easily sell one product on a website, create an opt-in list to market to, and use affiliates to leverage the sales opportunities for their products.

Because there were no better options until competitors like Premium Web Cart showed up on the scene in 2006 with more advanced marketing tools, modern interface, and sophisticated upsell and membership systems built-in, 1Shoppingcart had the entire market to themselves and built up a substantial customer base.

Sure, these customers needed to figure out ways to work around the 1Shoppingcart deficiencies, or were forced to integrate additional modules into 1Shoppingcart via API connections, but it was the only game in town so they did the best they could.

With competition heating up for the information marketing customers, and substantial growth opportunities from eCommerce merchants selling physical products, 1Shoppingcart attempted to pivot away from their bread and butter customer base and go after these physical “widget” sellers.

This direction towards widget sellers was pushed even harder after 1Shoppingcart was purchased by Web.com because Web.com has a business model specifically targeting the widget selling customer base and no model for pursuing the information marketer.

1Shoppingcart is now an online shopping cart originally built for information marketers and converted to the widget selling customer market so in the end it does neither very well.

You can imagine taking a sports car and trying to convert it into a pickup truck because it already has a powerful V8 engine. Bolting a cargo bed to the back, welding new heavy duty springs onto the axle, changing the rims and tires, and then putting a new label on the vehicle will convert the car into a vehicle that can definitely carry more cargo than the original version of the vehicle, but in the end, it’s no longer a sports car and it’s a marginally bad pickup truck with convoluted engineering and confusing user interface systems.

1Shoppngcart is now the equivalent of the mongrel sports car turned pickup truck which is why I call it the “Sybil” of the online shopping cart software. No longer a dedicated information marketing system and a poor substitute compared to the “purpose” built shopping carts for selling widgets.

For a better online shopping cart system, here are my recommendations for a 1Shoppingcart alternative based upon the market you’re in today:

For information marketers, coaches, authors, consultants or other high end specialty widget marketers with a more sophisticated nurturing, selling, and upselling process:

  • CloudNet360.com – The most refined and complete sales and marketing system

  • Infusionsoft – Ranked highly due to popularity but over priced and missing critical systems that will need to be purchased separately and added through custom integration

  • Ontraport – Unique features but peculiar system logic limits the versatility

  • Greenrope – Built by people that came through the engineering ranks and not by marketing types. The most “tech-geek” oriented of the group.

Widget Sellers – If you need “cart” functionality for facilitating transactions for commodity type products and have no interest in upselling or follow up sales to existing customers:

  • Big Commerce – Refined interface and substantial user base

  • Shopify – Easy to start and easy to use but every step of the upgrade path is filled with additional fees and “plugins” that only work in isolation versus as an integrated system

  • Volusion – One of the original “carts” but losing focus as they try to move upstream with their new platform and separate brand

  • Magento – Loved by developers for the flexibility and customization capability but be prepared to “marry” your developer if you choose this route

This 1Shoppingcart review focused on the macro view of the 1Shoppingcart system primarily because it matters more than anything else. Yes, the 1Shoppingcart monthly price and transaction fees are completely out of line but these wouldn’t matter if the system performed better than the competition and created greater top line revenue for your small business… it’s just not the case.

The 1Shoppingcart price is too high, the 1Shoppingcart software is too confusing, and the 1Shoppingcart business direction doesn’t match the technical foundation of the product.

About The Author: As a web marketing coach and consultant for over a decade, Andrew has decided to share his experience and insights to help online business people become about business automation systems available in the market to save money, time and energy.
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