I have been looking into 3d Cart for a while now and slowly poking around in it to get a feel for it. It is a very clean and polished interface and some nice design work so I had high hopes for it. Overall it is not a bad cart, the pricing is good and the basic feature set is complete and competitive with the likes of BigCommerce and CoreCommerce. It has full template support, mobile and social store configurations and string editors to change the underlying text of the site.
The template system is easy to update and customize but the supplied templates are table based and pretty clunky. They look OK and work but they need a lot of cleaning up to be effective with search engines and increase the load time.
For people wanting to save on processes and applications there is a built in blog that does a passable job of allowing you to post news and updates.
The Good
Very simple templates that make customizing the look and feel quite easy. 3dCart also has a splendid style editor that allows you to visually change the size, colour and look of titles and text elements within the cart. Not very useful for developers but it would be great for store owners with some computer experience and a few hours spare.
Built-in Affiliate program support – it isn’t as good as iDev affiliate but it is useful for businesses to test the affiliate waters before investing the time into a full scale affiliate program.
Edit text used in the store – you could effectively change your store language – although it would not be multi language in the true sense ( like CoreCommerce )
Power Reviews add-on (as well as built in reviews) if you want to extend the . Picnik integration for better image editing and manipulation.
Customer reward points and wish lists. Multiple ship to addresses.
Basic CRM system for simple customer support and managemnt
Ability to define pricing groups (instead of relying on the defaults)
Supports Drop Shipping and Multiple Warehouses witha very simple Distributor manager.
Shopping comparison site export:
- Shopzilla / BizRate
- Shoptracker
- Shopping.com
- Shop.com
- PriceGrabber.com
- NextTag
- Google Base / Froogle
- Yahoo Shopping
- Live Product Upload
- Bing Cashback
- GoDatafeed
Fulfillment, Order management and Shipping plugins
- Amazon FBA
- eFulfillment Service
- MOM Export
- International Checkout
- WeFulfillIt
- Avalara
- Google Checkout
- Order Motion
- Quickbooks
- Stone Edge
- Adship
- ShipWorks
- Endicia Export
- TrueShip
- WorldShip
Individual product statistics that help with testing and promoting products and fine tuning copy.
The ability to post Facebook and Twitter updates from the shopping cart backend.
The Bad
Only supports a handful or North American shipping providers rendering it quite useless for Australians, Europeans and Asians. If you are from outside North America save yourself the time and just read my CoreCommerce vs BigCommerce comparison
The admin area is a narrow fixed width and feels cramped when editing products and pages.
An internal newsletter system and no integration with MailChimp or Constant Contact.
Inventory management only at the product level not at the product variant level which makes it more work to support clothing stores.
The Conclusion
It is hard to look past the lack of shipping provider support which is a real shame because over all it is a solid shopping cart that looks good and is straightforward to use. If you are in North America definitely add it to your list to review – if you live anywhere else in the world skip it for now and look at Pinnacle Cart or BigCommerce.
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Tags: 3dcart
Hi Andrew,
Have you ever tried ashop commerce, they are an Aussie hosted platform and have just released a new version (www.ashop.com.au). I am not sure if i should stick with them or go to someone like big commerce or core commerce that are a bit cheaper.
Thanks
I have had negative experiences with 3D Cart – not the product, actually, but the sales and support staff. I’ve consistently found them to be condescending, impatient, and unwilling. As a result, I don’t even consider 3D Cart for my clients anymore; I just don’t need the aggravation, especially when such fantastic alternatives exist. I personally really like BigCommerce – both for its impressive features list AND its solid support.
You are so right about the admin interface. Waaaay too narrow. Plus the templates use tables. Some designers don’t even know how to do layout this way. In evaluating 3D it was a very easy pass.
Well, my experience is limited to Volusion and 3dCart, am webmaster for a large wig site with Volusion, and have built a few smaller sites with 3DCart where we experiment with more specialized product focuses.
I have to say overall I like 3Dcart better, mostly because of the simpler admin interface, and templates are more customizable. Volusion for some reason doesn’t let you edit many parts of your own site, you can edit the pretty much anything in 3Dcart with a little html and CSS knowledge. 3Dcart tech support responds quicker too, Volusion can take 3 or 4 days to respond to a ticket sometimes, and 3Dcart tech support usually responds within a couple of hours. Neither of them have very good free templates, so unless you like really ugly background patterns and outdated layout your going to need to customize some.
Volusion has some issue with product photos and product options randomly disappearing too. Their tech support claims it’s impossible. Managing product options through their admin is a nightmare when you have as many as we do, excel imports and exports are a must for all but the simplest option editing simple because Volusion has so many steps to add and edit options, and it takes forever. It’s fairly quick and simple to add and delete product options in 3Dcart.
Volusion does have more flexible product searching and sorting in admin, you can search and sort by almost any of their 100 or so product database fields. 3Dcart lets you search for keywords, but you have to use excel to to a more specific search, or sort your results by say free shipping or sale price.
Volusion’s phone order page is a little easier too, you enter everything on one page while 3Dcart makes you switch between 4 different tabs to add all the order info. It’s easier to edit existing orders in Volusion too.
Basically in my opinion processing and entering customer orders is easier on Volusion, but for the most part 3Dcart is easier and much more flexible when it comes to site design and doing quick edits on products in admin, and their tech support responds much quicker. Adding products in Volusion is so tedious I usually use Excel and the import/export even for 1 or 2 products. It’s fairly easy in 3dcart even through the admin page.
We’re going to try a new apparel site after having some luck with new products on Ebay, I think I might try Big Commerce next, see how it compares.
3Dcart does have product variant inventory support too, you just have to click on “advanced options” on the product options page, then you can enter stock for each product variant, you can also import/export csv files for variant stock. It’s a bit tedious, not great, but it is at least better than Volusion where you have to create hidden copies of the product then attach them to the options. Ugh!
Still I’m hoping to find better, and your blog is giving me some serious interest in Big Commerce.
“An internal newsletter system and no integration with MailChimp or Constant Contact.”
A built-in Email Marketing system that is included for FREE instead of requiring to sign up for a Third-Party service should definitely be a PRO. If integration is needed with MailChimp, ConstantContact or other, you can simply export your contacts via CSV.
It’s not a PRO because the built in email management lacks several important features
* There are no templates
* No online archiving of newsletters to allow people to read them properly regardless of email client
* No Analytics, click tracking, forward tracking, social media integration, Google Analytics integration
* By default it does not meet the minimum requirements for the CAN SPAM Act
** Double Opt-in Lists
** Unsubscribe links in the email
** Full disclosure in emails
I could go on, but 3dCart is a great product and I don’t want to kick it to hard, the in built is satisfactory and does work as described but it is far from a full fledged and compliant email management system. Anyone sending email for business really must move on to something more robust and3dCart should make it easy by integrating the products properly
From a customer perspective 3dcart works as advertised but the customer support is terrible. Tech support is not bad but billing and general customer service must have taken lessons from cell companies. I was a 3dCart customer for year and only stayed hoping they would straighten out. but they continue to get worse so I left. Save yourself the head ache and try someone other than 3DCart…
Well – 3d cart has a decent designer – but it’s not very good for the average computer user – its farily complex and buggy. There is indeed no support for email, and they charge way to much for domain names. Also they give no access to wholesale products – so you have to find your own suppliers, deal with your own shipping logistics etc.
I have recently switched to Get Selling Today – These guys are the real deal. Complete from start to finish e-commerce solution. Takes 60 Seconds to get setup, and you have complete access to over 1 million drop ship products. Basically pick the product, set your profit margin and that’s it.
They also have an amazing Facebook store – interfaces with your actual store automatically and allow your customers to checkout right on Facebook.
Best bang for your buck = Get Selling Today GetSellingToday.com – I believe there packages start at 19.99/month – but I use the Advanced package that have all the bells and whistles
Hope this helps other people
usually posts a few really interesting things like this. In case you’re a new comer to this website.
We’ve been with 3dCart since September, after moving off CoreCommerce. We were with CC for over 3 years and finally just couldn’t take the issues any more.
For what its worth, here is our experience:
Our site has improved drastically over CC in terms of site speed, conversions, sales and SEO. All of these are good things.
Tech support – if you go through Chat, fantastic! If you have to put in a ticket, I have to agree with the above comment: condescending, impatient, and unwilling — that about sums it up. The ticket support is truly awful. Use the chat system when ever you can.
The design system is fairly easy to learn, we have several advanced pages on the site and they were moderately simple to set up. If you have programming and HTML experience, you will be just fine, but if you are a beginner, it might be a bit daunting. They have nice templates and there are quite a few very good designers selling templates for under $500. You can get a very well designed site for very little.
The admin interface isn’t bad, however it is pretty limited and takes a lot of steps to get stuff done. But over all, it is pretty intuitive. They have a well documented knowledge base that really helps, but there is a lot of room for improvement to make things easier and quicker to get around. It is much better than CoreCommerce’s was and better than a lot of them we’ve used.
Quick Books — wow! Not even close. I would be extremely unhappy if we were paying for this “service”, as you have to on the lower levels. Yes, it will download orders, but only as either an invoice or a receipt, not properly based on the actual order type — ie. if they’ve paid, a receipt or order not paid, an invoice. They also don’t send over the payment type, so you have to manually go back through and enter this info on every single order. So, yes, your orders will transmit to Quick Books, but not correctly, or completely.
Coupons/Specials/Promos — EXTREMELY limited. This is really the most disappointing area. So very limited. You can do the basics, but nothing beyond that. Example — Free shipping -but all or nothing, no exclusions allowed. Want to do a %off, fine, but only one level, same with $’s off. You can give $5 or 5% of 50$ but you can’t add an additional level of like $10/10% off $100 purchase. You have to create a separate coupon code for that.
Checkout – more issues here –1) Check shipping in the cart. No idea what they were thinking here, except another sloppy example of programming. All the code is on the page to check for international shipping rates, yet, it is disabled and you have to pay a $200 fee to get it enabled. This forces international customers to go entirely through the checkout to find out their shipping. Really.Awful.Programming. 2)One page checkout – another disaster. It FORCES the customer to be registered in order to use. No guest checkout allowed, even if you have the settings set for it. A HUGE fail! If the customer’s email is in the system, it tosses them back out and they either have to remember what their password was, retrieve it, or re-register with another email address. Completely stops the checkout process and kills conversion. We had to back it out and go through the traditional long checkout to get stuff to work as customers expect. Very, very poorly thought out.
With so many things they do right, and with as progressive as this company is, it is quite baffling how they can’t get the simple stuff right. Coupons/promos should be a basic item, but its missing. QuickBooks, they did, but they didn’t carry it all the way. You are nickel and dimed for stuff that should be basic to a shopping cart.
Our overall assessment is they are a good company, they are progressive and moving in the right direction, but they are sloppy with the little important stuff. They have big ideas, but are not detail oriented, which causes the merchant to suffer over little stuff that could be much better.
Would I recommend them? Yes. Are we happier than when we were with CoreCommerce? Absolutely! I guess it is all about lesser evils and what you are willing to put up with. We have hopes they will get better but I guess time will tell.
Thank you for sharing that Kimberly I am sure a lot of people will benefit from your experiences
Have a great 2012, Andrew
Thanks for the post Kimberly. I have been considering them for a long time now and am trying to narrow this down between BigCommerce and 3dcart. I am curious if you’re using the new version 4 for your store? Can you give some details on the social media features and any drop shipping features if you use these? Thanks again for the detailed review!
Yes, we are using the version 4. It is still pretty new, but the features have added a lot to the ability of our site. This is one of the reasons we chose 3D over Big Commerce, while very similar, 3D just seems to be ahead of the development curve. We have enabled the Facebook items, but they really haven’t been used much on our site, so I don’t have much to report there. I guess if you have users that are really active Facebook people, you’d do better. But we are not seeing that people are using them much. The quick cart is pretty cool, but we had to do some modifications because we have shoppers that aren’t that savvy. They couldn’t figure out how to check out and were getting lost with the cart. I also like the Quick View. It is a nice feature that is normally only found on pretty expensive platforms. We do use the autoresponders for abandoned carts. That has been really helpful as well. We really aren’t set up to do daily deals/make and offer/ or daily deals so I can’t really tell you anything there. I’ve also not activated the Give Feedback because there were a number of complaints in the forum about it being buggy and causing errors on the page. Our shoppers are already so skittish and it was a new site for them, I didn’t want to add in additional issues. I do like they are always adding new partners and staying current with the market trends. This was something I never saw with CoreCommerce. It is helpful because if there is something you really need to do, there is usually a partner to help you get there. For instance — if you want to expand your recommendations – they partner with 4Tell who is a pretty good company for handling recommendations. Reasonably priced, easy to work with and pretty good results.
We did try out Big Commerce, but we never could get help. They weren’t willing to work with us the way 3D cart was and we waited days for any responses to tech support. They were also very rude. I just couldn’t see us being on a platform where we couldn’t get help easily if there was a problem. Having just been through that on CoreCommerce, I was really looking for a company that was receptive and helpful. The chat portion of the cart is very, very good.
I’m sorry but we don’t use drop shipping, however, the cart is completely set up to add dropshipper information. I know I’ve seen email templates for the dropshippers as well as automation rules to alert them when an order is placed.
I hope that helps you!
Kimberly, we have a 3Dcart store too, and customers are not required to register to checkout, even with one page checkout. They don’t even have to enter a email address. Maybe you have some setting set wrong?
Anyway I’ve been happy with 3Dcart overall. My main experience is with Volusion and 3Dcart, and I prefer 3Dcart, the features are pretty similar but I find 3Dcart easier to use.
I tried a bigcommerce free trial, and I thought they had a mostly very easy to use admin, but were lacking in features. They were not suitable for us as they didn’t allow you to import and export product options, like sizes and colors, you had to type them all in by hand, which was a tedious and confusing process requiring going back and forth between several screens, just to say add red,blue and green options to a shirt. 3Dcart and Volusion let you import and export product options so you can do bulk editing with excel and not have to edit them all individually through admin. Our products have lots of colors, and it would have taken months to add them to bigcommerce by retyping them individually. 3Dcart let us just import them from Volusion export files so we just had to modify the format and import them.
If you don’t have products with options then I think bigcommerce is easier to use, but their product options system is very poorly designed, so it was unusable for us. That was in May, 2011 though, it’s possible they have improved it by now. The bigcommerce sales guy said they were planning on improving the product options features eventually.
3Dcart tech support is pretty good too, they usually respond to tickets within a couple of hours, and the chat service is good too, I never tried calling tech support though.
Marvin, we do use the Facebook store feature of 3Dcart, it’s easy to setup, so people can buy stuff right from the facebook page, but for us at least nobody seems to use it. Most of our sales just come from google, and repeat customers. Our Facebook page hasn’t done anything noticeable for us. We post sales and new items and news there and get occasional comments, but Facebook followers don’t really seem to buy anything. Perhaps we just don’t know how to market on Facebook.
We don’t use the drop-ship features of 3Dcart, but you can set it to automatically email orders to suppliers when they come in. Shipping can also be set so that it calculates shipping from different suppliers. You just have to add “distributors” and assign them to products, then 3Dcart will calculate shipping for each supplier so if an order is being shipped from 2 or more different locations, it will calculate enough shipping to cover all locations.
Matt — the 1 page checkout is supposed to allow checkout without registration, but ultimately, it does not. Unless they’ve fixed it in the last couple of months — see this post here to see what I am talking about: http://forums.3dcart.com/new-feature-request/3990-poor-shopping-cart-experience.html
First of all, Matt and Kimberly, thanks loads for your input, this is invaluable information!!! I am leaning toward 3D since they do seem to keep up with technology! This is my first attempt at a real online store so I am trying to get it somewhat correct
Currently I have an eBay store and post links on my Facebook page to manufacturers updates, support pages and other news. That may be one way to keep followers interested. I do notice that the even larger stores always have market their social media outlets well before people actually use them.
The quick vew and ratings/reviews features are definitely ones I want to look into once I am getting setup.
I am not sure if you are allowed to, but can you folks send the links to your websites so I can take a look of what results can be accomplished?
Thanks again for all your help and I look forward to diving into this head first!
I wanted to thank everyone for their posts. I have used Yahoo stores (horrendous), and we have had 2 sites on Volusion for the past 3 years. It seems that lately Volusion’s options (and the fact that you must have the $99/month+ for API access) sound good, but don’t work so well.
We are looking to further automate our business and cost is not an issue if we can increase revenue accordingly.
We are debating between 3dCart, BigCommerce (mostly for eBay integration), and PremiumWebCart.
We would love to hear if anyone has insight on the difference between them…and their own experience, before we get our site fully designed and implemented.
We are a specialty retailer with only 20 unique SKU’s.
Hi Dan,
Overall I find 3dcart easier to use than Volusion, especially for editing/adding product variations. For I usually end creating product variations in excel then uploading them to save time, where in 3Dcart I just have to click the “options” tab and type them in and add swatches if needed pretty quickly. 3Dcart sites are completely customizable too as far as look, Volusion as too many sections that are off limits and can’t be changed, especially on product and checkout pages.
Also with 3dcart it’s easy to export products to google shopping and other shopping engines. Just have to customize fields a little. Volusion’s google shopping export produced a file with incorrect field names, and didn’t even included all the required product information, like descriptions. Didn’t see an easy way to edit it. Haven’t really used any API features on either cart though.
The only think I like better about volusion is it’s slightly easier to edit orders if you need to change products after an order is placed.
Bigcommerce had the best looking free templates, and I think it was easiest to edit templates on if you don’t have html knowledge. It’s product variation features were even worse/harder to use than Volusion’s though and there was no way to import product variations from spreadsheets. Though maybe they have improved it since last May.
3Dcart’s tables are similar enough to Volusions it was pretty easy to import product and variations from CSV files exported from Volusion, you mostly just have to change the field names to the equivalent 3Dcart field name in excel.
I have no experience with PremiumWebCart. I’ll have to check that out, still hoping to find a cart even better than 3Dcart.
Also it seems like 3Dcart’s tech support usually responds to tickets faster than Volusions. It can take Volusion days to respond to support tickets sometimes, and I usually got an answer from 3dcart within an hour or 2, even at 3am in the morning.
After much research (thanks for all the info Andrew) my choice was between BigCommerce and 3dCart. It was a coin flip so today I signed up for a for 3dCart’s free 15 day trial. I was excited to get started and when I clicked the “log into your Store” link I got this error message…”There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed. We apologize for the inconvenience! ”
I logged onto their free chat and it took 30+ minutes to find out that there was a technical problem (oh really!) and that they didn’t know when it would be fixed. I was also informed that I may have to re-register but was given no other info. Needless to say, my first impression of 3dCart was not a good one. If I don’t hear something soon (and don’t expect I will), I am on to BigCommerce.
Michael,
Thanks for your input. Please let us know what happens with these as I also am about to sign up with 3D this week.
Happy to report that Robb from 3dCart got me set up this morning so the ball is in my court now. I’ve spent a few hours of familiarizing myself with it so far and I hit a few minor speed-bumps but am pressing forward. I will come back here and give an updated report at the conclusion of my trial period.
Glad to hear you are on the move Michael. Let us know how it works out mate.
READ THIS BEFORE SIGNING UP WITH 3DCART!
I am using 3dcart and dying to transfer!!!!!!!
3dCart claims to have many fabulous features most of them do not work correctly, ie. something as simple and important as the WYSIWYG editor. I have spent hundreds of hours with this feature trying to edit pages through a 2″ X 7″ box only to have everything undone by something a s simple as adding a tab. Many details of the customizable templates can not be changed but you won’t find this out till you are well entrenched. I spent a month trying to hire someone to customize my page and went through three different companies that all eventually gave up on because all changes had to be tediously made through the 3dcart interface, so I was stuck making all alterations myself. If you are prepared to pay 3dCart $100/hour to do it for you then you are set.
They claim to be integrated with GoogleBase/FRoogle/Google Shopping this feature does not work either.
3dcart provides user guides to explain how to navigate certain features but many of these guides are useless and obsolete, ie google analytics. Your best bet is to access the forum of other puzzled and frustrated users providing answers for each other through trial and error.
Tech support has an attitude as stated above in another post. They are condescending and will try to answer your question before you ask it, then direct you to an obsolete guide. Ive spent probably over 30 hours online with tech support, there are a handful of tech that are able to provide assitance without being monsters about it. But hey! You can always pay 3DCart $100/hour to fix the features they marketed to you as being included in the first place!
I am not a programmer, but I do have plenty of computer experience. I am a graphic design student, do some internet marketing, and this is the 5th website I have built on my own. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS SERVICE to anyone who is a novice (or anything less than a full fledged html/jQuery/CSS programmer really)
In summary, this cart is great in concept…from a distance it appears to be a fully customizable ecommerce site. IF it was actually able to perform as advertised, IF the features worked correctly, IF the user guides were current, or even IF they weren’t but you were able to get tech support without the attitude THEN it might by worth the headache. At the moment I feel like someone should be paying ME to use the service.
I agree with Harleigh Abel, Isigned up with 3dcart in Dec 2011and had many issues navigating their system. Imust confess, Iam not computer savey,but I can by.
they advertized that their system easily integrates with google and it does not, moreover, you can not integrate with google shopping cart or down load your files to google search, unless you get someone knologeable about their programing at $650 .
I am frustrated with their system, as I invested several 100 hours with little to no success and their techs, needless to say, are limited withtheir answers and often times rush you off with much help,also when you fill out a ticket, they do not respond with a solution, just jargon.
I would love to solve my issue and stay with 3dcart, but without help, what’s the point.