Right off the bat let me say I am impressed with AmeriCommerce. It looks like programmers created it (it’s pretty ugly), but it runs like programmers created it, fast and feature rich. I didn’t know what to expect from AmeriCommerce when I first started developing around them; so I have made this review more detailed than usual because I had to discover most things the hard way.
I should also apologize for the delay getting this review out but I don’t like to start these reviews until I have worked with a cart for several months, otherwise this is just another truckload of affiliate bollocks.
The bullet points:
- Support: Phone support always answers within acceptable time frames, however only from 9-5 Monday to Friday. This is limiting especially, to internationals, but slightly fair enough as not many people answer their phones on the weekend.
- Look and Feel: Very well organized and clean. I hate the colors in the admin back-end. Orange, green and black with that aged glass effect, it does my eyes in (but I am an apple fan boy) not enough to stop me recommending it. I just hope if I complain enough they will tone it down a bit.
- Reliability: In the 12 months I have been developing on it I have never seen it down, which puts it up there with BigCommerce & CoreCommerce for reliability.
- Reporting: Lots. Very detailed, easily customizable and you can export to Excel. That’s about all you can ask for right?
- Templates and Customisability: Very few free themes. Like 16 (well 14 plus a mobile and a Facebook theme. I double checked with several paid accounts – if I missed something someone tell me). But with the tools available you should be able to start with one of these and make it your own. Otherwise it is no more expensive than BigCommerce to get a custom template created.
- SEO: The usual tools to help with URL redirecting, the usual fields for custom META data and editable tags. Multi-store may create a duplicate content problem if mi-used and ONLY if you use it. The page content is mostly of your own doing so if you want to optimize the pages you can. The free templates could do with some love, but as with most shopping carts the template is the least of your optimization worries (I am looking at your product descriptions).
My Immediate Thoughts on AmeriCommerce
AmeriCommerce is a good, well thought out piece of software that has grown in a sensible and maintainable way over the last few years. It has enough of a user base to give a sense of stability and longevity. It works exactly as it says it will and when you call support during office hours they answer and help. It is really difficult to pick a fault with them, except to say they need to get a designer on staff to tart things up a bit. CoreCommerce had the same problem a year or so ago, and spent some money making things look nicer and the complaints around here started slowing down. I know it sounds nice, but pretty interfaces make for happy customers even if they have more bugs than the ugly ones. People are just more tolerant if something looks good.
I would say AmeriCommerce‘s biggest plus is that they understated the customers needs, and they have just gone about the business of providing a solid shopping cart. There is no noise, no desperate attention seeking and no sacking support staff to bump up the marketing budget. I guess that is why they are so easy to like and work with. They built a great cart and they continue to improve and support it, letting the results speak for themselves. Well done guys, you have a new fan – can I have a t-shirt?
Eye jarring color scheme in desperate need of an update. I know I shouldn’t base my opinion on the color scheme, but it is a little difficult to look at, and shopping cart owners spend a long time logged into their carts so it is something to consider.
AmeriCommerce (as the name would suggest) is very US centric. You can customize it to make it work for markets outside the United States with just a little work, but I would like to see AmeriCommerce spread it’s wings a little in the coming years. They have a great product that people from all corners should be able to use without jumping through hoops.
Not many themes. I have covered this already, they don’t supply a great number of themes for free like a lot of other carts. The ones they supply are nice enough and generic enough that you should be able to find one to start you off though. Hopefully they start building on this library soon.
- Aqua
- Capstone Grey
- Classic Black
- Clean Blue
- Clear Spring
- Eco Green
- Floral Orange
- Minimal White
- Mobile
- Ozark
- Primary Black
- Shadow Khaki
- Spa Mint
- Spruce
- Swoosh Blue
Nice built in help – I really hate the green icons everywhere though and hope they find something else soon. They do a great job and I use them a lot to make sure I am doing the right thing, but they are like a punch in the eyeballs.
AmeriCommerce‘s Good Features
It just works.
The best feature of all. It does exactly what it says it will and it does it at a reasonable speed. The hardest part of reviewing shopping carts is separating the marketing nonsense for the day to day reality’s of using the software. With very little hype surrounding AmeriCommerce, it was a pretty easy job to just knuckle down and size it up.
Mutil-store
Multi-store front is fantastic. Do you sell the same products to several markets or countries and wish you could manage it all from one common back-end, but deliver different front ends to the users? Do you sell from a single inventory store but segment into different stores to specifically target different niches? Have you ever asked your developer if you can just add a store to your BigCommerce account, so you don’t have to log in all over the place to manage orders and inventory?
You probably need to look at AmeriCommerce for it’s multi-store goodness.
The only downside to multi-store front seems to be from an SEO perspective and duplicated content. You could use different templates and soon to be released URL Format feature, but unless you substantially rearrange the content on your page (and use alternative content per store) you will have trouble escaping the duplicate content issues. Don’t get me wrong you can escape them you just need to plan.
Language string editor and creator
Do you need a store in multiple languages? Done. Do you want to change some of the text the cart outputs? Done. This is a great feature and one that most Volusion users take for granted. Check out the forums for the other carts and you will see a chorus of complainers begging for a tool like this.
Drop shippers, multi warehouses
If you think this is a small feature look at my BigCommerce and Shopify reviews they are chock full of people talking about this feature.
Tools, tools and more tools
Clearly AmeriCommerce have got some very responsive programmers on there team because there seems to be a tool or shortcut for everything. It is almost too much and the menus carry on a bit but everything is nicely structured and very well named.
Built in affiliate program
It’s pretty good. It’s no iDevAffilate but it is better than a smack in the lips. The built in affiliate program has enough features to get you running your own private program, and offers nice transparent reports to ensure all your partners are happy.
Microstores
Microstores allow you to partition your store based on a user preference, while maintaining a common set of core cart functionality. Do you sell school uniforms? Create a microstore for each school and users will be able swtich to there school microstore and only see the shirts, dresses and jumpers for that school. Check the demo application at http://www.myjacketpatches.com/
We used to do this with tags and categories but this microstore partitioning is much slicker and looks more professional.
AddToCart Link Generator
Ever wanted to embed a Buy Now (or add to cart) button in your blog or a friends website just like Paypal does. Boom! Let me present the Add To Cart Link Generator from AmeriCommerce, it lets you do exactly that. Not since CoreCommerce let us deep link product forms has a shopping cart saved developers so much time and work. This feature does exactly what it says it does. It allows you to easily generate code to embed a product in a website or blog with Buy Now or Add To Cart functionality perfect for store owners that blog about there products or run closed affiliate programs. Try it once and you’ll be addicted.
This is an infinitely better option than people having to pay me to write and re-write WordPress plugins, to allow people to add BigCommerce, CoreCommerce and Shopify products to WordPress blog posts.
User Permissions Editor
The User permission editor is incredible – you can pick a group and detail precisely what they can read, create, delete or edit. The paranoid, tin foil crew will drool at the prospects. Very fine grained control of everything that you and your administrators can and can’t do.
Lots of Reports
OK I am going to cheat here and just list them because I mentioned them in the introduction.
- Marketing
- Marketing Dashboard
- Organic Summary
- Affiliate Dashboard
- Affiliate Analysis
- Affiliate Visits
- AdCode Summary
- PPC vs Organic
- PPC Summary
- PPC Click Fraud
- Sales
- Sales Dashboard
- Sales Analysis
- Sales (by category)
- Taxes and Shipping
- Abandoned Carts
- Visitors
- Visitor Dashboard
- Visitor Analysis
- Visitor Log
- Top Referrers
- Top Referring URLs
- Top Search Engines
- Top Sources
- Top Spiders/Crawlers
- Top User Agents
- Top Host Names
- Site
- Account Usage
- Top Searches (on site)
- Top Searches (organic)
- Top Searches (by engine)
- Most Popular Pages
- Top Entry Pages
- Top Exit Pages
- Entrance Bounce Rates
Payment Providers
AmeriCommerce has one of the smaller payment provider lists, but it has all the major gateways and methods so you should have no trouble connecting and getting paid. Besides the list below AmeriCommerce also has a handy little feature that allows you to create custom payment types like IOU, COD and Purchase Order.
- 3 Delta Systems
- ACH Payments
- Authorize.Net
- Bank of America
- Chase Merchant Services
- Cyber Source
- CyberCash
- ECHOnline
- ECX
- eProcessing
- eWay (Australia)
- Fast Transact
- FirstData / CardService International
- goEmerchant XML
- GoRealTime
- IBill Processing Plus
- Innovative Gateway
- Intellipay ExpertLink
- iTransact RediCharge HTML
- LinkPoint
- Merchant Anywhere (Transaction Central)
- Merchant e-Solutions
- Merchant Partners
- Moneris eSelect Plus
- MPCS
- NetBilling
- NetworkMerchants
- NexCommerce
- Ogone DirectLink
- Payment Resources International PRIGate
- PaymenTech Orbital – Salem
- PaymenTech Orbital – Tampa
- Payments Gateway
- PayPal
- PayPal Express Checkout
- PayPal PayFlow Pro
- PayPal Website Payments Pro
- Planet Payment iPay
- Plug ‘n Pay
- PSIGate
- PSIGate XML Interface
- Quickbooks Merchant Services
- RTWare
- Sage Payment Solutions
- SkipJack
- TransFirst eLink
- TrustCommerce
- USA ePay
- uSight Gateway
- Verisign PayFlowLink
- WorldPay Select Junior Invisible
- YourPay
3rd Party Integrations
- Quickbooks Synchronization (This will cost you an additional $300 + $60 a year)
- PeachTree Sync
- Shipworks
- T-HUB (This will cost you an additional $300-$700)
- Stone Edge (This will cost you an additional $239 + $60 year for one store)
Missing Features
3rd party email integration – for those MailChimp experts out there this is a must
Wishlists – these are crucial in some industries.
Comparing AmeriCommerce to other shopping carts
AmeriCommerce vs Volusion
I would recommend AmeriCommerce here. Volusion 2011 is much nicer than it’s predecessors, but it still has a lot of work to do before your average mom and pop can use it without technical help. AmeriCommerce has a comparable set of features and tools. Volusion has a lot more templates to offer you, but the way they have structured it now they clearly want to sell you one for about $900.
AmeriCommerce vs BigCommerce
Both use a very similar template system so designers can just flip a coin. If you have more than one store look at AmeriCommerce to save you a great deal of time and money, the back-end needs modernizing and a friendlier color palate, but there really isn’t anything wrong with it.
AmeriCommerce vs Shopify
There would only be two reasons to go with Shopify over AmeriCommerce.
- You have a very simple shop, simple needs and just want the easiest eCommerce experience available.
- You have an intricate design and refuse to compromise – and why should you! I love Shopify and do a happy dance every time I get to create a theme for it, but there is no denying it is seriously lacking so out of the box features, (yes you can pay extra for some of them but come on, that can’t be Shopify‘s answer to everything!)
Should you use AmeriCommerce?
I guess that is why you are here isn’t it? Yes you should. I have had very few issues since working with AmeriCommerce and every time I got answers in the forums or on the phone. If you are disillusioned with the lack of support at BigCommerce or the recent security problems at CoreCommerce then AmeriCommerce is worth your time. If you are just starting out they are a solid company with a strong history and bright future so you should get on board.
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Thank you for your very informative review.
Two features that americommerce does not have, which i find important is easy integration with eBay, and multi language websites.
Yes, you are absolutely correct these two are missing although eBay and multi language functionality are added advantage. You can use Iqecommerce as I am using..It is better.
Well – First let me say that I have tried (meaning signed up for trials and built carts with) BigCommerce, AmeriCommerce, Volusion, Shopify, PremiumWebCart, SubscriptionBridge, 3DCart, CoreCommerce, ShoppingCartElite, Fortune3 and probably a few more that I am forgetting about . . . But seriously, I have tried ALL of them and have been smacked down Each and Every Time! Our problem is that we offer products that customers can have “Automatically Shipped” aka, subscription billing aka recurring billing, aka AutoShip.
AmeriCommerce is the ONLY system that we were able to make work. Now, I’m not saying it was “Out of the Box”, but I am saying that AmeriCommerce gives you enough features and edits, that we were able to make it work. I may call and ask them to do a little customizing to get things a little more Automated, but hey… I’ve talked to providers that want well over $500 – $1000 PER MONTH to get this setup. Now we’re doin it with Americommerce for $25 a month. Well worth it.
My BIGGEST Gripe so far is when importing orders from our previous system, we BIFFED it bigtime . . . we are talking 2000+ orders. Well Guess what, Americommerce doesn’t have a “Mass Delete” feature for Orders. So now we’re stuck with all these incorrect orders . . . but hey, at least I was able to cancel them is mass form. (Really – you let people import thousands of orders at a time, but can’t delete the same way!!??)
Anyway – I run another site on BigCommerce and I LOVE LOVE LOVE Them too! Although I was soooo close to just purchasing a license from Interspire and adding the Recurring Billing Feature, I am very very happy that I chose to stick it out with AmeriCommerce.
Your Review is GREAT and I ALSO AGREE with your comments about the colors used in the Admin Console. Take a page from BigCommerce here! Theirs is SOO nice!
David,
Try importing all of those orders with a new order staus if cancelled doesnt fit the bill. Give your AC support rep a call and ask them to delete all orders witht that status. There may be a minimal cost associated, but its worth getting rid of the headache!
I am in the middle of evaluating a half a dozen ecommerce sites and you nailed this one exactly right. So for I really like AmeriCommerce but the admin is butt ugly.
My concern is what if I leave and someone less experienced needs to take over. AC is not that intuitive and certainly not as easy to use as BigCommerce.
I am leaning towards BC right now just because of the admin but I read so many bad things about their support that this is a concern.
Americommerce may be pretty ugly looking but once you get over the eye strain it is pretty well laid out and logical. It takes longer to come to terms with than Big Commerce or Core Commerce but I am confident that most people would be able to use it after a short induction
Hey Andrew,
Thanks for the great review. If you have time, I would encourage you to give us another look. We’ve been crankin out some really awesome features over the past few months and judging by the screenshot most of them were not available on the version of the site you were on.
One of the most fundamental changes is the new Theme System. Full front end point and click css capability. Full front end widget editiing capability (style, drag/drop, edit, add, delete, etc)
Front end Layout resizing mode… Want your site to be wider, left/right column wider, header taller?… just drag the resize handle and save.
Oh and also we’ve tweaked some of the butt ugliness to more neutral looking (same colors just toned down quite a bit.)
I have noticed Ryan but I have been so busy doing a heap of Americommerce SEO work I haven’t had the chance to redo the screenshots and reviews. I will make it a priority though because it is a great shopping cart and I wish more people would use it
How would you go about printing a USPS shipping label in americommerce?
Hi Andrew, I have a couple of BigCommerce sites and love the system, the rankings I get are great but If I had seen AC sooner I may well of used them for the multishop system. Im based in the UK so can you run down whats so bad about AC for users in the UK, also being in the UK is this a problem re rankings etc as the AC servers etc are US based, its not been a problem for my BC system. By the way, I hear people moaning about the back up from BC, well I have only ever used their forum to get help and have never been let down, there always seems to be a mod you can use or someone with advise…
With Americommerce, can you easily add your products to Ebay and Amazon? If not, then what cart works best with those and also has some good dropshipping capabilities built in?
Mike,
Americommerce supports Amazon but not eBay. BigCommerce supports both and has drop shipping support as well via Ordoro.
You might also look at Core Commerce it supports eBay and drop shipping (no Amazon)
Hi Andrew
Sorry for the duplicate message but I could really do with your thought re below…
I have a couple of BigCommerce sites and love the system, the rankings I get are great but If I had seen AC sooner I may well of used them for the multishop system. Im based in the UK so can you run down whats so bad about AC for users in the UK, also being in the UK is this a problem re rankings etc as the AC servers etc are US based, its not been a problem for my BC system. By the way, I hear people moaning about the back up from BC, well I have only ever used their forum to get help and have never been let down, there always seems to be a mod you can use or someone with advise…
I will do a run down for you tonight. Simply though it comes down to what shipping and payment provider’s it supports or doesn’t support as the case may be. I have very successfully implemented many UK based Americommerce stores though – it only needs a little kick.
BigCommecre support is something I have always defended – I am glad I am not the only one that hasn’t had an issue, I was beginning to think I was imagining things
I look forward to any info you can give me re U.K. usage etc. We use DPD as our courier but that’s not an issue as we do not connect our sites to the courier. We use worldpay so that shouldn’t be an issue I would imagine. My issue is weather or not the servers etc being US based will effect the seo/rankings etc.
Thanks
World Pay is supported so check that off your list. See this FAQ to confirm exact details http://www.americommerce.com/kb/afmviewfaq.aspx?faqid=32
As for US hosting affecting search engine rankings, this will NOT be an issue as long as your site uses a .co.uk domain name. I believe this is the case for your site.
If you are using a .com domain name you can negate any negative effects quite easily by building a solid UK profile into your website and social media profiles. This should include GBP pricing, UK addresses and phone numbers, UK spelling. You needn’t fly the Union Jack, but it is the Queen’s big year so it would be a nice gesture
I am a huge fan of Americommerce. Multistore is a wonderful thing and micro stores are a great selling tool. If you switch you will not regret it and I hope you share you story with us if/when you do
Thank you Andrew, If we go with AC it will be a new venture, we will stick with BC as well as I have nothing but good things to say about them. I know nothing of codes html etc and I think I have made a couple of nice simple sites with one of the BC normal templates. Take a look as these could be examples for your readers..
http://www.which-tent.co.uk
http://www.crosscamping.com
Thanks again.
Gary
Hi Andrew,
About the multi store option, is Americommerce the only one with this option?
Also, we are selling the same product over 2 online stores,
http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/
http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/
If I move the 2 domains to Americommerce, I don’t see how I will have a duplicate content SEO issue. What do you thing?
Merci,
Jean
The duplicate content from multistore arises from store owners only entering one product description and using ver similar templates.
As I said it is easy to alleviate – use very different templates with different menu’s and navigation labels and add a unique product description for each store using the tags provided