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Curious how Core Commerce Compares to Volusion – I have lined them up and done the leg work for you. Read it here
I’ll be honest – I have only just recently found out Core Commerce existed. In all my years and all my searches it has never crossed my path. As far as I can gather it has been around since early 2008 (whether it is based on a product from before this I don’t know yet). Not as long as Shopify, but longer than Big Commerce.
It is quote low key. Only 130 odd followers on Twitter, a handful of blog posts each month, 2000 forum posts, 1000 some forum members, not a very deep site (a bit of content here and there but nothing to rock the bookshelves). From first impressions this morning until now all I keep thinking is that Core Commerce is Big Commerce‘s baby brother.
I had heard some great things about it once I started looking into the product, but no huge enthusiasm like I had seen with Big Commerce, Shopify and even the Volusion fan boys.
Templates.
If you read the Core Commerce website they brag about the quality of there templates (including claiming there’s are better than Big Commerce) – No. Bad Core Commerce. Your templates are passable. Your templates are serviceable. Your templates and usable. They are not better than Big Commerce. They are out dated to put it mildly. They are a big step up from Volusion -I agree with that – but you are quite a long way off the Interspire/Big Commerce templates.
It’s not all bad news though, the customisation is good. Lots of options to change, lots of fine grained control – it’s a bit clunky but it works and I can definitely see people using it at the expense of hiring me. Big points for that the other shopping carts would do well to offer as many design customisation options.
SEO
Optimisation
Pretty crappy. A lot to do with the template you select, but there is a lot of CSS embedded in the page, no canonical URL’s no robots meta tags -I’m not impressed, I hope they are getting on top of this.
Meta tags
Good (there are even some guides and help text).
URL’s
Lazy and ugly. Not exactly user friendly with Id’s and other identifiers tacked onto the end of most pages. Better than some offerings but showing there age.
Integration
Google Products, Shopzilla all in there which is a nice feature. Plenty of room for text and page content.
Admin Interface
Really ordinary. While all the options are there it lacks the polish of shopping carts of similar price, in fact I think that is the best way to sum up my initial thoughts of Core Commerce.
It lacks polish. Not a death sentence and it has some great features (PCI-DSS Compliance for one) that should help it gain market share (especially if Big Commerce don’t hurry up and get compliant).
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{ 36 comments… read them below or add one }
what about corecommerce’s claim to be the only XHTML compliant coded tool when compared to Yahoo, BigCommerce, Network Solutions and 3D cart, There comparison can be seen here: http://www.corecommerce.com/ecommerce-software-comparison.html.
Also they are the only ones with onboard eNewsletter too (can save you the cost of signing up for iContact or MailChimp).
I agree with you on the templates, i just don’t get it – why make everything else to tempting and then throw in low end plain looking templates to choose from, makes no sense to me unless they’re trying to upsell on the customized design services.
I wasn’t really impressed with the included newsletter stuff, it seemed like an after thought. I am surprised Big Commerce/Interspire closing down Big Response and sending people to Mail Chimp instead. I am a huge fan of Mail Chimp it does such a complete job.
Core Commerce (and Volusion for that matter) really seem to believe that there templates are good though and that bothers me – it shows a huge lack of understanding of the market and of consumer expectation.
Thanks for your comments Nicola – keep them coming
Hi Andrew. I work with CoreCommerce. We are actually adding new templates shortly more focused on specific industries versus the more general themes we have now. You will notice in the next 45 days over 20 brand new templates.
Wonderful news. I will keep an eye open and make sure I revise my review as soon as you do.
Thanks for getting in touch we all appreciate how available Core Commerce have always made themselves
Hey Andrew:
In the past few months, we’ve added several new templates and we are working on several more. You can see what’s in use now and what will be completed in the next few weeks. Being a former web designer, I’m not easily impressed with designs, but these new designs have me excited.
Check it out:
http://www.corecommerce.com/ecommerce-templates.html
Thanks,
Matt DeLong
President/CEO
One other thing, all our newer templates work with our logo creator tool where clients type text in to generate a logo that matches the current design they are using.
Did you see us in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704596504575272850463019656.html
Thanks,
Matt DeLong
President/CEO
Hi Andrew,
I’m currently comparing CoreCommerce vs BigCommerce.
While Big Commerce does seem to be feature rich, I’m dismayed by all the negatives people have been saying about down times and lack of tech support for website issues.
Is it true or is it simply Big Commerce is growing too fast?
I have only heard of a few instances of very short and acceptable downtime. I have never not been able to speak to tech support when I needed and one time when I had my back to the wall contacted Mitchel Harper on twitter (the owner) and got sorted that way.
What I can tell you is that in my years working the support desk at a web hosting company is that people with online stores called on mass if they visited there store and it wasn’t available – even if the problem was at their end – and screamed and yelled about the millions this was costing them They are a special breed that tend to exaggerate the effect of any downtime on there sales (which they really exaggerate to try and get compensation).
Don’t disregard what they are saying, at the rate Big Commerce is growing it is highly likely that they will occasionally have issues with availability – everyone does – call them yourself and ask about the issue and what they are planning to do about it in the future.
That should clear up both of your issues with them :0)
Thanks, judging from your comparisons, I’ll assume BigCommerce is a good place to start.
I like it jump on a few free trials and play around – you might have different feelings. My preference at this point is Big Commerce, but I wouldn’t talk someone out of Core Commerce just for the sake of it.
We are a current customer of Corecommerce and beyond the templates, there are SO many other drawbacks. I would advise potential customers to really look hard at other solutions, I wish we would have. For starters, their Quick Books interface is a NIGHTMARE. Whoever set it up had zero accounting experience. We now manually enter everything because it made such a mess of our systems. Coupons are very limited, for instance no way to give a free item with purchase. No ability to put subitems/skus on sale without changing the price — ie if you want to put your blue shirts on sale, you can only do so by changing the price – no abilities to add a sale price. Shipping is a disaster. You can’t run anything but plain vanilla without issues. It is always off. It has cost us a lot of sales. Then there is tech support. It is fine just so long as it isn’t a weekend. We’ve had our site go down several times on a Friday or Saturday and be down the whole weekend. We had a full outage for several hours just a couple of Fridays ago. No way to contact support, tech support number just tells you they are closed. They say all you have to do is ‘put a ticket in’ – fine, if you can get to the admin – which you can’t if the servers are down. Frankly this company is just too green to be trusted yet. We are getting ready to relocate. Too many issues = too much sales revenue lost.
@Kate: We have no incidents of sites being down all weekend, that’s total nonsense! We are occasionally hit with sophisticated DDOS attacks (like everyone else) which causes a HUGE SURGE in traffic (100,000 packets per second). That causes our DDOS equipment @ Rackspace to kick on and it takes a few minutes to be up and running.
I won’t bad mouth BC — as they are a strong competitor….keeps us on our toes.
I just wish they do the same.
Thanks,
President/CEO
CoreCommerce
Hi Andrew, I’m looking to switch to either BigCommerce or CoreCommerce and can’t decide. Here are the current prices for both as of today 4/21/2010:
BIG Commerce
Setup Fee $49.95 $49.95 $49.95 $49.95 $49.95
Monthly Fee $24.95 $39.95 $79.95 $149.95 $299.95
Products 100 500 1,000 Unlimited Unlimited
Bandwidth 2 GB 3 GB 5 GB 15 GB 30 GB
Storage 200 MB 300 MB 500 MB 1 GB 3 GB
Extra Bandwidth $5.12/GB and Extra Storage $0.10/MB
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Core Commerce
Setup Fee $49.99 $49.99 $49.99 $49.99 $49.99
Monthly Pricing $24.99 $39.99 $64.99 $99.99 $159.99
Products 100 250 1,000 5,000 Unlimited
Bandwidth 2 GB 4 GB 7 GB 20 GB 30 GB
Hard Drive 250 MB 325 MB 500 MB 1 GB 2 GB
Extra Bandwidth $2/GB
Extra Storage?
The site I’m currently hosted with charges nothing for Bandwidth/Hard Drive space. So I am in unfamiliar territory.
As for number of products, I have a small product line so not a big factor. But for someone who wants to offer between 251-500 products/month then the pricing is in favor of BC at $39.95 vs CC $64.99
But starting at 501 products is in favor of CC
BC: $79.95 vs. CC $65.99
At 1,oo1 products it’s still in favor of CC
BC: $149.95 vs. CC $99.99
Once you offer 5001 products it’s back to BC
BC: $149.95 vs. CC $159.99
But the Bandwidth/Storage for CoreCommerce is equal to and usually more generous that BigCommerce on the first 4 plans. So my gut says that if you are offering 5001 products you are probably in all likelihood going to be pushed to the higher Bandwidth needs and for BC it’s steep at $299.95/mo for over 15 GB/month. From 8-14 GB CC is still only $99. Huge difference in price.
In addition CoreCommerce also hosts your store with Rackspace which is the best one out there w/no downtime (but not according to the last post).
Thoughts anyone? I’m really on the fence here….
Thanks!
Lisa
Have you tried the free trials – as they are about neck a neck start trials with both and see which one “feels” better. Personally I usually go with Big Commerce -but I am nothing if not flexible
Kate,
You have written post bashing CC and pushing BC in other forums. Show your real identity as a BC employee. That is just disgusting.
What do you think of CoreCommerce’s new templates? I think they look pretty sharp.
I really like some of them. I participated in the survey’s when they were trialling some of them and they have really come a long way. I am holding back full praise until I see the HTML but Core Commerce has done a great job.
Jason,
I am not an employee of BC, I’ve never used their cart and this is the first review I’ve ever posted of CoreCommerce. We did NOT have a positive experience with them and I wanted to share it so that others can make an informed choice. Nowhere in my review did I post anything about BC, nor would I since we haven’t used them. We did take a look and based on feedback from their tech support they are not an option for us, since we require very advanced shipping options. Since your reaction was so extreme, it makes one wonder if YOU are employed with CoreCommerce??
Currently we are looking at 3dCart — anyone have any experience with them?
I am currently with Big Commerce. I have never had an issue during normal business hours getting ahold of someone in the tech department. I started with their free trial to see if I liked their system. I chose them because they met my needs at the time. However, I am now having a hard time. I have ~12,000 products that are on the site. Availability of these products changes and old products need removed and new products need to be added. Since they host it, I do not have access to the database back end to integrate with my distributors back end. This is hugely frustrating now. I now have to upload a 12000+ line item spreadsheet (.csv) file and it truly does not like it. It hangs everytime. I was told to break the spreadsheet into 500 item segments, um, NO, that is 24 uploads every two days. I continuously have customers buying items that are not in stock and should have been removed from view when I uploaded. The only way around this is to purchese the non-hosted license for ~$1800 and create my own sql database. Unfortunately, I am just starting and will eventually upgrade to this, but capital investment at this point needs to be scrutinized.
I am totally a newbie at this sort of thing and I tried BC first. There were a few things I didn’t like, so I tried CC. I find that CC is much less intuitive and things that should be simple are not. There is a real lack of online support that is beyond the basics. And it’s not easy to find things when I search for them. However, they are usually pretty quick to answer questions. Unless they can’t figure something out, then they just seem to not respond. I’m going to switch back to BC.
While you are looking around check out the free trial at Volusion – it might be a case of third times the charm.
I am setting up a CC store this summer and intend to migrate from another host soon. Online documentation is very week but support has been amazing to quickly answer all the questions I’ve fired at them. Some things in the admin are not intuitive but I can deal with that as long as all their amazing list of features continue to be solid. I haven’t set up the quickbooks integration yet but I hope it’s better than Kate described. The real test will come when I transfer my domain and start doing business there…
I had experience on Volusion and Bigcommerce but I’ll comment separately. Volusion is a very old architecture that is loaded with all kinds of workarounds designed to get effects which should be built into the basic software. It is incredibly cumbersome to work in compared to any modern platform. The templates are terrible – and I mean terrible – you have to have a designer. Even then, the store itself does not navigate well. It is not xhtml validated and a typical site has thousands of errors. Now on the plus side, if you have a huge catalog, and ship from different warehouses, it has a lot of functionality and a very developed API. But it is not the store for a small business in my opinion, or small-to-medium size businesses. Newsletter is no great shakes because you have an email limit per each plan and you have to pay extra for anything over. If you do a lot of email marketing you are better off with a 3rd party plan anyway. Rendition of images is prehistoric and out of date — not customer friendly. Same I would say with options. All okay if you’re very small or very big – nothing in between. Can’t even integrate paypal express yet.
I might add that Volusion navigation is very slow, and frequently you have full screen blackouts when going from one page to the shopping cart, for instance which turns off customers. We had massive cart abandonment problems there. Page loading times varied way too much and were way too high, and this is a criteria now being used by Google to rank pages.
3D Cart is a very good platform with very good service. They have strong integration of payment methods and their own merchant accounts with USAPay and it’s great and well integrated with good rates. Only drawback is their templates are limited – but VERY MUCH BETTER THAN VOLUSION. A modern program, fast to work in, fast page loading, modern image presentation and options. MUCH BETTER CHOICE FOR SMALL TO MEDIUM BUSINESS THAN VOLUSION. They also have very affordable data base services, and I think they can bring over your entire catalogue for you for about $500. More developed than Big commerce in a lot of ways. Very good webmail interface and API.
One more negative about Volusion – they really stick it to you for any extras and one thing you have to be careful of is that they count OPTIONS as separate products for the purpose of calculating your monthly fee. So if you have one hundred products with ten size and color options – that is one thousand products for billing purposes. This is not done at 3D Cart of Bigcommerce.
Now on Bigcommerce – I have mixed impressions only because they do not properly represent how much development they have ahead of them. It is very good I think for small to medium size businesses. The comment here about the importing process is accurate. The import functions are in their infancy, and the API is in it’s infancy. They have the basics, but even if you wanted to import variations from one BC store to another you cannot do it because you cannot export your variations. A very alarming skip there in development. I would say template system is the best of all of these options by far. The navigation is very fast and user friendly, checkout is smooth and very much propels the customer through. Paypal express and Google express checkout well integrated. Great image and option presentation (you get prices and not price differences). Some templates have logos that can be customized. XHTML validated – and that is becoming very important, especially in good linkbuilding and SEO. They do NOT HAVE A WEBMAIL INTERFACE, AND THEY ARE NOT VERY CANDID ABOUT THAT DEFICIENCY IN THEIR PROMOTIONS. Documentation is very slim to none. Knowledge base is very lean. There are a lot of good videos and phone support I have found good – ticket support is spotty with a lot of variation in knowledge with the staff. I am having a big issue now with an email problem caused by switching domains that is over their head. They have no email expertise there and the problem has been kicked up to level II but it is just laying around and now I’m being abused by the staff for doing too many tickets and emails – or that they are too long. Imagine trouble shooting an email problem and the support staff telling you I should only write one sentence — it’s a very esoteric problem on the server with an erroneous association with the wrong domain – and they cannot fix it – their reaction when they don’t understand something or don’t know something is to blame the customer for doing something wrong. This I find unacceptable. Not universal – but should not happen at all. I still have no confidence they can or will ever fix this. So if you want state of the art webmail interface don’t go here. They have tons of development to do and they are understaffed. There were glitches in my template that were dealt with but unfortunately half of the support staff assume you have done something wrong every time you contact them, rather than reading, understanding and responding to the ticket. This has spoiled what otherwise was a very positive feeling about the software. I still think it’s the best selling platform of these choices but they have a lot of work to do to really get this up to where it should be to compare with their representations. One thing, they do not count options as products so we are saving money here.
So who do you recommend for hosted shopping cart with integration with ebay, facebook, on site blog, and twitter? I am looking for something that seo’s well, has a wide array of templates and allows me to run one inventory but sell in multiple places. Product line is small, less than 250. Looking for under $50 per month. Thanks for your thoughts.
Big Commerce (with the next version which is out in a month or so) should satisfy your needs. Otherwise Core Commerce
Andrew,
I totally agree with you on Corecommerce lacking the polish of for example 3dcart and bigcommerce.
I’ve been trying out all 3 the last week or so… and came to the following conclusion:
I love 3dcart. I had a beautiful site up & running in 20 minutes, the admin area feels great and is easy to use.
I love the fact that their templates can stretch to 90% of the screen width. A lot of people have HD screens now and a 90% site just looks so much better then having this landing strip in the middle of your screen as with most other shops.
Bigcommerce – Very easy to work with as well. Templates are OK but I preferred 3dcarts look & feel. Also, if you use the standard templates, I liked 3dcarts much more.
I hated the fact that they sent me about 30 mails within a week of signing up.. even though some of them had some good content it felt VERY pushy. All they did is push me away.
And now for the surprise… I think in the end I will go with Corecommerce. No, it doesn’t look as good as the other two and it will take 10 minutes more to get used to. Oh and the templates are still rubbish (but the new ones should come soon plus I will make my own anyway)…
but…… they just offer better features!
For me the two most important ones being:
* They offer multilanguage (I can not believe the other two don’t!) – a BIG plus in Europe.
* They have an excellent rewards programs.
These are two things that are hardly mentioned anywhere but i think are very important to a lot of people!
Would be nice to hear your thoughts…
Yes Big Commerce do use the hard sell – but that’s what they have always excelled at – they are marketing superstars – how do you think they took Bog Commerce from nothing to one of the top 4 shopping carts in less than a year. Luckily for them the software lived up to it’s hype for the most part – it come from good stock I suppose.
Don’t worry about the polish on Core Commerce – they have been madly polishing away – expect it to shine next week – I have seen preview screen shots and it looks 100 ties better – it is going to start stealing quite a lot of business from the others, especially BigCommerce.
I like 3d Cart – still looking into it completely so I won’t comment to prematurely, but it does everything it should and does it well
Ah that’s good to hear. I’m really curious about the new look!…
When looking for alternatives, I stumbled upon another cart that also offers everything I’m looking for and more: Searchfit. It seems like they have all the features and more compared to the others and according to some sites they have the highest retention rate and happiest customers of all of the competitors.
I am going to try it out in the coming days, but for now it would be cool to hear people’s opinion!
Thanks!
Love to hear how it goes for you – I have deliberately ignored it because of the TOPSEO’s badge on the home page, but I would be curious as to how you find it
Back again.
I’m now trialing cs-cart and searchfit.
CS-cart has everything the others offer plus more, and it’s a one time buy of about 200$ instead of a fixed amound per month. Plus, and this is a huge advantage I think, you’re not limited on bandwidth if you host it at Siteground for example.. so no surprise bills.
Also, if the company goes bankrupt or anything else happens, you’re store won’t just go offline. It’s your store hosted by your provider.
If you get a domain at siteground (but there are more providers) you can install it with 1 click and you get a 60 (!) day trial.
I’m currently also trialing Searchfit, which also seems to do the job very well. It offers more then core and bigccommerce and it looks and feels a bit more “professional”.
The templates really suck though, but I don’t care since we will have our own design.
So… still a bit in doubt between the two
Anybody got experience with searchfit or CS-cart? Please let me know….
Choices, choices!…
I am not a fan of Searchfit – it looks dodgy especially with that TopSEo’s badge on it – call it guilt by association.
CS Cart looks very good. I have only given it the quick once over but I like what I have seen so far
Hi Andrew,
I don’t know this TopSEO site.. but I see that searchfit is indeed nr 1 there and well, to be honest, they do offer a LOT of features. Why would this be bad exactly? All the other shopping carts are doing crazy comparison’s, etc.
See for example this article: http://www.3dcartblog.com/analysis-of-a-lie-3dcart-vs-volusion/