SHOPPING CART COMPARISON

WHICH SHOPPING CART & CRM IS BEST FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

There are currently over 100 different shopping carts and ecommerce solutions available. Some require a one-time payment, others an ongoing monthly payment. Unfortunately, most shopping carts offer very limited database or customer response management (CRM) tools.

Obviously, it is impossible for me to offer a thorough review of each here. However, I can provide you with some tools to do your own research and make your own assessment.

Research Your Options

Step 1:

Learn about all the questions and issues involved with choosing a shopping cart or ecommerce cart for your business. This site has a list of great articles and it does not accept advertising from shopping carts so should be fairly unbiased.

Step 2:

Identify the ecommerce features you need your shopping cart and CRM or database management to have. Then, you can do a search on these features to see which shopping carts offer them and the price comparison.

You can do this using the comparison tools on sites like these:

http://www.shoppingcartindex.com
http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com

*Note: I have been unable to find a shopping cart comparison service that lists ALL the shopping carts available.

THE SHORTCUT

Having been in business online since 1997, processing orders and handling databases, I've built up a pretty good understanding of what a business needs from start-up through to large product and customer base.

As a marketing consultant, I also understand how your online store, shopping cart and database need to interface with your marketing programs and customer contact.

The Problems

So, I can tell you right now, that the main problem with most shopping carts is they do not provide adequate back-end or database functions. For example, a customer calls you (or your customer service team), and you want to be able to immediately call up their Customer Record – so that you can see how much they've spent with you, which products they tend to buy, so that you can upsell them or suggest new, related products to them. Most shopping carts cannot do this.

Or, you want to segment up your database, so that you can send an email campaign ONLY to customers who have bought your first book, but not your second. Or who have bought your book and CD course, but not your DVD set. And perhaps you want to remove customers from the list who recently signed up for your membership program. Again, most shopping carts cannot do this.

Also, when you send out your emails, you want to have a trackable link in there, so that if someone clicks on your offer for more information, or to buy, you can see how many clicked-through and thus test the effectiveness of your email marketing.

Again, when testing to see how many click on your offer, you will want to segment up your database – sending one email with one headline to 100 people, then the next 100 get a different email, or a different headline, etc. You test to see which campaign pulls the most responses and then THAT is the one you send to your entire database.

If you do not have a shopping cart that can integrate with all your backend, database, administration and marketing tasks, then you will be doing double, triple or quadruple work!

Automated = Freedom

Ideally, to have a business running as efficiently and profitably as possible, you want to have everything automated and organized and integrated into one cohesive system. You do NOT want to have separate systems for:

Shopping cart & product purchases
Email marketing
Autoresponders – emails that are automatically sent following product purchase or opt-in offers
Newsletter
Free reports
Membership/continuity programs

Now, you may not need to perform any of the sales or marketing tasks outlined above. You may be a small business or just starting out. That's fine, so you can start with something simpler.

However, you still need to choose a shopping cart or online store to start out with that will later enable you to EXPORT your database into a new, bigger ecommerce system without losing your customers or their information!

MY RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on my experience, all the different systems I've tried, the research I've done, and all the mistakes I've learned from – here are my top recommendations for shopping carts, customer response management and database solutions that I give to my own clients:

Option 1 – 1Shopping Cart

If your business is operating at this level, with these needs:

You are a small or start-up business with not too many products or services
You want a shopping cart that's very easy to use, that you can set up and manage yourself (or use EcotechCRM & Design to do it for you!)
You need an affiliate program (gives websites that refer to you a commission on sales)
You need a way to automatically charge for monthly payments or recurring billing
You want only a PayPal account
You want both PayPal and a merchant account with credit cards
You want to offer a newsletter
You want to do broadcast emails to your database
You want to set up basic autoresponder emails that will automatically go out when someone purchases a product or signs up for a report
You want your emails or autoresponders to contain basic trackable links to track or test effectiveness, conversion, etc.
You want to sell ebooks with a security download feature

Price Range: $34 – $99 per month

This shopping cart and ecommerce solution offers a nice balance of product sales and marketing tools. It is ideal if you are offering physical products as well as services, digital products, or monthly memberships programs. To see their full list of features and a month trial for only $3.95 click here…

Option 2 – Volusion

If your business is primarily concerned with selling physical products and not much marketing:

You have a medium to large amount of products.
You want to offer more advanced shopping features like a Wish List, or Related Products, or My Favorites, gift cards, coupons, etc.
You want to be able to access your Customer Records when they call in to see what they've spent and assist them with their order, but you don't need to do email marketing campaigns to them.
You don't need to do any post-purchase, or follow-up marketing with your customers
You want an affiliate program
You want a merchant or PayPal account

Price Range: $29.95 - $197 per month.

This shopping cart system is ideal if you just offer a lot of physical products and you don't want to do any integrated marketing to your customers. To see their full list of e commerce features and a 14-day free trail, click here…

Option 3 – Infusionsoft

This is the crème-de-la-crème (the top!) system for medium to large size businesses, who either have a lot of products and services and/or plan to do a lot of marketing.

This system is fully functional for most of the shopping cart and all of the marketing activities of the other two, PLUS lots more.

Infusionsoft is the all-in-one shopping cart, database, ecommerce, and CRM - customer response management solution - that is recommended by business gurus like Dan Kennedy and Michael Gerber (author of The E-Myth).

This shopping cart system is ideal whether you have just a few products or a lot of products. But your main focus is being able to manage and effectively market to those customers – increase sales conversion, increase spend per customer, increase upsells, onsells and cross-sells, etc.

It is also the only online store and CRM that has comprehensive tools to track effectiveness and conversion rates for your marketing campaigns to your customers. The key usability feature is that all of these features and processes are fully automated.

Due to the huge number of things this system can do, it can take quite a bit of time to set up (but that's where EcotechCRM & Design comes in – we can do it all for you!).

Price Range: $2000 set up fee, $300 per month

To see their full list of CRM software features and a demo video, click here…

WHAT I USE PERSONALLY

When my online businesses were just starting up and building to a decent monthly revenue, I used 1Shopping Cart.

Then I switched to Infusionsoft and imported the databases from 1Shopping Cart.

All of the systems I've recommended above come with free technical support – an absolute MUST for any shopping cart or crm system. You need to be able to phone and actually talk to someone if you can't figure out how to do something, or if something is not working, etc.

For ecommerce hosting for your website or registering your domain names (URLs), I recommend two providers that both provide free 24/7 telephone technical support (a must), their customer service is excellent, and their pricing very reasonable:

Go Daddy

Bluehost

**Disclosure: Some of the links provided above are affiliate links – thanks for your support!