Any Americommerce or Volusion users to give feedback?
We have been utilizing a small time Work at home mom web hosting site and custom shopping cart software for about nine months now and have clearly outgrown it. It's lackluster, cumbersome, and essentially forgotten about. My wife wants the ease of a cart with a powerful but easy to use backend to really perform tasks easily and be able to follow up with customers. Americommerce seems to be as feature rich as anything I've seen, a step above volusion in fact. THeir abandoned cart follow up module is remarkable. Anyone have any experience with this host/cart? It's expensive for the plan we need @ $99/mo.
Thanks.
Volusion for inbetweeners
Just my comment on the benefits of Volusion - I do not think it is the optimum solution for a full fledged developer. But for someone who is looking for a shopping cart with a lot of features, free templates, and software that is not too state of the art you can't stumble through it, it's a big step up from the entry-level carts out there. It has major features which can serve large catalogs, including export api features for automated exports to a lot of 3rd party platforms. It's SEO features are not perfect but they're again much better than the many entry level platforms out there. If you do not have a lot of products, I think 3Dcart is actually better. It has easier to use administration area for sure, no going from one giant page to another, and it's cheaper. It also has very good support and I think a better product image presentation. however they do not have the number of free templates. So budget is always an issue and decent looking templates are important if you do not want to spend a lot of money on 3rd party developing. It also has a free chat program, and decent built-in email marketing module. I don't know too much about monstercommerce, but I found their demo very difficult to deal with and not very intuitive. If you have a small business and are looking to grow slowly and don't want to spend a lot of money but want something with good features and a quick startup I think the best choice is quickcart. You can also have a free demo there FOREVER - unlimited - which is great if you really are feeling your way through and don't want to spend money before you can really sell. For pure SEO features, there is no doubt SEO-Cart is the way to go. This generates real html pages, no mumbers, no .asp, .php just pure html pages and abbreviated url addresses. It also has automated metatags. I've tried the demo and the description tags are very good, keywords are a decent start you can always modify them. Still it will save a lot of work on a large catalogue. However, you will need to pay for a template. Volusion, in my opinion, is a good package in that, well, what you don't get doesn't cost you money, what you do get saves you money. But there are definately better choices I think if you do not have a lot of products; 3dcart and quickcart provide templates. So these are inexpensive startups.
