3dcart is a Better eCommerce Solution

Driving a good eCommerce solution with demanding customers is a difficult target for consultants to provide a crystal-clear decision. Choices of eCommerce solutions are endless; comparisons of products and solutions on the internet are countless. This evaluation is from personal experience with a customer.

During a consultation session with a customer, he requested an in-depth comparison case study about top eCommerce solutions; the request is too demanding. The customer wanted a technology expert’s view of multiple size solutions. Solutions that fit a small business with few services to offer, and yet are futuristic enough to grow without visiting the decision loop again after two or three years.

Initially the discussion focused on having an open-source solution, with a privately managed hosted platform online. This means that my customer and myself would own the solution, its support, its problems, and its availability and security protection. The driver behind this direction was a recommendation from a developer in the company, which is a normal recommendation from an internal developer because most of the developers are control freaks on developing and controlling solutions.
However, after a long discussion with the top management about the risks of self-ownership for the solution, I managed to convince top management to consider a cloud solution, and eliminate all technical support requirements, along with the internal task of security assessment to the technical team with skills to manage such system securely.

To avoid being biased to 3dcart, I will not mention other products evaluated, however the evaluation went for many ready-hosted cloud ecommerce solutions to provide online store functionality and success. My client’s choice landed on 3dcart.

In this quick article, I am describing the top drivers behind choosing 3dcart.

 

 

Building Blocks of an Online Store

 

• Website interface and theme
  • Desktop theme
  • Mobile theme
• Control panel
• Language Control
• Blog
• Marketing tools
  • Newsletter
  • Promotions management
  • SEO
  • Loyalty programs
  • Gift cards
• Payment providers
• Shipping
• Support
• Security
• Scalability and growth

 

Themes and Interface

3dcart desktop and mobile themes are responsive, working together to provide a unique experience to website visitors. Theme customization is an easy and straightforward task; you do not need CSS skills to achieve your task, all you need is basic HTML understanding. The product comes with more than 50 free themes and a large selection of premium themes.
Themes come in four categories: Core Themes, HTML5 themes, 3dcart themes, and expert themes.

Control Panel

The standard request for most businesses is to have multiple users to manage their webstores; 3dcart comes with handy granular access control depth for users who will manage the webstore. The IP restriction option is a direct choice to restrict users logging to the website from specific IP addresses. However, my lovely security option available for all is two-factor authentication.

Language Control

Language control in 3dcart is not limited to language templates and providing different language options for your users. It is a tool to brand your 3dcart store and provide your own words and synonyms to your customers; I rate this option as a unique option to do seamless SEO branding and capture more organic search engine traffic.

Blog

Blogging is a fundamental tool to spread the word about your webstore in search engines and generate organic traffic. The more content you create for your webstore — about your products, about your loyalty programs, about promotions and promoted shipping options — the more you get organic search engine indexing. Search engine indexing is a key factor to rank higher and stay on top of search results; blogging for SEO is free tool for long-term marketing spread over the internet. It is a rising game for every business to play and invest on.

Marketing Tools

 

Gift Cards

The lifeblood of generating sales is marketing; 3dcart marketing tools are comprehensive and diverse, designed by an experienced business mindset for serious marketers on the internet world. Distributing gift cards and driving customers to the website to make actual purchases using the gift card is a proven method to build recurring revenue from the same customer after finishing the gift card.

Promotions and coupons

Promotions do influence purchases. The use of promotions and coupons is another proven marketing tool to drive actual purchases and more consumer engagement in the future. The consumer mindset is programmed to consume more products using coupons and promotions regardless of their income level. As Danny Wong explains in his published study about coupons and promotions, “Discounts discourage cart abandonment and encourage new trial”.

Newsletters

Email marketing is still one of the top drivers for consumer engagement; with all due respect to the social media boom, email marketing is still ranking high. A study shows 85% of marketers agree that email-marketing performance is still on the rise. The 3dcart Newsletter module is a built-in tool and well integrated with email servers to ensure reliable message delivery, reduce spam and segment customers.

Loyalty programs

3dcart loyalty built-in features enable state-of-the-art loyalty program management. My experience is that developing loyalty features and integrating them into sales systems is one of the top challenges for software development houses. 3dcart has all of that built-in with room for innovation.

SEO

3dcart is built-in with native SEO features. SEO is the key to internet business; without SEO investment no organic search engine traffic can be gained. SEO is a big topic that takes long practice to gain exposure. 3dcart has done all the work for webstores to be search engine friendly, mobile friendly, easy to remember URLs, speed loading to avoid losing customer patience, with content building tools for products and services.
Whole coverage of all SEO requirements is provided built-in by design with 3dcart, the business just needs to focus on providing the proper content, description, choosing good titles for products, and providing enough how-to content.

Payment Providers and Shipping

3dcart provides ready functionality to work with more than 100 payment providers, starting from PayPal and Stripe, and support for a large number of countries’ proprietary payment gateway providers.
Shipping is one the hardest things to get right for online webstores, as the shipping process has a lot of moving parts and varies from one shipping provider to another. If a webstore’s shipping workflow faces an issue, it could kill the whole business for a long time. 3dcart provides an easy to use, easy to customize workflow with well-developed experience for each major shipping services provider.

Support, Security and Scalability

3dcart has implemented a solid support system via different support channels, including a knowledgebase, videos, written guides, and user’s manual. Support is not limited to webstore content management and how to do things; it is extended to provide tools for designers and developers to develop extra functionality for their businesses’ choice and implement them.

Every online store working properly with strong advertisement and marketing strategies definitely will hit peak traffic periods. Failure on those periods will damage the business’ reputation heavily; 3dcart would get its share of reputation damage as well. 3dcart Enterprise support can guarantee responsive and available platform performance during peak traffic periods.

My preferred topic to evaluate in each solution is security. The PCI-DSS certification tag speaks all; it is the banking standard. Using a solution promoting its platform as PCI-DSS certified offers a high level of assurance in protecting its business customers.

Final word

3dcart is an overall better solution for small businesses and large businesses as well, with a company of more than 20 years of experience in providing ecommerce software solutions.

Author: Jawad Alalawi

Information Technology Professional specialized in Financial Payment Services, Risk Management, Information Security, and Compliance. Experienced in solutions development and implementation, and technical writer.
Banking and Technology Information Security Consultant

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