By Deborah Carraro with special thanks to Yaro Stark
I’ll be honest, I have a personal bias towards this service. Many of my clients use it but more than that, I use it in my business. As an online business manager, I’ve worked with many clients who use different tools. I’ve had a chance to work with other systems and 1ShoppingCart wins hands down when it comes to meeting their needs.
1ShoppingCart: If you have an online business, one of the most important tools you’ll need is a shopping cart. You can find all kinds of shopping carts with a wide range of features at a wide range of prices.
Yaro Stark reviewed 1ShoppingCart a few years ago so I wil post his review here:
Let me start out by saying I was very excited when I first started my 30 day free trial of 1ShoppingCart. I logged in and was blown away with the potential – the possibilities – my young Internet marketer’s brain started churning away thinking about the products I could launch and all the cool things I could do to market them, all through 1ShoppingCart.
The problem, which I must admit even as I write this is still a problem, is that I didn’t have any of my own products to sell! However I signed up for 1ShoppingCart because I was looking for an email autoresponder to start managing my Business client lists with and I figured since my path was taking me down the Internet marketers road then no doubt I would make use of the rest of the 1ShoppingCart features eventually.
What Does 1ShoppingCart Actually Do?
Okay, let’s cut to the chase – what can you actually do with 1ShoppingCart?
Online Commerce
First, the obvious – it’s a Shopping Cart – which means you can set up products for sale and copy and paste forms into your website to set up a fully functional ecommerce system. 1ShoppingCart works with a whole range of payment processing providers including the ever popular Paypal and 2Checkout, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty setting things up to start taking orders.
The actual shopping cart module in 1ShoppingCart is quite robust and you can stipulate all the tiny details about your products, including shipping, taxes, recurring payments, commissions for affiliates, landing page, thank you page – everything! I feel comfortable telling you that almost any product will work fine with 1ShoppingCart. There is a learning curve though and I was certainly intimidated initially looking at all the customization options, but the 1ShoppingCart team provide a ton of help files and videos. It’s all very intuitive and after the initial set-up and I doubt you will need to make very many changes again.
Client Management
1ShoppingCart is not a CRM system but it does have a fairly standard client database management system. You can see which autoresponder clients are on, search the database by different fields, import and export client lists and all the rudimentary features you would expect. It’s not exactly a relational database, so beyond seeing which autoresponder clients are on you won’t be able to do much analyses, but it does the job well enough for a small online business.
Email Autoresponder
1ShoppingCart has a very good email autoresponder. It is a little bit clunky compared to the dedicated email autoresponder providers I have used but it’s not really a fair comparison since 1SoppingCart isn’t *just* an autoresponder. The fact that you can plug it straight into the shopping cart and affiliate management system is fantastic and if you plan to need all these features I would strongly recommend choosing 1ShoppingCart. As I have recently discovered it’s damn hard to integrate different third party providers if you want to have different companies handle your email autoresponder, shopping cart and affiliate system – at the moment it’s not really possible at any price even close to what 1ShoppingCart charges.
The 1ShoppingCart email autoresponder will do exactly what all good autoresponders do – you can set up a sequence of emails to go out at set time intervals. You can automatically move clients from one autoresponder to the next as they take different actions, for example from the “prospects” email list to the “clients” email list once they make a purchase.
Top Internet marketers have been using the 1ShoppingCart email autoresponder for many years. That was the original reason I chose 1ShoppingCart. When I saw at the end of emails from Alex Mandossian and Perry Marshall (etc) that they were using using 1ShoppingCart – that was all the recommendation I needed.
Affiliate Management
Here is one of the areas 1ShoppingCart really excels. The affiliate module, while once again a bit daunting at first to comes to grips with, provides a powerful suite of options that even a single individual can make use of to manage their entire affiliate system. I know many online marketers who use the system to affiliate sell their products.
In a nutshell the affiliate module allows you to take on affiliates, manage them, and set up promotional tools for them to use to promote your products. You can set up banners, text links and the usual range of affiliate resources. You can also customize the look and feel of the affiliate area and brand it with your own custom logo in the header (etc).
For me the best feature of the affiliate program is the fact that you can integrate it with the autoresponder module. That means that you can seamlessly use your affiliates to build your email lists, pay them commissions on sales and keep everything all in one place in a nice and tidy interface. There aren’t many other services out there that can boast this feature at the price 1ShoppingCart charges.
Other Features
I’ve covered the main features and now I’ll just briefly mention what else 1ShoppingCart can do. It has a solid ad tracking system which you can use to track and split test any online advertising campaigns using media such as text links and banners. It has a custom form builder which you can use to create the input forms for your customers and email list subscribers to join or purchase from. There is also a pop-up generator which you can use to have an input form pop-up on your website.
Most of these features are available in other places, for example Google has a fairly reasonable ad tracker in it’s Google AdWords program which is handy because you can use it alongside your AdWords PPC campaigns to test PPC against other online advertising media. The thing with 1ShoppingCart is once again, it’s all integrated in the one place, so when you combine ad tracking with email autoresponders and affiliate promotions you have a pretty powerful set of tools for optimizing your online sales process.
The Good, The Bad and…Well that’s it!
The only problem with 1ShoppingCart is that it does a lot. It’s a complex system that requires some learning to get the most out of, but as I stated there are plenty of help files and audio and video teaching tools too. One potential risk with a “jack-of-all-trades” service like 1ShoppingCart is that the individual modules may fall behind in overall features and quality when compared to specialist providers, which is the argument you could use when comparing the AWeber email autoresponder to 1ShoppingCart. However the gap is not that big and if you do want the extra features 1ShoppingCart wins hands down.
And herein lies the true strength of 1ShoppingCart…There is no other completely integrated set of tools like it for the online marketer. It really is the “marketer’s choice” when it comes to selling goods online. If you know how to make use of all the bells and whistles, you actually have a need for all the bells and whistles or you plan to in the near future, it is actually mind-boggling to think about how truly powerful 1ShoppingCart is.
That being said – for me, it’s too much right now so I don’t need to spend the monthly fee for all those bells and whistles. If you are in the same situation and you really only need a shopping cart or perhaps an autoresponder there may be cheaper alternatives. However if you plan to grow, which I am sure you do, and no doubt will eventually need an affiliate module, ad tracking and all the other features then perhaps starting out day one with 1ShoppingCart will save you from the pain and anguish if you have to later move your email lists and client database into 1ShoppingCart.
Get It Now!
The best thing about 1ShoppingCart is that you can try it for a 30 trial period so you can make the choice whether it is right for you after actually playing with it. You can sign up right now from here: 1ShoppingCart or MarketersChoice.
I hope that helps with your decision making and good luck with your online business.
Good fit for:
- online entrepreneurs with funds for an email marketing budget
- email marketers who want to send a weekly newsletter or broadcast
- online business owners who want to automate their sales process
- anyone looking to emulate the best practices of established internet marketers by using the same systems they use
- anyone who needs to integrate a shopping cart with autoresponder follow up messages
- internet marketers who hope to have affiliate or JV partners
Coming next week: 1ShoppingCart’s competition
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