3dcart Review

Intro

Originally launched in 2001, 3dcart takes pride in being an extremely feature-rich eCommerce platform for small to medium-sized businesses, designed to bring your products and services to a global audience.

3dcart users can list products, publish them to the Internet, accept orders and process payments all from the platform itself. The eCommerce company also offers professional website design services, SEO marketing packages, point-of-sale solutions, B2B eCommerce and more.

Templates

3dcart has over 60 free themes, all of which are mobile responsive, and over 30 paid templates. The platform also enables users to submit and upload their original created templates.

Each premium theme varies in price, starting at $60 USD to nearly $199 USD.

When setting up an online store, users can access 3dcart’s templates through the ‘Settings’ tab in the far left-hand corner. Next, click on ‘Design,’ and you’ll be presented with ‘Themes & Styles’ which allow you to edit your site’s design or choose a new theme.

Site owners have the option of implementing one of 3dcart’s free templates (which tend to be limited in capabilities), purchasing a single premium theme or for a ‘one-time’ $249/year fee users can enjoy year-round access to all of 3dcart’s premium themes.

The Editor

To enter 3dcart’s editor, you must enter from the builder’s main dashboard — the editor can be accessed under ‘Settings’ and ‘Design.’

Here, you can access your Store Settings, Admin Settings, Distributors, Manufacturers, Checkout Questions, IP & Security. Themes/Styles, Emails, Store Language, System Messages, Store Status, Payment & Shipping.

If you have a difficult time locating any of these elements, you can use the search bar in the top right-hand corner of the page, which is an extremely helpful tool.

Listed below are all elements/features of 3dcart’s Editor. These elements range from making adjustments to your store’s settings, controlling who you give admin access to, creating emails, set the store language as well as a number of other features.

Element	Features
Store Settings	Under this section — users can make edits to important store information such as its name, slogan, upload an email, set currency codes, time zone and currency settings.
Admin Access	You can add and remove admin-level users.
Distributors	This feature sends automatic email notifications to distributors (alerting them of new orders). Through ‘Distributors,’ you can also calculate shipping based on the distributor’s address.
Manufacturer	Allows customers to easily browse a number of brands.
Checkout Questions	This feature lets you collect valuable data related to the user experience.
IP Security	Protect your online store with IP security.
Themes & Styles	There are over 100 free and paid templates to choose from.
Emails	Create email marketing campaigns, emails to customers or affiliate marketing emails.
Store Language	The platform can support any language that uses the Roman/Latin alphabet, such as English, French, Spanish or Portuguese.
System Messages	Edit messages that appear throughout your site such as login errors, add to cart, shipping, billing and more.
Store Status	Find and edit your store name, and change the status of your store to closed or open.
Payment	Control all aspects of payment such as selecting methods of payments like PayPal, Authorize.net.
Shipping	This feature lets you control shipping methods, settings, insurance, handling options, countries you deliver to and will even recommend shipping solutions.

 

You can reach your blog, manage site content, edit your header & footer and make optimizations to your titles and content from this same section.

Editing content in WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) mode, titles and content, system messages and store languages sections is simple, and can be done in a few easy steps.

WYSIWYG: You can find the WYSIWYG editor from a few locations in your Online Store Manager, but we’ll just talk about the most common point of access:

Head to Products > Product List

Next, click ‘Action’ and “Edit.’ Once you begin editing your product list, the page should look something like this:

From within the same section, you can edit content:

• Product > Categories
• Marketing > Autoresponders
• Content > Blog
• Content > Site Content
• Content > Header & Footer
• Content > Text & Titles
• Settings > General > Manufacturers
• Settings > Design > Close Store

Titles & Content: In this section, located in Content > Titles & Content.

From Titles & Content, make updates to:

• Account Pages
• Affiliate Pages
• CRM Pages
• Gift Registry Pages
• Main Pages
• Wishlist Pages

Store Languages: To edit this section, head to Settings > Design > Store Language.

Orders

From 3dcart’s main DashBoard, you can view orders from past and present customers. Find all information regarding orders awaiting payment, shipment, high-risk, incomplete, archived, shipped, refunded, pre-orders and export lists to a spreadsheet. Under the same section, manage shipment, tracking numbers and track payments.

Products

You can access and manage all of your products under one tab, which is located in the ‘Products’ section– accessible from the main ‘Dashboard.’

Products List: List new, and update existing products in your store. You can make all of your products appear on your homepage by checking the ‘Home Special.’ It will look something like this:

Once your products are on your homepage, they will appear with specs and photos.

Categories: Manage categories, subcategories and edit details, product sorting and hide or delete a product from your eCommerce store.
Images: Add images to your store and organize them.
Reviews: Add reviews of current and past products.
Waiting List: If you should find yourself out of inventory — use your ‘Waiting List’ feature to notify customers when you receive new inventory.

If you want to edit your store’s name and slogan, you can do so by accessing: Settings >General >Store Settings. It will actually look something like what you see below.

You can then hit the ‘View Store’ button in the top left-hand corner to see what your store looks like when it is live.

Customers

Also accessible through 3dcart’s main dashboard — this portion of the site is used to gather demographic information on current and past customers to build lists. Here, you can manage and organize customers into segmented groups and assign them special pricing.

This is a big advantage.

Another advantage of this section is the ability to manage your site’s CRM, and respond to support tickets. The comes equipped with a gift registry.

The ‘Customers’ feature will become useful once you start managing customers and orders both domestically and abroad. The platform also offers two further capabilities:

• An affiliate program, enabling you to offer users commissions for referring shoppers to your store, and
• Gift registries, which customers can set up to enable friends/family to purchase their chosen items for a special occasion.

Marketing

Here’s where the platform goes beyond being a good platform and takes on a new set of superpowers, becoming superb. Its marketing tools are great and can help your store become a success when used properly.

• Marketing Checklist: The marketing checklist provided by 3dcart consists of the below elements and is designed to help optimize your site’s content.
• SEO Tools: We’ll highlight this feature a bit further down in the SEO section, but this tool is jam-packed with tools made for optimizing on-site SEO.
• Like Button: You’re given the option to add a Facebook like button to your site, thus increasing your company’s social visibility
• Social Bookmarking: This feature lets you share your products anywhere, boosting traffic to your website.
• Promotion Manager: Through ‘Promotion Manager,’ you can drive traffic to your website through promotions such as buy 1, get one free and other coupons.
• Autoresponders: These are customized and automated follow-up emails that are sent based on customer purchase history.
• Newsletters: Engage with your customers via email marketing and earn new leads while providing valuable content to readers.
• Group Certificates: Import/export bulk coupons and group certificate campaigns.
• Special Offers: Here, you have access to Bing ads and Grasshopper Virtual Phone Service, which gives you a toll-free or local number with unlimited extensions, professional greetings and more.
• Shopping Engines: In the form of plugins, access 10 plugins like Bing, Google Product Listing Ads, Google Product Feeds, Shopzilla and Shopping.com.

Mobile

While 3dcart does not have a mobile application — there is a simple way to access your account and manage its storefront from most smartphones if using HTML5 themes.

When accessing your Online Store Manager — you can manage orders, review item details, view customer records and manage CRM tickets.

The process, although not done through an app — is quite simple and works for most smartphones, but is best optimized for iPhone. To create an access icon on your phone, you should follow the steps below:

• On your iPhone browser, go to http://[yourdomain]/mobile/admin
• Click on the (+) sign
• Next, a new window will appear
• Once it does, you’ll need to create a bookmark
• Select the option labeled ‘Add to Home Screen’
• From the following screen, rename the bookmark.
• By default, the icon is labeled ‘3dCart Mobile’ but can be renamed.
• Lastly, click ‘Save’ and the new icon will appear on your home screen

3dcart Apps

The eCommerce platform has well over a hundred apps, ranging from accounting to social media. We’ve chosen some of 3dcart’s most useful apps to highlight.

App	Specs
ShipStation	Print hundreds of labels in one batch — with no manual data entry. It costs $25/monthly.
MailChimp	You can connect your account and run targeted email marketing campaigns. Access to MailChimp is $9/mo.
SKUVAULT	Use SKUVAULT to help save time with inventory management, starting at $99.00.
Fraudwatch	Fraudwatch helps reduce fraud and identify fraudulent orders before they’re processed. It also adds a level of credibility to your site, as it adds a safe store seal to your site. Fraudwatch is just $9.99/mo.
3dboost	The app costs $10/mo and gives you control over popup design and target it for desktop, mobile and tablet.
Live Web Insights by Yahoo	Live Web insights is free and offers a real-time visitor tracking tool to see who is in your store, what pages they have viewed and which products they are interested in.This is a free app.
Shopgate	Enables merchants to launch revenue-driven native apps for iOS and Android with no coding experience required. Shopgate is also a free app.
Avalara	This app calculates and files sales tax for the price of $5/mo.
YOTPO Reviews	YOTPO Reviews is free and lets you generate leads and use them to bring qualified traffic to your site.
Justuno	This is a free app built to help convert traffic, acquire new email subscribers and social followers.

Support

Regarding support, 3dcart has 24/7 phone support. 3dcart also has live chat support and a community-based forum support network called Knowledgebase, which features questions and answers to some of your most pressing questions.

There, dozens of questions and answers are available at your disposal.

Another great feature offered by 3dcart is that users can send questions to live representatives and if they should need to leave in the middle of the conversation, a representative will send them an answer.

This does, of course, depend on how much background info/insight you initially provide.

Hosting/Domain

With 3dcart you get a free domain and free registration but no aftermarket, country-specific or other premium domain names can be used. The good thing is, each time you renew your domain with 3dcart, it is free.

You can even point an already-existing domain to your 3dcart site. But keep in mind, when creating your domain, you are given the option to add extra security to your site for one or two years.

Here’s what’s included in each 3dcart hosting plan:

• Monthly updates
• 256 Bit SSL certificate
• FTP access to files
• Daily backups
• 99.94% uptime
• 24/7 monitoring
• IP blocking security
• SEO

You can find a host of SEO tools in 3dcart’s ‘Marketing’ section under ‘SEO Tools,’ but we want to give this feature a bit of TLC and highlight its many capabilities. Its tools are actually quite advanced in terms of SEO and can be valuable if used properly.

You can update things such as your sitemap and submit to Google and Bing. You can also add in social links, AMP for product pages, Google Analytics and most importantly — add meta tags, enable product dynamic tags and further customize your HTML sitemaps.

SEO

You can find a host of SEO tools in 3dcart’s ‘Marketing’ section under ‘SEO Tools,’ but we want to give this feature a bit of TLC and highlight its many capabilities. Its tools are actually quite advanced in terms of SEO and can be valuable if used properly.

You can update things such as your sitemap and submit to Google and Bing. You can also add in social links, AMP for product pages, Google Analytics and most importantly — add meta tags, enable product dynamic tags and further customize your HTML sitemaps.

These features are really great for optimizing your site regarding SEO and making ensuring your site has a great chance (from the start) to rank high on Google. The good thing is, as your knowledge of SEO grows, you’ll be able to take advantage of some of these advanced tools and incorporate some of 3dcart’s apps and integrations specifically designed for SEO optimization.

Plans/Pricing

3dcart’s pricing structure is simple and gives you the option to pay both monthly and annually. With three core plans, starting at $29/month.

Term	Basic	Plus	Pro	Enterprise
Monthly	$29/month	$79/month	$229/month	Custom pricing — for this, contact customer support
Yearly	$26.10/month	$71.10/month	$206.10/month

 

Here’s a breakdown of pricing for all of 3dcart’s individual plans and what they include:

With the above plans, you’ll also enjoy adding unlimited products, 24/7 support, unlimited hard-disk file storage and unlimited bandwidth. And although 3dcart does not charge transaction fees, you will likely have to pay a 2% – 3% fee from whichever payment processor you choose, be it:

• PayPal
• Stripe
• Authorize.net
• Beanstream
• Dwolla
• Square

Integrations

Integrations	Yes/No	Features
Google Shopping	Yes	Available to 3dcart users, starting at $49.99/mo.
eBay	Yes	You use eBay Connector to sell on the world’s largest online marketplace.
Amazon	Yes	This feature lets you connect with Amazon Fulfillment and Amazon Order Sync.
Etsy	No
Google Analytics	Yes	Gain insights on your site like referral traffic, etc.
Social Media Profile	No	Links to profiles embed social feeds on site.
Social Media Share Buttons	Yes	Available for Facebook.
MailBox	Yes	Integrated mailbox.
CRM	Yes	Lucky Orange Chat, Kevy, ReadyCloud, LiveAgent, Privy and ShipRush.
MailChimp	Yes	Available for email marketing campaigns and promotions.
Chat	Yes	3rd-party chat apps are available.
3rd Party Reviews	Yes	Third party reviews are available.
Tracking Tools for Shipping	Yes	Aftership and Affiliate are both tracking tools that track customer packages.
Music	Yes	Through integrations like POWr, you can add a music player plugin to your site.
Video	Yes	You can add a video to products.
PayPal	Yes	Accept secure payments through the PayPal integration.

Future Considerations

If you’re in the market to build a new eCommerce website, you should take into account there are a ton of paid apps, many of which are paid on a monthly basis. They range from a few dollars to over $1,000 — which can certainly add up.

It would be difficult to justify using some of the apps and integrations, no matter how helpful they are unless you are making a large profit or you see the value in using expensive apps and integrations designed to optimize your site and providing a potentially unforgettable user experience.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• The platform is very feature-rich
• 24/7 live chat and phone support
• Unlimited storage on every plan
• Great SEO tools
• Very customizable
• Affordable pricing
• Responsive templates
• Free trial

Cons

• Basic template designs
• Cluttered UI — too many options within the platform
• Learning curve