Shift4Shop Review Archives - Shopping Carts Reviews

Bigcommerce Review

Bigcommerce is a paid-for 'hosted' e-commerce solution that allows business owners to set up an online store and sell their products online. It comes with a range of customisable templates to help you design your store; you can use it to sell either physical or digital goods; and there are also some tools provided to help you market your store.

Pricing

Bigcommerce offer four different pricing plans:

Bigcommerce Standard: $29.95 per month
Bigcommerce Plus: $79.95 per month
Bigcommerce Pro: $249.95 per month*
Bigcommerce Enterprise: pricing varies, depending on your business requirements
The 'standard', 'plus' and 'pro' plans are aimed at individuals and small businesses; the Enterprise plan is geared more towards large businesses and corporates (users with very high bandwidth / advanced functionality requirements).

* This fee increases depending on what your annual sales figures are like - these sales limits are discussed in more depth below.

Usability

For quite a while Bigcommerce lagged behind competing products by not providing an extensive range of responsive templates. Fortunately, this changed recently, with Bigcommerce rolling out a larger selection of responsive themes.

There are 7 free themes and around 90 paid themes (ranging in price from $145 to $235) - and each theme contains a number of different variants, so there quite is a lot to choose from.

Design

As discussed above the exact features you get with Bigcommerce depend on the plan you opt for, but basic features include:

a choice of 7 free templates (but as discussed, 2 in reality!)
the ability to sell a wide range of either physical or digital goods, in categories of your choosing and using shipping rates of your choosing
integration with Paypal and a wide range of payment gateways
full content management (CMS) functionality
good search engine optimisation (SEO) options – it’s very easy to add appropriate keywords to your products and site pages
integration with several e-newsletter services: Constant Contact, iContact, Mailchimp and Interspire
integration with Alibaba.com
automated reminder emails to people who abandoned their carts at checkout
discount coupons and gift vouchers as standard
product review functionality - this is particularly welcome: not all e-commerce platforms offer this as standard, and usually require you to fiddle about with third-party apps or services to enable it.
the ability to tweak CSS and HTML as desired
professional reporting.

Features

One feature worth drawing particular attention to is Bigcommerce’s abandoned cart feature – it’s one of the best out there. The tool allows you to create up to three automated emails to site visitors who go part of the way through the sales process only to leave your store without buying anything. This has the potential to dramatically increase your revenue with little effort – other than the 'one-off' time investment in setting up the automated messages – being involved.

Conclusion

Bigcommerce is one of the strongest hosted online store builders I’ve tested. Above all else, it is very easy to use – it’s one of the most user friendly store builders I’ve come across to date. The standout aspect of it is arguably the comprehensive feature set you get on its entry-level plan, which provides more bang for the buck than many competing products.

Other things I particularly like about Bigcommerce are the quality of its abandoned cart saver and the flexible approach to product options (in a Bigcommerce vs Shopify shootout, I suspect that this might sway quite a few users Bigcommerce's way).

Miva Review

Miva Merchant is an eCommerce platform that provides enterprise level features and customizability, while still offering the usability and customer support one would expect from a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution.

Pricing

Usability

Design

Features

Conclusion

Shift4Shop Review

Shift4Shop’s all-in-one software has everything you need to build your online store for free. From managing your inventory, to processing payments and shipping, and with some great themes and marketing tools, Shift4Shop claims to be the best ecommerce platform for SEO, that helps you increase conversion rates and enable the success of your store – all in one package.

Pricing

3dcart’s all-in-one software has everything you need to build your online store. From managing your inventory, to processing payments and shipping, and with some great themes and marketing tools, 3dcart claims to be the best ecommerce platform for SEO, that helps you increase conversion rates and enable the success of your store – all in one package.

Usability

Design

Features

Conclusion

Shopify Review

Much of the eCommerce community considers Shopify to be the best online shopping cart available, to the point that many new merchants use it without considering other options. It's true that Shopify is full of rich features for your eCommerce success and can be a great platform, but is it right for your business? Read on to find out!

Pricing

Shopify offers a range of plans, all competitively priced and made to fit in the budget for a variety of businesses. Smaller-scale plans offer pared-down feature sets, as to be expected from any eCommerce platform, but even in the cheapest plans the necessities are included. Additional features are available in the Shopify App Store. However, if you find yourself needing to use multiple third-party apps to tailor your store more closely to your individual needs, you may end up paying quite a bit extra. Total additional charges for apps are hard to generalize because different stores will be using a different setup on a case-by-case basis. However, the apps tend to be reasonably priced and many are free. Also note that unless you use Shopify's built-in payment gateway (Shopify Payments), you will also be charged a small transaction fee for each sale.

Usability

Shopify is very intuitive and beginner-friendly, and the platform itself guides you through the necessary steps to get everything set up. You can sell any type of product through Shopify, although more specialized items may require an additional app installation. The backend is sleek and easy to work with, and there is plenty of instruction and tutorials available for the more complex settings and features.

Design

Shopify offers a wide selection of attractive themes made to optimize conversions, and they're easy to customize on a surface level. Deeper customization will require knowledge of Shopify's proprietary coding language Liquid, which presents an obstacle to developers used to HTML and CSS. For the most part, however, the themes have been built well enough that they won't require too much tweaking, although occasional bugs do crop up. You should still be able to find a theme that is great for your store and get good results from it without the need for extensive code editing.

Features

There are two main competing points of view when it comes to Shopify's features. Many current Shopify merchants are satisfied with the balance of built-in features versus additional apps. Others feel that more features should be included without needing to install (and sometimes pay for) additional functionality. It's true that Shopify relies a great deal on its app developers. The benefit of such an app-heavy system is that new users aren't overwhelmed with a ton of extra features that may be superfluous to their store's specific needs, and they are able to slowly expand their store's capabilities through apps as the need arises. In this way, users can have more control over their feature set. However, the drawback to this system is that the majority of Shopify apps are built by third-party developers and not always directly supported, as well as the extra cost incurred by many of them. Shopify merchants who dislike the platform's reliance on apps have stated that they would prefer more features to be built in, in order to achieve a smoother result. There have also been reports of unexpected missing features, and critics of Shopify have claimed they feel needed features are left out in order to force an app purchase. But remember, the need for apps is completely different for merchants everywhere and just as many are quite happy with the service as is.

Conclusion

Shopify offers a solid foundation to a beginning online seller, and works great right out of the box. In many cases it will be a good choice. There are lots of features, design is solid, and bugs and issues are pretty far between. However, if you do run into a problem, it may be hard to address without paying extra for an app or hiring a specialized Liquid developer. The best recommendation is to thoroughly plan out your store and its needs, and closely investigate Shopify on your own to make sure that you're aware at the very beginning if you're going to need features provided by apps with an additional cost. Shopify does offer a 14-day free trial to help you get a feel for the platform, so make sure to take advantage of that while making your decision!

Volusion Review

In the late 1990s, website designer Kevin Sproles noticed a trend in his clients’ requests. They wanted shopping cart software they could use to easily sell online. In response, Sproles founded Volusion, an all-in-one shopping cart option for small to large businesses. Since its founding in 1999, Volusion has grown to employ more than 250 people and now hosts over 40 thousand online stores, including Element Outfitters and Evutec.