Shopify vs. 1ShoppingCart
While the majority of ecommerce shopping cart providers offer a somewhat similar feature set and essentially try to differentiate themselves with details, there are a few “outsider” services that take a radically different approach. One of these is 1ShoppingCart, a service that focuses specifically on combining an email marketing element with a basic, no frills shopping cart service. From the user’s perspective, how does 1ShoppingCart compare with more traditional shopping cart providers? We’ll examine this using the popular Shopify as a representative of the standard shopping cart style.
1ShoppingCart vs Shopify Basics
Like most hosted shopping cart providers, Shopify offers several different pricing options which vary with respect to details like product number limits and storage availability. Their most popular option is the mid-range Business plan, which costs $99 US per month and gives users a maximum of 10,000 product slots to use, as well as 1GB of storage, and unlimited bandwidth. Shopify differs from most providers in its class in that it does not charge a startup fee for new stores. However, it does charge transaction fees, which, in the case of the Business package, come in at 1% on every transaction.
1ShoppingCart also has a few different services available. Users can choose to go with just the shopping cart aspect of 1ShoppingCart, in which case it is comparable to FoxyCart in that it’s appropriate for users who want to build a complete store on the foundation of the shopping cart back end. You can also opt for just the email marketing aspect of 1ShoppingCart. Or, for $99 per month, you can get the full 1ShoppingCart service, which includes the actual shopping cart functionality as well as the email marketing features and some extra services.
eCommerce Features
Understandably, there is a major difference in feature sets between Shopify and 1ShoppingCart. Shopify is comparable to providers like Volusion, BigCommerce, and 3DCart in that it has a range of tools designed to help users manage inventory and orders, various statistics tracking facilities, and built-in integration with outside payment gateways (including popular choices like PayPal), shipping services, and other assorted applications (including Google Analytics). Shopify helps users with essentially every aspect of building and running an online store.
1ShoppingCart is quite different in this respect. It doesn’t have the same sort of tracking or integration features. While 1ShoppingCart does provide the actual shopping cart and checkout functionality, it leaves just about everything else to the user. Where 1ShoppingCart does provide a little extra is with its email marketing support. While there are many other email marketing assistance services out there, 1ShoppingCart is unique in that it combines a compelling, fully realized email marketing suite with advanced features like spam prevention with that shopping cart functionality.
Ease of Use
Simply put, the process of setting up and running an online store is much easier with Shopify than it is with 1ShoppingCart, although this is by design on 1ShoppingCart’s part as well. Shopify is actually perhaps the best current shopping cart provider for ease of use, as it provides the most powerful storefront customization tools (requiring no prior web programming experience) as well as one of the cleanest and best overall interfaces.
1ShoppingCart, though, is in some ways easier to use for web developers, as it doesn’t burden your store with design parameters. Instead, you are free to build your store as you like, from the ground up. While this is by no means a simple task, it can be an advantage, provided that you have the time and expertise necessary to create an online store from scratch.
1ShoppingCart vs Shopify Conclusion
If you’re in the market for both a shopping cart provider and an email marketing solution, 1ShoppingCart manages to do both of these things pretty well. The majority of users, though, will most likely prefer Shopify, mainly because it is much easier to use and is accessible to novices and not just web development experts.