3dcart Review - A Good Ecommerce Platform?

3d car is it any good [Music] what's up guys it's paul from e-commerce gold and in this video we're going to be reviewing one of the most well-established e-commerce platforms that's out there because 3d car has been around since 1997 which is one of the few platforms that actually dates into the last century which is pretty impressive when you think how quickly technology evolves but is it still a viable option for an e-commerce platform well that's what we're going to be looking at in this review and for this review we're going to be looking at six different things we're going to be looking at the pricing the features the theme selection and customization the support options are available the hostname performance before looking at a quick overview of how easy the platform is to use so make sure you stick around because i'm going to be covering lots of different things in this video now with the introduction out the way let's jump into this review and get it started so the first thing we're going to be talking about is the pricing of the 3d car platform and the first thing you notice when you first go on to 3d car is how many pricing options they actually have because they have five different plans now most ecommerce platforms stick with three basically a small a medium and a large with 3d car they've decided to go a little bit further than that by having five and some of them are quite close together in terms of pricing because you can see the first two are literally ten dollars apart you've got the startup there's 19 a month and the basic that's 29 a month now for me these are just a little bit too close together i'd much prefer to see kind of a hybrid between the two around about 25 that's kind of the introductory package rather than having two that are so close together but they say they do start from nineteen dollars a month and the main difference between the packages is the allowance you get in terms of turnover because on the startup package you get up to fifty thousand dollars a year in sales when you move up to the basic this jumps to a hundred thousand when you move to the plus package at seventy nine dollars this goes up to two hundred and fifty thousand and they do also have two larger packages as well which are the power of 129 dollars a month and the pro at 229 a month and this gives you turnover up to a million dollars before you move on to their enterprise packages so there is a large selection but there's almost too much going on it'd be nice to see kind of simplified a little bit especially with the two introductory ones the startup and the basic i'd like to see these two kind of merged into one and just have a really good basic package now turnover isn't the only thing that increases when you move up through the packages you do also get access to more features that helps your business grow as your revenue grows so this is useful and it kind of rewards you for growing your business because you get more features it's going to help your business in the future so this is another useful thing and i'm going to cover more of that in the features section which is next now when it comes to features 3d car is pretty well sorted which is something you would expect from a platform that's been around for so long and seen so many different innovations in the world of e-commerce and on the screen is all the features you get with the startup package so this is the 19 a month package so you get a single page checkout you can have digital downloads product reviews two-factor authentication for e-commerce tools there's also drop shipping support and integration with the 3d card platform as well which is useful there's also a lot of features when it comes to marketing so you've got seo tools so you can create meta descriptions custom urls things like that there's a built-in blog with the platform so you can create content around your ecommerce site as well then you've got things that you can help to promote your website so you've got gift certificates discount codes and coupons and you can also integrate it with mailchimp so you can do email marketing as well some very useful marketing tools but one of the things that is really good with 3d car is the amount of reports and analytics you get so you can really delve into the analytics of your site see what's working and see what's not working and as you can see on screen there's lots of different kind of reports that you can get on a side note if you do want to check out for yourself what's on screen this is my full written review of the 3d card platform where i do go into some things in a little bit more detail because if not this video will just go on forever and a day so if you want to check that out i'll leave a link in the description below so you can go through and check out my full written review so let's get back to the review now one thing that is very well sorted on 3d car is payment gateways which once again is understandable with how long the platform has been established and it's got integrations with all of the major ones out there and the ones that i've listed on screen are just the most popular ones and the most commonly used ones amongst e-commerce platforms but there is a massive selection to choose from so there's a good chance of you using maybe not such a mainstream payment gateway that it will be supported by 3d car now another thing that is really good with the 3d car platform is you can customize the feature set that's available on your site and this is using the module system that 3d car operates and this module system is a combination of features that can be added to your 3d cart store and also integrations with third-party platforms so you can add things like abandoned cart notifications build your own affiliate program have product question q and a's on your actual product listings or you can have integration with third-party platforms so you can bring in all your amazon orders you can link it up to mailchimp as i've already mentioned there's lots of different features both internally and externally that can be added through modules and the best thing is all of these are free to use if they're available on your plan which is really really good and gives you lots of customization options over your 3d cart store now the next thing we're going to talk about is theme selection and customization now when it comes to theme selection 3d car is one of the best out there when it comes to fully hosted e-commerce platforms this is because they have 60 free themes to choose from and then an additional 50 premium themes that cost from 149 to 199 dollars so this is a grand total of 110 themes you can choose from which is bigger than a lot of other e-commerce platforms but theme selection is one thing themed customization is another so what's this like to do in 3d car we'll go into our demo store now to access the design and customization settings you actually have to go into settings then go on to design there's no main heading in the main navigation bar you have to go into settings but what's the theme customizer like well let's open the theme customizer and basically it brings up the theme and you have a few options so you can change the header color you can change the typography you can change the text buttons but it's basically limited to color options and text options there's not much you can do in terms of layer from this editor it's not really great so you can't edit any of these sections from this main editor you're kind of limited to just changing a few colors which is good because it does give you some customization options but it doesn't give you full control over your site but is there any other options well if we go back into the 3d cart dashboard and then we can open either the template editor so if you know about html or css you can go in and actually change the core code of the website or you can go into this editor which gives you some layout options it will launch the page editor and what you can do is you can add some content options but you can't actually control the layout of the page it's very limited as to what you can actually do and it doesn't feel particularly intuitive to use because there's so many different sections and things you need to navigate around in order to make changes to your website it'd be so much better if all these options were just all put into that theme editor that i showed you a second ago because you could do everything from one place it just made the whole process so much easier even if the options are reasonably limited it'd still be much easier to do from one place rather than having to go back and navigate into another section it just it doesn't feel like it flows very well to me so section number four is the support options are available for you as the user now this is another important reason why someone goes with a fully hosted e-commerce platform is the fact that they know that somebody they can contact should things happen to go a little bit wrong now 3d card definitely has you covered on this one because all users get access to 24 7 support even on the startup plan you get 24 7 support via email ticketing and also by the live chat system now as you move up through the packages you do also get access to phone support which is also 24 7. and being able to phone somebody up and have them go through a process with you so you can understand it is very very useful and very helpful to have now there is also some other support options as a community support forum which is a great place to ask non-urgent questions and they also have really good documentation should you need to work your way through something and you're not quite sure how to do it a quick search of their documentation will generally find an article that should be able to help you so when it comes to support options 3d card definitely has you covered so the next thing we're going to be looking at is the hosting and performance of 3d car because you want to know there's a good hosting environment supporting your website so what does 3d car offer well they offer fully pcie compliant hosting 99.9 uptime 24 7 server monitoring a cloud fair cdn so it doesn't matter where your customers are in the world your content will be delivered quickly a free ssl certificate and unlimited storage space on all packages now this all sounds great but what's it like to use in the real world and how well does it actually perform well i like to put these platforms to the test so what i do is i take three of their customer example sites run them through pingdom's speed test tool using the washington dc and san francisco servers and also run them through google's page speed insights once a day for three days to get a nice spread of data so how well did 3d cart do well as you can see on screen 3d card done pretty well especially on their low times because they had a 1.21 and a 1.95 average low time which is really really good because it's under that kind of golden 2 second window that you want when it comes to google scores the mobile score wasn't great at 31 out of 100 but this is kind of in the ballpark of what most hosted e-commerce platforms are kind of achieving and the desktop score wasn't bad at 69 out of 100. so there is some room for improvement when it comes to google scores but generally that in the ballpark of what most of the other e-commerce platforms out there are doing so they're certainly not off the pace and the load times are pretty good so nothing to really worry about when it comes to the hosting environment of 3d cart so the final thing we're going to be looking at is a quick overview of how easy 3d car is to use and the first thing is getting started now getting started with 3d car is very simple this is because they offer a free trial so all you need is your email address and to create a password and you're going to be good to go with one of their free trials and i'll leave a link in the description to 3d cards so you can go and check these guys out for yourself now once you've been through the sign up process you'll be taken into your dashboard and it looks basically like this so the main dashboard is a reporting overview now the first thing that come to mind for me was there's no kind of setup guide immediately when you sign into 3d car which is a little bit strange especially from a fully hosted platform but they actually do have a checklist they've just kind of hidden it so if you actually go under marketing and click on the onboarding checklist it will actually give you a list of things you need to do in order to get your website set up and ready to go live now to me this is a really useful feature it's something that's really helpful especially when you're just getting started with an ecommerce store so you can go through all these things you can set up what you need to do how you need to do it then you can mark it off so you know that you're working through a process to make your store live i don't get why they don't push this more this is a really really good feature and it's something that's missing from a lot of other e-commerce platforms so i don't really understand why 3d car have done that because i say it's such a good feature but outside of that the dashboard is pretty easy to use it's pretty simple they've gone with the basically industry standard sidebar layout so there's well named headings with some with sub options like under the marketing and under settings so there's quite a few different options hidden within the basic submenus of the 3d cart main navigation dashboard but all in all it's a very easy dashboard to navigate and it doesn't take long to get used to using it but what's it like to actually manage your inventory within 3d cart because this is an important thing you want to know it's going to be easy to manage all of your products so what we're going to do is we're going to go into products we're going to go into the product list which is the main overview list and then we're going to create a new product by clicking on the green button in the top right hand corner and as you can see it brings us to the add new product page now the first thing that jumped out to me when i first went on this was the description editor because it feels like something from microsoft word back in the mid 2000s it just doesn't feel very modern and it doesn't feel particularly intuitive to use it just feels a little bit dated to me which is a shame because the rest of the page actually isn't too bad because it's a single page layout for adding a new product and everything else is well laid out and it's just one thing that just kind of let this the page down for me it'd be nice to have a better editor in here so it just feels easier to use rather than trying to create a word document from the mid-2000s but all in all the add new product page is very simple to use and you also have options down here so you can add variations and things like that into your product listing very simple very easy to use now the next thing is creating a product hierarchy so to organize your products because if you didn't organize them it'd just be a bit of a mishmash in your ecommerce store as to where products are so for this 3d cart use the category system which is a tried and tested method and it just works it's simple it's effective and it works and for this you can create both parent and child categories which is really useful because it creates a good product hierarchy so if we want to add a new category what we do is we click the button in the top right hand corner add the name and then decide whether you want it to be a parent or a child category if you want to be a parent one you click new if you want it to be a child one you select one of the existing categories and save it to that category and then you'll be added underneath it so if we call that uh hats and we'll place it under women save that category option and what it'll do is it will appear underneath the women's option so that's how quick and easy it is to create and organize your category set up so you create a good hierarchy for your products very simple very easy to use so the next thing is actually managing your inventory so you've added all your products your stores life how do you keep your inventory up to date so how do you update start quantity how do you update pricing how do you do all this in 3d cart well if we go into the product list what there is is a selection of bulk editing tools but it's not completely evident from the get go where these are so if you initially select a few items from the check boxes this little drop down menu will appear at the bottom and if you go on that you can move it to category or you can delete selected it looks like there's not that many options but if you actually go into more at the top it produces a drop down menu where you can manage your inventory so if we go into that we can update all the inventory so we can quickly and easily update start quantity or another thing you can do is you can make changes to prices so you can go into the price editor and you can make changes to prices so there is quite a few options when it comes to bulk updating your inventory but once again with 3d cart it just be nice if there's a bit more obvious to how you do this rather than being hidden in a sub menu somewhere it just it feels a little bit like the workflow isn't as optimal as it could be in the 3d car system so the final thing i want to talk about is managing orders because this is hopefully where you're going to be spending a lot of time in your 3d cart store so if we go into orders and go into manage orders what can we do from the main overview menu so what we do is we select the orders and then with the selected we can do quite a few things from the drop down menu so we can change the order status or we can print the invoice or packing slip this is really useful because it allows you to manage all of your orders just basically from the order overview menu you don't have to go in and do this on an order by order basis so this is going to save you a ton of time when it comes to managing your orders now another thing you can do with 3d card is you can export the orders so what you do is select the orders you want click the button in the top right hand corner and what it'll do is you'll ask what you want to export another thing you can do is you can import tracking numbers so if you get a bulk notification from your kind of shipping partner of your tracking numbers what you can do is you can import all of these directly into your 3d cart dashboard and it basically auto updates them for you very quick very efficient and it's a good way of keeping your customers updated now before i give my conclusion of 3d card i just have a couple of quick requests for you if you enjoyed this video and you found it helpful i'd really appreciate if you could hit that like button because it really does help the channel out massively also if you want to see more e-commerce related content consider hitting that subscribe button and the notification bell because i post videos on a weekly basis also if you'd like to support the channel you can do by buying me a coffee and i'll leave a link in the description below for that it is very much appreciated if you do so my conclusion of the 3d card platform is it any good it's not bad it's a very competent platform and it'll definitely get the job done at building the ecommerce website and generating sales but i feel like it just hasn't quite kept pace with some of its competition namely shopify and big commerce who have focused on areas where 3d car is definitely a bit weaker so things like theme customization which is pretty poor when it comes to opencart is much better on the other two platforms and there's some things just on the platform that don't feel like the workflow is optimal and some things like the product description editor feel a little bit dated it just doesn't feel like it's quite kept paced with the competition so while it definitely can get the job done is it the best option out there i think there are better options out there which is unfortunate because it does offer a good set of features and generally the platform isn't that bad to use it just hasn't quite kept pace with the competition so thank you so much for watching i really do appreciate it especially if you've watched it up to this point and once again if you could hit that like button i really would appreciate it so make sure you stay awesome guys stay safe and i'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 1,482

Keywords: 3dcart Review, 3dcart Review 2020, 3dcart ecommerce, Shopify alternative

Id: BR2SIWYrR8k

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020