Finding the best ecommerce platform for your business is never easy. You want an ecommerce store builder that does more than just sell your products. But, one that offers beautiful templates, customer support, extensive sales features at a great price.
If you’ve begun your research, you must have stumbled on 3DCart. This guide goes through the 3DCart platform extensively and what it offers. We also look at how it stacks up against its competitors.
What is 3DCart?
3DCart is a leading e-commerce platform that allows merchants to create an online store without installing any specialized software.
Company Overview
The company started in 1997, and it incorporates several features into its platform that makes it simple to create and run your online store. Currently, the service powers over 10,000 online stores, providing support, and a full suite of tools to help its clients succeed in today’s competitive market.
Who is 3D Cart Best For?
3DCart is an ideal choice for e-commerce stores on the rise and would like to scale their operations. If your business is growing, and you need a partner that can handle your increasing order volumes, they’re the ones to call.
The platform’s easy-to-use service means that you don’t need any site-building or development skills. It provides all the features that you need to establish yourself and grow, and it’s also inexpensive to use for small businesses. If you want to grow quickly and save as much money, this service is for you.
How 3DCart Works
Head to 3DCart’s website to sign up and get your 15-day free trial. Note that you will have to select your plan here too. However, unlike some of the popular e-commerce builders out there, 3DCart doesn’t require credit card details to get started.
Customize Your Store
Log in to your store and choose the customization settings. These include mobile-ready themes and others. You can select from tens of themes and templates available. You can also pay for professionally-designed themes, depending on your needs.
Upload
Upload pictures of your products and details. You can add product information like weight, specifications, metatags, titles, and others.
Configure
Set up your store details. These include shipping, payments, tax rates, and more. You’re ready now. Launch your products to the world. 3DCart’s dashboard centralizes key areas of your store management, including incoming orders, returns processing, and store reports generation within your admin account.
3DCart Features
3DCart has an abundance of features. Mobile selling, integrations with social media platforms, blogs, email, and more are available. We love the fact that these features are built-into the platform.
They are not added plugins or apps you need to download or pay for once your site is up. You can even tweak the backend as you like, and the dashboard is responsive enough for you to make updates quickly.
The 3DCart API also integrates seamlessly with other approved apps. For advanced developers who would like optimal customization, this is a great fit. Besides social media platforms, you can also connect your site to top e-commerce services like eBay and Amazon.
Dashboard
The 3DCart has a comprehensible dashboard that walks you through the store creation process. There’s a navigational bar on the left-hand side so that you can move between sections quickly. And if that’s not enough, the e-commerce builder comes with educational videos that help first-time users find their feet on the platform.
Templates
3DCart connects its theme and template store to the dashboard. So, you can quickly get in and select the themes that pique your fancy and customize it. Currently, there are over 100 optimized templates available. These templates are grouped into categories based on price, developer and industry. The website builder features themes for the apparel market, electronics, food and drink, furniture and others.
However, the templates on 3DCart can’t be compared to some of the other e-commerce platforms we’ve reviewed in the past (see our Wix and Shopify reviews). They seem a tad rudimentary, and while they have different design varieties, e-commerce merchants who value sleek designs will not be impressed.
Inventory Management
Inventory management involves a lot of moving parts for an ecommerce store. You need to track your products, schedule reordering, create processes for backorders and others. If you’re like most store owners, you probably have about two to three separate apps for inventory control.
3DCart creates a central station for all of your inventory needs. You can accurately track stock levels for all your products and set up Stock Alerts on each one. This way, you can easily resupply them once it falls below a certain threshold. Besides the numerous options available to store owners, one unique feature has to be the ability to configure settings on a store-wide or per-item basis. With this feature, you can set some items under Back Orders for a separate market, while opening others under the Waiting List.
Hosting Services
3DCart sets you up with a scalable hosting package that comes with fast site performance, unlimited disk space, unlimited email hosting, 256Bit SSL certificate, and more. Its hosting service has data centers across the country, and the company guarantees you 99.94 percent uptime with round-the-clock monitoring.
You can block people from specific locations from accessing your website, although it’s unclear how this holds up against Virtual Private Networks. Integration with Cloudfare also ensures optimal content delivery, faster speeds, and protection from Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
And if your store expands beyond your current package, 3DCart would upgrade your tech to ensure you stay competitive with new functionalities.
Mobile E-commerce
Mobile is huge. Recent data on mCommerce shows that about 67% of the world’s population own a smartphone, and 79% of that group use their phones to shop often. And the ratio is expected to rise by 2021.
3DCart sets you up for mobile success thanks to its mobile-friendly websites. Unlike WooCommerce, you don’t need to maintain multiple versions of your website or implement Google AMP to be compliant and rank for useful keywords. 3DCart cuts through the technical fog delivering an optimized mobile platform that ensures your online store is optimized for all devices.
SEO & Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools are also available under the “Marketing” tab on 3DCart. The service makes it easier to find these tools than many other e-commerce platforms, and it compiles them all into a single page.
You can change URLs to make them shorter and more rank-friendly, and you can also check out possible keywords that you would need to add to product descriptions to help them rank higher. Integration into Google Analytics is available, and you can also add features like rich snippets, social media links, sitemaps, and more.
As for the Marketing tab, you also find a rich array of features that will help you to promote your store. 3DCart offers nifty features like social bookmarking, autoresponders, promotions, email newsletters, and connections to shopping engines.
Other core marketing tools include:
- Drip campaigns
- Promo coupons
- Gift cards
- An in-built affiliate program
- A rewards points system and loyalty program
- User incentivization tools
Payment Integration
3DCart supports just about every primary payment processor. You can accept cash, checks, money orders, gift cards, and digital payments. The service provides over 160 payment options for you to choose from.
The service also provides integration with popular accounting software QuickBooks, for easy management of your payments and records.
You can customize delivery costs on every product inventory page or use a store-wide setting. As for the shipping methods, 3DCart integrates with popular shipping companies like DHL, FedEx, USPS, and more. Integration for ShippingEasy and Address Verification is also available, so your customers can enjoy a better fulfillment experience.
3DCart doesn’t take any transaction fees from all its plans. All you have to deal with are the credit card charges for payment gateways that use this method.
Security
With 3DCart, your site is rooted on a platform that’s compliant with level 1 PCI standards. So, you get the same security level that top online platforms provide. Your customers’ data is always safe, and you don’t run the risk of losing anything thanks to the 256-bit SSL encryption. The e-commerce builder uses FraudWatch to monitor credit card transactions for malicious transactions that could disrupt your business. The tool is set up to alert you on suspicious orders and to prevent fraud.
Customer Support
3DCart is noted for its dedicated support team, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company’s support team is available via phone call, live chat, or email. If you’re like most business owners, the bulk of your time is spent on your social media channels finetuning your marketing campaigns; you can also reach out to them on the popular social media channels.
3DCart also provides videos, user manuals, webinars, and its very own Ecommerce University, which is an online learning center for everything on selling online. These tools and services are sure to help both the new and experienced store owners acquire more insights into how to grow an e-commerce business.
3DCart Plans & Pricing
3DCart has a flexible pricing system that gives you tons of features. First, let’s look at those that are available regardless of the price:
- Shopping cart
- No transaction fees
- Domain registration
- Facebook store
- Secure web hosting
- Unlimited orders
- Round-the-clock support
- Over 100 payment options
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Built-in log section
- Over 50 optimized themes
So, on to the pricing plans. You have the following:
- The Startup Store Plan – This plan costs $19 per month on the monthly billing and $17.10 per month on the annual billing. Choosing the annual billing option will save you $22.8 per year. The plan only allows one staff user account.
- The Basic Store Plan – The plan costs $29.00 per month on the monthly plan and $26.10 per month on annual billing. The annual billing option saves you $34.8 per year. The Basic Store Plan comes with support for two staff users.
- The Plus Store Plan – This plan costs $79.00 on the monthly plan and $71.10 per month on the annual plan. So, the annual billing saves you $94.8 annually. The Plus Store Plan allows a maximum of five admin user accounts.
- The Power Store Plan – 3DCart claims that this is its most popular plan. It allows up to ten staff users, and it costs $129.00 per month on the monthly plan. On annual billing, you spend $116.10 per month. The yearly plan saves you $154.8 per year.
- The Pro Store Plan – For 15 staff user accounts, you have to pay $229.00 per month on the monthly plan and $206.10 per month on the annual plan. The yearly billing saves you $274.8 every year.
All pricing tiers have a 15-day free trial.
On average, 3DCart is cheaper than several of the other e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify. As explained, this factor is one reason why it’s better for small, ambitious e-commerce companies that want to grow quickly.
3DCart Comparisons
3DCart vs Shopify
Shopify is our top-rated web builder for ecommerce stores and for good reasons. It provides extensive features that allow a merchant to sell across multiple channels, access to apps, beautiful responsive web templates, and is insanely affordable.
Concerning sales feature, 3DCart racks up some strong points here due to its extensive backend that caters to unlimited products and pre-integration with fulfillment giants like FedEx. But, despite 3DCart’s strengths, Shopify still outperforms. Shopify comes with unlimited products on all product plans, a mobile app, access to thousands of third-party apps through its app store.
3DCart vs. Squarespace
Squarespace is a widely used online store builder that comes with extensive features for retailers and small businesses. This fully-hosted solution is popular for its stylish designs and its unlimited bandwidth and storage space.
The platform is an easy-to-use store builder with stylish and sleek templates. However, in terms of ease of use, Squarespace Commerce is our winner. While Squarespace is easy to set up, it does require a little bit of a learning curve for first-time users.
This isn’t a deal-breaker thanks to its intuitive interface. Unlike 3DCart, whose huge array of features means the interface is overwhelming and confusing. However, when it comes to seeking help and support, 3DCart comes on top regarding support. The platform is known for offering one of the best support packages in the market—which includes phone and email support. With Squarespace, you’re limited to round the clock support via email and Twitter. You can read our full Squarespace review here.
3DCart vs. Wix
Wix is a comprehensive website builder for creating beautiful online businesses. It comes with impressive customization features, an intuitive website builder, multichannel sales, and global shipping options. Wix trumps 3DCart is many departments.
Chief of which is design. There are few website builders that offer as much design flexibility as Wix. That’s not all. The library of free templates is simply astounding, making it easy for non-developers to set up their online stores in minutes.
3DCart is not terrible either. It offers customers free themes too, but their options are not as attractive as Wix’s. In terms of payment integration and e-commerce customization, 3DCart is a step above Wix. 3DCart offers more customization options for store owners—giving them the freedom to create the store of their dreams.
Wix is a bit limited in that department despite its magic. 3DCart also supports more payment platforms than Wix. You can offer payment through Apple Pay, Visa Checkout, PayPal, and others. While Wix only covers seven of the most popular payment methods out there.
3DCart vs. WooCommerce
Ye, it is free to use, and it comes with multiple free plugins that can help you scale. There are no restrictions on product listings or orders to be processed. You can also integrate any payment model you want as long as you can find a plugin for it.
Put in the platform level protection and a thriving community that continuously works to improve the platform, and you have a winner in WooCommerce. But, there are some drawbacks to using WooCommerce.
First, you have to manually update your website or pay for a builder to fix things. You also have the costly premium plugins required for security, design, and operations. In some cases, enabling additional functionality might require PHP development skills and ongoing maintenance—which might not be cost-effective for the store owner in the long run.
Conclusion
Going by its membership numbers, 3DCart is a popular choice among e-commerce platforms. The platform’s features also show that it has a lot to offer companies that want to set up and move. It’s affordable, easy to operate, and loaded with several of the most critical integrations.
While the lack of a mobile app could affect your business, most of 3DCart’s themes are mobile-compatible. So, your customers will be able to shop with their browsers on the go. So, it’s not a bad deal all the way.
If you’re looking for a powerful platform to host your e-commerce website, this is undoubtedly one of the top choices.
3DCart
Pros
- Change themes anytime
- Cheaper than other e-commerce platforms
- Over 160 payment methods
- Good Customer Support
- Unlimited Product Options
Cons
- No mobile app
- Not Many Free Templates
