3dcart Review 2022
An affordable and feature-rich ecommerce solution.
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Functionality | |
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3dcart gives you free reign to control your online store
3dcart was founded in 1997 by CEO Gonzalo Gil, who had spent years coding and designing custom solutions for online merchants looking for advanced shopping cart functionality. After designing the same solutions for a plethora of clients, he decided to put all of the most popular features together into the ultimate ecommerce platform, which would become 3dcart. Now, 3dcart has over 22,000 merchants and 23 years under their belt, making them one of the longest standing ecommerce platforms around.
Today, 3dcart stands as one of the top ten ecommerce platforms used in the world, meaning you won’t need to worry about their company scamming you or being fraudulent. Their company even offers 24/7/365 phone support, a comprehensive knowledge base, and community forums.
Using 3dcart, you can build an online store, design it to your liking, sell an unlimited number of products, and get the word out about your business with marketing. One major benefit of 3dcart’s service is the lack of transaction fees charged by them, aside from any compulsory fees already charged by your chosen payment method.
Their pricing plans include sales caps, which you will automatically upgrade with once you hit those caps; every plan has an increasing number of features to match the larger business you will have.
3dcart’s major benefits are its comprehensive feature list, relative ease-of-use, helpful support team, affordable pricing structure, and easy scalability. So, let’s dive into the details of those benefits.
Benefits
3dcart was designed with achieving both higher search engine rankings and conversion rates in mind.
They focus on giving you all the tools that you need to increase visitors and sales, meaning they put extra emphasis on the freedom and capability you have with their software.
This isn’t a platform that holds your hand, which some may want; instead, it gives you free reign to fully control how your online store does business. If you want a truly comprehensive ecommerce solution that focusses on features, rather than simplicity or looks, then 3dcart may be the right choice for your business.
Pricing
3dcart has the following five pricing tiers:
Tier | Cost Per Month | Sales Per Year | Bandwidth | Support |
Startup Store | $19 | $50k | Unlimited | Live Chat + Tickets |
Basic Store | $29 | $100k | Unlimited | Phone + Live Chat + Tickets |
Plus Store | $79 | $250k | Unlimited | Phone + Live Chat + Tickets |
Power Store | $129 | $500k | Unlimited | Phone + Live Chat + Tickets |
Pro Store | $229 | $1M | Unlimited | Phone + Live Chat + Tickets |
Before committing to a paid plan, you can get started with a 15-day free trial where you can get to know the software and decide on whether it works for your business. In regard to pricing, 3dcart has a similar pricing structure to most other ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, albeit they charge less with reportedly more features.
If you sign up for the annual plans, rather than paying monthly, you can save 10% off of the already-affordable price points. On top of this, 3dcart charges no transaction fees on any plan. This makes 3dcart a good option for businesses that are looking for more functionality and value than Shopify at a better price.
Features/Type of Plan | Startup Store | Basic Store | Plus Store | Power Store | Pro Store |
Responsive Themes | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Built-in SEO Tools | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Social Integrations | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Ratings and Reviews | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Newsletters | ☐ | ☐ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Abandoned Cart Reports | ☐ | ☐ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Amazon & eBay Integrations | ☐ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
API Access | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ | ☒ |
Ecommerce Comparison Features
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Buy Now | ||||||
Overall Rating | ||||||
Price | From $9 | Free to Install | Free to Install | From $29.95 | From $2.99 | From $5.00 |
Themes | 100+ | 1000+ | 1000+ | 120 | 15 | 500+ |
SEO Tools | ||||||
Ease Of Use | ||||||
Functionality | ||||||
Customization | ||||||
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Our Review |
3dcart Features Summary
3dcart offers some of the most built-in features available on any ecommerce platform. Marketed as a truly all-in-one ecommerce solution for any online store, from startups to enterprise, 3dcart makes available to merchants every feature that they’ll need to start and maintain an online business selling products. While 3dcart states that it’s easy enough for beginners, the sheer number of features available makes it feel like a better fit for more experienced individuals.
To put it briefly, 3dcart is truly comprehensive and detailed regarding the level of customizability it gives to merchants. While this may be initially overwhelming, many businesses may find that 3dcart fits their needs without the added step or funds of enlisting the help of third-party services or expensive apps like other platforms tend to do. Their features cover everything, from inventory management to SEO, for a relatively affordable monthly price.
Dashboard
The 3dcart dashboard visualized your store’s performance in a simple, at-a-glance way that organizes all of your business’s data into customizable widgets. To the left-hand side is the main navigation menu, which is organized around the core aspects of your business: Orders, Products, Customers, Marketing, Content, Settings, Reports, Modules and a customizable Shortcuts tab.
Also, directly from the dashboard, you can view any store notifications, including orders, CRM requests, reviews, etc. and do a quick search for orders and products. Supplementary materials are available from the dashboard as well, which include news articles, technical support shortcuts, and recommended apps for adding to your online store.
The overview section of your dashboard uses real-time data to give you an instant view of your business’s performance. Here, you’ll find total orders, revenue, AOV, visitors, and conversion rate. You can also compare past data ranges to see how you’re improving, all of which is represented graphically.
While the Online Store Manager is fully mobile-responsive, there isn’t a dedicated mobile app. However, we found that the mobile version of the Online Store Manager works well, especially on tablets.
Themes
Rather than taking the time and funds required to build the look of your online store from scratch, you can choose an existing 3dcart theme and customize it to your liking. At this time, 3dcart offers 45 free themes and 44 premium themes, most of which contain unique layouts and a varying array of features.
All “Core” themes by 3dcart are built on the platform’s proprietary Core Templating Engine and are mobile-responsive, meaning they’ll adapt to any screen size in a usable way. Editing your theme can be done in a variety of ways, but most prominently you can use the “Core Theme Editor” that allows you to simply change the colour scheme of your chosen theme.
To add unique elements, you can use the Page Editor, which allows you to insert blocks of content into designated areas on the page. While the Page Editor uses what’s called a “Drag ‘n Drop HTML Builder,” it doesn’t use traditional drag and drop like other web editors. This is because you’re limited to adding content to specific areas, while your homepage carousel, featured products, and other sections (depending on the theme) are stuck in place.
Premium themes range from $149 to $199. While this may sound pricey, these themes come with advanced features that the other free themes don’t, such as parallax scrolling, animations, and social media carousels.
3dcart also offers a selection of themes designed by third-party experts if you’d prefer a different take on their online store layout. However, you should keep in mind that all 3dcart themes are based on a similar basic layout in order to function on the designed framework, so you won’t see much drastic variation, even in the third-party designs.
Content Management
3dcart offers a built-in Content Management System, which provides a non-technical way to add, edit or delete website pages and content without having to dive into your site’s code.
You can generate pages, edit them, and link them to other pages within the built-in CMS. To upload images to your store, you can upload files to your File Manager and use those images wherever necessary on your site.
What’s notable about 3dcart’s platform is that it has a built-in blogging platform that allows you to write and publish blogs to go up directly on your online store. This is opposed to many other ecommerce platforms, like Volusion, which force you to host a blog website separately and link to it on your main online store.
Plugins and Extensions
On 3dcart’s app store, there’s currently over 300 apps available for direct integration.
This includes apps for accounting, channel management, dropshipping automation, email marketing, fraud prevention, live chat, site search solutions, tax software, and much more. Compared to other ecommerce app marketplaces, this selection is relatively vast and varied.
You can also have your own custom integration developed for any software or service that’s not already developed using 3dcart’s API, which is available on all plans. So, this gives you the freedom to customize your ecommerce setup however you desire.
Checkout
3dcart supports built-in integration with over 200 payment methods, including popular options like Authorize.Net, PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay, and Stripe.
Their selection also includes support for high-risk payment providers, which would be useful if your industry has been deemed “high-risk” by most popular payment gateways. You’ll also be able to add digital wallet payment options to your store, such as Apple Pay, to make payment easier. Even cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are supported on their massive list of methods.
When it comes to the security level of your site’s checkout page, 3dcart provides all merchants with a free shared SSL certificate. Do note that your entire site will be secured with the free SSL if you’re using 3dcart’s shared domain; if you’re using your own domain, the only pages that are secured with the free SSL are the checkout and login pages.
You can buy an SSL certificate to secure your entire site without using the shared domain from 3dcart, where the cheapest one available is $60 annually or $5.99 per month. If you’d prefer to purchase a third-party SSL certificate, you’ll need to pay the installation fee of $49; while this can be an inconvenience, this fee is cheaper than other platforms like Volusion.
3dcart provides an integrated anti-fraud solution called Fraudwatch, but this solution comes at a cost that can vary from $9.99/month to $49.99/month. They also integrate with age verification software like BlueCheck to verify the identity of customers in case you’re selling products that are age restricted or location restricted.
Shipping
With 3dcart, you’ll be able to set up real time shipping rates from UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, Canada Post, Royal Mail, and AU Post. However, you’ll need to register with the carriers you’d like to work with before integrating them into your store.
You can also create custom shipping methods to ship by weight, quantity, value or ZIP code if you’d prefer not to use a major carrier’s rates. With dimensional shipping, you can get accurate shipping rates for every order by defining the exact size and weight of your product and the predefined box size you’ll be using. There’s also the option to add flat rate and free shipping to customers based on certain criteria that you’ve set.
Shipping labels can also be printed directly from your dashboard from the major shipping carrier of your choice. Additional handling fees can be added to shipping costs to cover any special materials or procedures needed to pack and ship certain products, as well as shipping insurance as a percentage of the order value. Freight shipping integration is also available with options like Saia, Echo Freight, LMI and Freightquote available.
Inventory Management
3dcart has a lot to offer in the way of inventory management, with the ability to sell physical products, digital downloads, and gift certificates. You can also use the built-in dropshipping functionality to sell products through third-party fulfillment services.
Taxes are simple to set up using the Sales Tax Management module, which allows you to determine tax calculation based on country, state, and postal code.
Here, you can optionally include or exclude shipping and discounts from tax calculation, configure up to 3 taxes per location, set up tax-exempt customers or different rates per group, and use Product Tax Codes to apply different rates to different products. However, if you’d like real-time automated tax calculation, you’ll need to integrate with third-party software like Avalara’s AvaTax.
All products can be found, and added, in the Products List page of the Online Store Manager. This page displays important product information at a glance, which you can search through using the search function. 3dcart allows you to upload unlimited product images, create unlimited product options and variants, use dynamic “SmartCategories” to classify products in real-time categories, add upsell and cross-sell classifications, and embed videos on product pages.
You have the choice to either create products and categories one by one manually or import in mass using CSV files.
When importing, you can either import products to go up alongside your existing products or replace your current catalogue entirely. Keep in mind that you’ll need to download the sample CSV provided and enter your product information while abiding by the correct columns.
If you’d like to sell on more than one sales channel, you can directly integrate with Amazon using the Amazon Order Sync app, connect to eBay using the built-in eBay integration, or connect with any other channel using a provided third-party multi-channel selling app like Ecomdash.
3dcart also has functionality to track stock levels for each product, configure stock alerts when inventory is low, set out of stock products to show as “Out of Stock” on the product page, allow for Back Orders, utilize Waiting Lists, or choose to completely hide products until they’re back in stock.
This allows for you to fully customize what customers see on your online store and how you want them to buy when stock levels become an issue.
Customer Management
3dcart comes with built-in CRM software that allows you to keep complete records of all customer interactions.
The software also allows customers to submit tickets when they need help while keeping all of the information organized automatically.
You can use their software to send out order notifications automatically, send out newsletters and abandoned cart reminders, and much more. Customers also have the ability to either make accounts on your online store or choose to check out as guests.
While 3dcart’s CRM is relatively basic, it provides most of the necessary functionality that online stores need. If you need more detailed information, or advanced functionality, you may want to integrate with a third-party system.
Marketing
In the Marketing section of 3dcart’s Online Store Manager, you’ll have access to a variety of SEO tools, a promotion manager, autoresponders, newsletters, and integration with shopping engines. Here, you can also integrate with third-party marketing services like Mailchimp, ClickFunnels, Privy, and much more.
You can also add customers to customer groups to give certain types of customers special pricing or discounts or create a mailing list for email campaigns. Using the built-in email newsletter module, you can send out targeted emails to your customer list based on specific traits, like cart abandonment, returning customers, new customers, and more.
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Sales / CRO
3dcart offers a native review system, which allows customers to leave reviews with star ratings, which appear on the product page, that you can either approve or deny or restrict to verified buyers. This data can be used as structured data so that Google can add this review information to your search results.
Using the promotion and coupon manager, you can create configurable sales and discounts for any and all items. You can also create coupon codes for marketing and customer service and define expiration dates or max usages per code and customer.
SEO
One of the most impressive aspects of 3dcart’s platform is it’s built-in suite of SEO tools. Within the SEO Tools section, you’re able to freely work with a variety of options. This includes custom file names, canonical URLs, hiding category header and footer links from pagination, IP canonicalization, 301 page redirects, your website’s sitemap, HTML sitemaps, meta tags, and your Robots.txt.
3dcart also includes native Google Analytics integration, although you will need to manually retrieve your property ID from Google.
However, rather than manually adding this code into your store’s template, you can enter it into the Google Tools area of your SEO Tools page. This is an improvement on other ecommerce platforms, which may ask you to work with your site’s code to get this functionality.
If you’d rather not do your own website’s SEO work, you can hire 3dcart professionals through paid SEO marketing services. They offer everything from Google Analytics setup to content marketing services through their MyWebmaster marketplace.
PPC
While 3dcart allows you to integrate with social media platforms like Facebook, there isn’t a native way to create PPC ads within 3dcart.
However, 3dcart does support adding a Facebook Pixel to your online store without having to touch your site’s code. They also offer a feature for exporting your Google Product Listing Ads Feed, which you can then use to create Google Shopping Ads and campaigns.
There’s also the option of using their Google Shopping Feed Automation app to, as the name suggests, automate the process; this app does come at an extra cost.
Social Media
Customers can sign into your online store using their Facebook login credentials if you activate the Facebook Connect Plugin; however, this comes at an extra cost and is not included in any plan.
To allow for proper sharing of product links to social media platforms like Facebook, 3dcart does freely allow you to configure your Open Graph Meta Tags. You can also add a Facebook Like Button to your online store so that users can easily like and share their favorite products to their own feeds.
Using 3dcart’s Social Links feature, you can add your social media URLs to the frame of your website.
However, this feature isn’t available on older HTML5 themes, wherein you would have to add that coding in manually via the CSS and HTML files of your theme. 3dcart’s HTML5 themes have been largely phased out, so you most likely won’t need to worry about this.
One unique feature that 3dcart offers natively is their Social Wish Lists, which allow customers to create wish lists that are public and shareable through social media. This is a good opportunity for marketing, as well as being a way for customers to organize what they want to buy from your store.
Email Marketing
3dcart’s email marketing newsletter module is included in three of their plans and allows you to send out various types of newsletters to customers. Unfortunately, you cannot purchase the Newsletters Module ala carte, so you’ll either need to upgrade to one of the plans that includes it or resort to a third-party service.
Newsletters can be updates on new products, announcements for new sales, coupon and special discount offers, and much more. You can also send multiple newsletters to different groups of customers or potential customers using SmartLists, which automatically creates mailing lists based on specific criteria.
In the realm of design, several newsletter templates are available to choose from and edit. However, the templates provided are extremely basic, so if you want your newsletters to have anything more advanced or visually pleasing, you’ll need to add in your own design code.
Aside from the built-in newsletter module, you can integrate with several third-party services for email marketing including Rejoiner, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, and many more.
Hosting
Because 3dcart is a fully hosted solution, keeping your site up and running is handled for you, with support always available if there’s any issues. 3dcart guarantees 99.94% uptime with 24/7 monitoring; this guarantee means that, if there is an outage outside of scheduled maintenance, you’ve got leverage to protect you.
Bandwidth is unlimited on every 3dcart plan, so you won’t need to worry about bandwidth overages. All of your DNS settings can be managed within the Online Store Manager. 3dcart also registers you a domain name for free for your first year; after that, you’ll need to pay to renew that domain every year. Keep in mind that, although 3dcart registers your domain name for free, you will have to pay for an SSL separately to secure that entire domain, unless you decide to use the shared SSL and shared subdomain.
3dcart also offers integrated email accounts to merchants, but the number of which you get will depend on your plan. This can range all the way from just 2 email accounts to 30, so keep that in mind when choosing your plan. You can also use third-party email hosting services if you’d prefer.
Analytics
Directly available on your dashboard, and in the Reports section, you’ll see real-time reports and metrics that cover several areas of your business. This includes customers, inventory, marketing, payment and shipping, products, sales, and statistics.
Each report comprises of several sub-reports including sales by day, profit by order, sales per product, and more.
Regarding your general web analytics, you can see site traffic reports based on pages, referrers, browsers, visitors daily or monthly, hits daily or monthly, bandwidth usage, and conversions. For information that’s more detailed than this, you’ll need to utilize Google Analytics.
Ecommerce Comparison Features
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Buy Now | ||||||
Overall Rating | ||||||
Price | From $9 | Free to Install | Free to Install | From $29.95 | From $2.99 | From $5.00 |
Themes | 100+ | 1000+ | 1000+ | 120 | 15 | 500+ |
SEO Tools | ||||||
Ease Of Use | ||||||
Functionality | ||||||
Customization | ||||||
Security | ||||||
Support | ||||||
Our Review |
Development
3dcart’s API allows you to develop custom integrations with third-party systems that aren’t currently supported with official integrations (which would be found in the app store). You can also freely edit your site’s HTML and CSS with your theme, which you may be inclined to do if you’d like more unique aspects added to your site.
If you’d like to migrate to or from 3dcart, exporting and importing all of your products, customers and orders is relatively simple within the admin. 3dcart’s team also offers a site migration service if you’re moving to 3dcart, but this obviously will come at an extra charge.
Support
All plans, aside from the Startup plan, are able to call into 3dcart’s phone support. Most notably, 3dcart’s phone support is available 24/7/365 to take calls and assist with any technical support issues you may have.
Aside from this, all plans have access to online support chat, support tickets, and self-service help via a knowledge base, ecommerce University learning courses, and various video tutorials.
For community help, there’s a 3dcart form where users can interact with each other and with staff to receive advice and assistance on their online stores. Additionally, full documentation is provided throughout the platform, including for every 3dcart theme.
Experts
On the 3dcart Experts page, merchants can choose to work with over 100 experts available for third-party services in the US, Canada and Europe. These experts span various service industries, including web design, marketing, development, migration, and photography.
At the end of the day, 3dcart may be a good ecommerce solution for your business if you’re looking for a feature-rich platform that comes at affordable rates with relatively simple scalability.
However, the platform is mainly worth it if you already have some technical knowledge, or else you may find yourself overwhelmed by the customizability available to you. If this sounds like something that can apply to you, sign up for the free trial and see how it works for you.