Shopping Cart Elite Review 2016

Design & Customization
8.9

Features & Tools
8.8

Plans & Pricing
8.7

Customer Support
8.7

Ease of Use
8.7

8.8

Shopping Cart Elite

Shopping Cart Elite is a sophisticated eCommerce/Shopping Cart system provider that automates much of your business; marketing and operations processes are seamlessly integrated. From graphic design to hosting, the platform offers a complete solution for retail businesses to operate online smoothly. Eleven years of research and development have resulted in software that is intuitive, end-user friendly and omnichannel ready, with a powerful CRM system and hypersonic CDN technology for optimal revenue outcomes. Read our Shopping Cart Elite review below.

Visit Website

Pros

Syndicates Blog Information to Third Parties
Additional Useful Features
Powerful Backend
14-day Free Trial

Cons

Limited Templates
No Mobile App

Overview

Website: www.ShoppingCartElite.com
Year Founded: 2009
Categories: Shopping Cart Software
Free Trial: 14 Days

Shopping Cart Elite offers a full complement of services, from automated inventory and automated tracking to easy data entry and automated status updates. It includes simple data feeds, Quickbooks integrations and even automated spying/repricing tools to make sure you are competitive.

Shopping Cart Elite contains enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, as well as customer relationship management software (CRM), employee monitoring, warehouse automation and threat and engagement analytics to cut down on low-quality and fraudulent traffic.

Recommended: Per SCE, the platform was built for companies with 3 – 25 employees; particularly online retail and wholesale operations unhappy with the limitations of their basic shopping cart.

Area of Focus/Specialties: SCE aims to be a comprehensive system, from automation to optimizations and graphics, at a far less high price than most full-featured platforms.

Tech Specs / Limitations? Standard (free) designing options are a bit limited with this company. When you start to set-up your shop on SCE, just one basic template is available at no cost. There are lots of features available to customize your online shop, but there is typically a charge for them.

Additionally, SCE’s Level 1 Plan is relatively inexpensive at only $19.99 per month, so from the outset, it appears to be a good plan for small businesses. However, it is limited to 1,000 products; this will force you to subscribe to one of the most expensive plans as you grow.

Scalability/Room to Grow: They can handle minimal accounts up to their Enterprise package of 1MM products, so there is ample room to go.

Money-back guarantee? The site does offer a 7-day money back guarantee, and there is also a free 14-day trial period to check out the platform before you give them your credit card information. The site also notes a 100% money back guarantee for Enterprise users, without further detailing how that guarantee works.

Reputation: Shopping Cart Elite seems to suffer from some growing pains. WOT reports the website as just 42% trustworthy and 39% child safe. Reviews found on the Internet are mixed, but leaning toward the weak side.Their customer service does not seem to be up to par compared to other companies within the eCommerce platforms industry.

Some user reviews talk about poor service and frustrations getting their site set up and up to speed. The company’s owners would do well to pay attention to its users and handle customer service issues better to remain high in traffic and decrease the incidence of penalties.

Awards & Quality Certificates: Our search showed up a few certifications for payment platforms, like Payleap and PSIGate.

Why Choose Shopping Cart Elite? SCE enables customization of every part of your eCommerce site, and you can also pay SCE to build an automated site for you. The platform offers an excellent back office program as well.

Key Features

Point-of-Sale System
PCI Compliant
Google Analytics Integration

Quickbooks Integration
Price-comparison Tool
Supports Multiple Currencies

Over 60 Payment Gateways
In-house Credit Card Processing
Image Resizing Tool

Facebook Integration
Supports eBay and Amazon
SEO Ready

Experts on Shopping Cart Elite

eCommerce Platform

Industry Experts Verdict on Shopping Cart Elite

eCommerce PlatformFor some reason, there is a sizable disparity between consumer and expert reviews although this is good news for Shopping Cart Elite. While the experts weren’t exactly unanimous in their praise of the program, they did award it scores that range from six to eight out of ten. That is quite a jump from a consumer average the hovers around one.

Among the experts, the SEO features also stand out as a major plus for Shopping Cart Elite. Oddly enough, the reviews also give the help and support features a perfect score although this seems to refer more to available resources than the ability to actually talk to a person.

This biggest complaint against Shopping Cart Elite had to do with their templates. The program does not rank well for ease of use, and it can be difficult to customize themes that aren’t that impressive from the start. A lot of customers choose to pay for custom design services, in order to make the most of their website.

Overall, experts agree that Shopping Cart Elite is definitely worth checking out, especially if you are looking for a highly scalable program that comes equipped with powerful inventory and marketing tools.

http://ecommerce-software-review.toptenreviews.com/shopping-cart-elite-review.html

Shopping Cart Elite Positive Reviews

Positive Consumer Reviews and Testimonials on Shopping Cart Elite

The only positive review we were able to find said the exact opposite of all the negative reviews. This one satisfied customer seems to be the exception when it comes to third-party review sites. That being said, the Shopping Cart Elite website does have an extensive list of positive testimonials from customers. A survey of the testimonials reveals a few common threads:

Strong SEO and reporting tools. Users report that switching to Shopping Cart Elite helped to improve their search engine rankings and more efficiently target keywords.
Access to a talented design team. While it sounds like customer service is lacking, apparently the design team is experienced, helpful and easy to contact.
Personalized attention. Both consumer reviews and testimonials often mention the CEO Igor by name. Obviously, he has a very hands-on approach to handling clients, which can help make any business feel important and valued.

Negative Reviews

Negative Consumer Reviews and Complaints on Shopping Cart Elite

Reading through the user reviews of Shopping Cart Elite is almost painful. The words “terrible,” “rip-off,” and “beware” come up more than once. In fact, the vast majority of users gave the company a score of zero. They didn’t even get credit for trying.

Based on the reviews, it sounds like customers were promised a lot more than the received. Although the company offers a live demo and a 14-day free trial, apparently these weren’t enough to get an accurate picture of the software. Shopping Cart Elite bills itself as a feature-rich product but customers report that many advertised features simply didn’t work or even exist.

Users also made it quite clear that is it basically impossible to get a hold of a customer service representative. Multiple calls, emails, and Skype inquiries repeatedly failed to yield any helpful answers.

https://bestcompany.com/ecommerce/company/shopping-cart-elite/
https://www.shoppingcartelite.com/articles/shopping-cart-elite-reviews-from-best-company

Design & Customization

Website Templates

Shopping Cart Elite only gives you one design template to work with initially on the free plan, but the site also has a theme store where you can pick a more specific theme that is better suited for your business, and the themes shown on the website look pretty fantastic. You can also build your site from scratch though this is limited to those with significant design experience and is by user request.

Website Builder Interface

SCE recommends that they handle graphic design, or, at least, the CSS portion. Those with significant design experience can tackle the project themselves, but it is important to read this part of the site’s FAQs first. lt outlines the way SCE works, with its block system that allows them to do continuous upgrades without disrupting customer sites.

Page Style Customization

The site offers three design packages that can be added to make your site more customized to your liking. Clients with coding experience can create portions of their storefront, like headers and footers, using standard edit and design options, HTML or CSS.

HTML/CSS code is accessed through the platform’s Master Design cloud templates, giving knowledgeable users more customization options. The SCE templates already carry all of the front-end settings needed, including image, plug-ins, and promotional information.

Using the blocks systems, visual editing is simple; you can add, clone or move components like Headings, Layouts, Paragraphs, and Visuals. You can also reuse your block templates as needed to change things for different seasons or sales.

Site Navigation: SCE utilizes what they call, “Mega Menus” to allow customization of site navigation. You can add multiple categories and have them appear on separate pages, and link them to drop-down menus from the home page for customer-friendliness.

Content Management: Content can be added to your website in some ways. You can bulk upload products or enter them manually. Blogging and articles are done with a simple WYSIWYG editor.

Photos and Galleries: You can quickly add photos and galleries to your site, and interactive carousels with images, custom text, and embedded videos can be placed anywhere on your website that you wish.

Mobile Store Site Building: SCE sites are adaptive to your tablet and other smart devices. If you want to enhance the way your mobile site looks and acts, SCE can design a custom theme for your mobile templates.

Social Sharing Integration: SCE social apps leverage social media to help you enhance your sales. They offer sharing buttons, purchase sharing apps and social rewards to encourage shoppers to buy. There is also social analytics, and ROI tracking included so you can target your best social platforms.

Custom Design Services: Shopping Cart Elite can execute the entire migration of your site, and have it totally customized and designed for you. Design rates range from $25-$75 per hour, and most complete migrations take about 300 hours of work. Custom design quotes are available from the company.

Features & Tools

As with all website, the setup will significantly affect the functionality of your eCommerce business. SCE aims to give you all the tools to set up a beautiful site that correctly functions, and mostly automatically.

SCE offers the full range of eCommerce solutions, starting with simple plugins all the way to the creation of entire websites from a blank canvas. You can decide how much or how little of the site’s services you desire.

Additionally, you can bring your custom domain name to your Shopping Cart Elite site. They give complete instructions for setting it up, but if you’d rather not do it yourself, the SCE team will handle it for an additional charge.

Shopping Cart Elite sites will integrate conveniently with almost everything you can imagine. From Amazon and Ebay push functionality to Google and Bing, it is simple to integrate into other sites to optimize sales. SCE gives you a shopping cart, but also full-powered digital eCommerce. Push technology lets you increase sales simply by automating.

SCE offers 100% mobile-friendly Google score setup on a site powered by the platform. SCE websites use Adaptive Design for mobile sites; this is the same design used for large retail sites like Amazon and Target.

Adaptive Design loads faster and more precisely on mobile screens of any size, and for any device on the market. Because mobile has increased tremendously over the past several years, with no signs of slowing down, SCE has ensured that all its eCommerce businesses are fully optimized for mobile viewing.

Adding products to an SCE site is relatively straightforward, but SCE helps with tutorials on every aspect of working with products to help you get familiar with the platform and understand the best ways to do things. Product display options are varied, and the tutorials can also help you choose the one that is best for your products.

Shopping Cart Elite is more than just a shopping cart, and offers a lot more than a traditional online storefront; merchant tools, a website builder, and advanced backend capabilities make the functionality of your shopping cart and your site more seamless and automated.

Bandwidth and storage are based on the plan chosen by the user and depend upon the number of products that you want to add to your website. It is scalable as your business grows. You can export your catalog, or any part of it, at any time with the functionality of the SCE site. There are tutorials to help you in that regard on the site as well.

Support is provided by email, phone, live chat support, tutorials and training videos, a large FAQ section/knowledgebase where you can look up issues, and support tickets as well.

Language support is done via Bing translator at this juncture. You subscribe to the translator using Microsoft, and it generates code that you can paste into your plugins and website settings. Customers are then able to change to their preferred language.

Hosting and Security with Shopping Cart Elite are excellent by all reports. SCE is certified PCI compliant and handles transactions by using over 100 secured gateways. The company also provides a free highly secure SSL certificate to protect customer’s information.

Behind the scenes, SCE works with CloudFlare CDN to block any attacks and offload attack traffic from customer sites. CloudFlare CDN caches and serves images, making the sites faster and more secure and allow SSL certificates at the DNS level. Additionally, SCE runs backups continuously for its customers and emails are archived for one year.

Feature	Overview
Checkout, Payment, and Shipping Features	Shopping Cart Elite offers a very comprehensive eCommerce solution, including features that make each part of this type of business simpler by using automation whenever possible. Payment processing can be done with your payment gateway of choice, though the company highly recommends USAePay, Authorize.net, PayPal Pro and Chase Payment Tech.
Shopping cart plugins and add-ons	are available to offer upsells, automate and track shipping, and more with Shopping Cart Elite. The site does ask that you avoid third party widgets to the greatest extent possible, noting that they can drag down the performance of your website. Many plug-ins today are not SSL compatible, and that can cause serious issues with how your site is rendered, which can disrupt sales. Shopping Cart Elite higher-end support plans have the ability to measure plug-in performance and remove those that cause issues.
Order management	with SCE is an automated process that is streamlined and efficient. If one of the orders has a glitch, you will receive an email to correct it. Often, there is a simple piece of information missing or incorrect, and they can be resolved quickly.
Inventory management	is easy with the SCE platform. You can upload your store products with a CSV file or manually, and configure your settings the way you want them depending on your particular business model. For instance, if someone tries to buy six blue widgets but you only have four in stock, the system will know how to handle that based on the parameters you set. That might be showing two of them as back ordered for later delivery, or telling the customer that item is limited.
Abandoned carts	are money left on the table, so you will want to email those customers and try to maximize your sales. Set up notifications in your back office to let you know when you have abandoned carts to deal with.
Mobile eCommerce	is smooth and seamless with the adaptive response that is built into all SCE-powered websites. The mobile version of your site is rendered well on mobile devices of all types for customers to use for their purchases.
Payment Card Industry (PCI) Certification.	Shopping Cart Elite is PCI compliant and has a certificate that websites can use. SCE recommends using BCSW as they do not require scanning your certificate.
Shipping Estimator	is set up by you in your website settings and is simple to do. Just follow this direction: Settings> website settings > website settings> Shopping Cart > Shopping List > Allow Estimate Shipping Tax & Shipping Calculator. You can add multiple shippers and even flat rate shipping here.
Shipment Tracking	You can setup shipments so that they have tracking numbers by this process: Orders > Orders Ship-out > Select the Order Number > Generate a Tracking Number By Pressing Generate. Of course, you will already have your UPS, USPS or FedEX credentials in your settings. Another method to track is on that ship out screen; you can select the order and click manual tracking; next paste in the tracking number and send to a customer. This marks the order as shipped.
POS Capabilities	Our search for information about POS capabilities of the site turned up nothing. In fact, questions about POS go unanswered on the SCE site, leading us to believe SCE does not have that ability.
CRM Features & Reports	SCE offers a full complement of reports to help target ideal prospects and see where your efforts are paying off.
SEO	is easy with SCE; it is intuitive and has built-in SEO friendly software that ensures high-quality organic traffic. The system highlights keywords and suggests changes to improve SEO. It offers lots of SEO tools, algorithms, and even a competition spy to track and adjust your pricing if you wish. Keyword rank monitor, visitor-generated SEO, and other marketing tools are integrated.
Social Sharing Integration	is provided. Social media is becoming a vital part of life online as social websites and apps proliferate. For business, social media is used for marketing products, promoting brands and engaging with current customers and prospects. Social media marketing uses the social network to increase brand exposure and customer reach, for more sales. SCE has sharing buttons, social rewards and purchase sharing apps integrated. There is also analytics to show you which channels convert to sales best, so you know where to focus. Additionally, social login is available and is proved to help stem shopping cart abandonment by making it easy to register for your site.
Blogging	setup and process is simple with the WYSIWYG editor available. You can create articles to segway into a product, or as a product blog. Additionally, templates can be used in a series of articles to make them look professional and customized.
Newsletter	signup is available, and Shopping Cart Elite recommends connecting with MailChimp for newsletters.
Built-in Promotion Options	is an area where SCE shines; the site offers comprehensive marketing and promotion options for businesses of any size. It features CRM quotes, autoresponders for abandoned shopping carts, excellent engagement opportunities and retention capabilities as well ERP and automation.
Gift Certificates, Deals or Coupons	The site allows creating coupons to be set up for your products.
Site Statistics and Analytics:	Shopping Cart Elite apps are designed to deliver analytics needed in easy to understand format. Your dashboard can be customized to show your favorite social reports, as well as sending you important stats and tips via email.

Plans & Pricing

No free plan exists with SCE, but there is a 14 day free trial period. Pricing with Shopping Cart Elite starts with a basic level at $19.99 per month. It includes unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage and allows 1,000 products and two employee passwords. All levels will have an account manager at Shopping Cart Elite to work with.

Once over 1,000 products, you will be moved up to Level 2 at $35.99 where you can host 10,000 products and have five employees using the site. Level 3 starts at 10,000 and goes to 50,000 products, with ten employees allowed for $65.99 per month. The Level 4 Plan is the enterprise plan that allows 25 employees and up to 2,000,000 products to be hosted; it costs $99.99 per month and comes with custom design and White Glove Website Setup, and you will have a marketing manager assigned to help you.

Additional setup costs can be incurred depending upon how much help and customization you want for your site.

Customer Support

Customer support is provided via online chat from anywhere on the site. In fact, there are two chat buttons on every page for easy access that is available around the clock. A toll-free telephone number is available as well, and an email is an option if your question is not urgent.

Shopping Cart Elite offers lots of tutorials on the site, and webinars as well so that you can ask questions and get help in real time. An extensive FAQ section can answer most of the questions that you might have as well.

Ease of Use

Store setup is relatively easy with the use of drag and drop tools that SCE calls “Blocks.” The Blocks Editor allows content editing for desktop and mobile sites, and you can optimize your content for all devices by dragging the blocks to where you want them.

You can even see exactly how it will look while editing the block, without and coding knowledge. Because this is an entirely different way to do things, it might be a steeper learning curve to use SCE than some other platforms.

For those with programming skills, there is access to HTML and CSS code on the site. You can enter custom content above or below the featured products area, as well as custom plug-ins, SCE does caution that you should only add your HTML, and not modify the existing code.

Conclusion

Shopping Cart Elite offers more bells and whistles than most similar platforms available today. As such, it might be more than what is needed for your small business; however, you will not outgrow it. The company can handle any business, from the small business to a large enterprise.

The tools included will help boost sales and decrease bounce rates, as well as cut down on abandoned shopping carts. Shopping Cart Elite has more tools than you will likely ever use, but it might be exactly right for you if you are in a competitive market and want every advantage.

Compare

Shopping Cart Elite

Shopify

BigCommerce

Volusion

Alternatives

WEEBLY

READ REVIEW
TRY IT NOW

SQUARESPACE

READ REVIEW
TRY IT NOW

JIMDO

READ REVIEW
TRY IT NOW

The AWA eCommerce Sofware Score have been calculated based on the most valuable components required to build and manage a successful store.

34% Design & Customization
19% Features & Tools
16% Plans & Pricing
14% Easy Of Use
17% Customer Support

The calculations revealed for each component are based on the summation of actual customer reviews, usage reports, provider websites, user reviews and rankings, and available analytics. As an entrepreneur or storeowner, your requirements in these various categories may vary based on your selling needs, growth potential, and long-term goals.