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Shopping Cart Elite vs APSCSee how these companies stack upSHOPPING CART ELITE AS YOUR AUTOMOTIVE SOLUTIONOnline sales of auto parts and accessories will reach $6.5 billion in 2016 and will continue to grow at 15% annual rate. Those that tried to reach and surpass $1M in revenue are finding it difficult to achieve without the right tools and features in their ecommerce solution. Here are the reasons why Shopping Cart Elite is the best choice for businesses selling auto parts and accessories. Shopping Cart Elite includes the most Automotive Data. With SCE, you get more brands than any other shopping cart, free. Over 1500 brands + SEMA data + JDM data comes with your package. For many businesses, this is a deal-breaker because it affects Time to Market. Often it can take weeks to months to setup automotive data feeds. It will also cost a lot in development fees and resources if you have to do it all manually. Its important to consider this if you dont want to delay your sales when starting up. Many prefer to not deal with the hassle of development and have everything included from the start. If this is you, go with Shopping Cart Elite. Shopping Cart Elite is the only ecommerce solution that can do vehicle fitment lookup for auto parts, wheels, as well as tires on the same website. Shopping Cart Core customization is also an important feature many companies require. For example, if you want some feature to work a specific way to fit your business. The problem with Core Customization arises during version updates. For example, if you make any change to your open source shopping cart you will be out of sync from the shopping cart future version updates. For the best shopping carts, updates often happen because they are constantly improving, adding features and tools, and optimizing their platform, much like Apple software does with their iOS devices and firmware updates. A good ecommerce platform understands this and will continue to bring the best services and improve customer experience with every update. However, Apple does not allow the end user to customize the core of its software for one main reason; the customization cannot be guaranteed and may break during future updates. This is why Apple develops their iOS on their own, and any apps that wish to run on iOS devices must be approved. This way the end user has the best experience possible and this is the perspective that SCE takes. SCE will develop the customizations clients need for their business, and they will upkeep these customizations while they update and improve their platform. When you get an open source shopping cart where you are allowed to customize their core as you wish, but you are not guaranteed anything if problems arise and your store breaks. Taking this route one will inevitably experience substantial loss of revenue when their store breaks and they are forced to pay developers to fix the problems ASAP. When it comes to marketplaces only, Shopping Cart Elite is fully out-of-box ready with eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping and over twenty other marketplaces. The bottom line is other carts will advertise that they can be connected with other software to become market-ready, however, the connections are never fully functional. Im willing to bet you arent able to give me three customer testimonials from any cart that will attest to having full functionality. Also having to pay, setup, and maintain yet another software is just unnecessary. After achieving $1M in revenue companies will begin needing to automate order tracking, inventory levels from multiple warehouses, sending orders to suppliers and much more. Easy Data Feed is SCEs solution to this and it is incomparable. The other carts offer no scalable solution in this area. With Easy Data Feed you can literally create any type of data feed your business needs. Use it to pull tracking information from suppliers emails and plug them directly into your website, use it to pull inventory, product data, prices from suppliers website, audit prices on products, discontinue old products and more. The web is full of valuable data but getting that data in a usable format is not easy. Product Information, Leads from Business directories, Vendor Inventory Levels, Competitor Analysis, SEO results, the list goes on and on of available online data that could be turned into valuable digital assets, but only with Easy Data Feed will you be able to get it quickly, easily, and in usable format. Even if your suppliers dont have APIs, Easy Data Feed can connect to their website as a visitor and place the orders for them. Of all the carts only SCE offers SEO Automation and is 100% Google SEO Compliant. The other carts claim to be compliant but are unable to furnish a 3rd party audit report from an SEO company to prove it. SCE can furnish one. Shopping Cart Elites best SEO feature is organic SEO automation using what they call Visitor Generated SEO. How it works is when users arrive at your website from a google search the keywords they used in their search are turned into dynamic SEO friendly webpages on your website, this is done automatically. Then the new pages are indexed and submitted to Google to increase website ranking, again, all done automatically. This is an example of SEO automation which the other carts are incapable of. One aspect that keeps many autoparts businesses from growing is having poor CRO, Conversion Rate Optimization. Although a store may be receiving a healthy amount of traffic it doesnt necessary mean that traffic is converting well. And this is an entirely separate aspect of online ecommerce that must be considered from the shopping cart. Shopping Cart Elite is unique in that it offers the Marketing Advisory Plan. The plan uses TEA, Threat Engagement Analytics, a proprietary tool that analyzes user engagement through mouse and keyboard tracking. Your business will have an expert Marketing Advisor assigned to it who will analyze the information gathered from TEA and pinpoint problems in your website sales funnel. He may find your CRO is low due to poor copy, call-to-actions, images, coding, etc. He will then suggest the necessary changes you will need to make to improve your CRO. Shopping Cart Elite is a platform designed for growth and offers tools, features, and autoparts and accessories industry knowledge that no other cart can. It even makes available an open API so that if your business ever does scale to the point that it needs to integrate with other systems, it can. Make the right choice and go with a truly complete solution with proven automotive ecommerce experience, Shopping Cart Elite. THE DEVELOPERS PERSPECTIVE COULD BE BAD FOR YOUR BUSINESSTheres often a struggle between developers of open-source shopping cart platforms and ecommerce businesses. The developers number one fear is not being able to do his job, or worse losing his job. Its completely understandable, everyone has self-preservation instincts, but you have to remember this when taking his advice. Whats good for him might not be good for your business. Developers will always tell you More control is better. And yes, many times it is, but just as many times it isnt. The truth is its situational. Take for example a TV remote. If you only had two buttons on your remote, up and down, life would be much more difficult when watching TV. In this situation more control is in fact better. Your life is better with number buttons, play, pause, mute, rewind, etc. But to what point does control become too much? What if your remote had buttons to reprogram the TV software, erase stations and replace channels forever, or configure electrical configurations? Would you want that control at your fingertips? Or do you think it would be better left to the experts who designed the TV in the first place? Would you want to pay developers to update your TV? Or would you rather the SONY release the best updates for you?
This analogy applies to shopping carts. A lot of control is good, yes, but too much control can be a bad thing. But developers of open-source carts will never tell you this. Unfortunately, this leads to lack of critical information being conveyed to the leadership team by the developer. What the leadership doesnt know is that open-source carts are not scalable without investing more money into additional staff and infrastructure. They will fail to note that if changes are made to an open-source cart, the company will likely be unable to upgrade to the latest versions the following year because the developers customized technology will be out of sync with new code. If the company attempts an upgrade anyways the entire system will break.
This is a big deal especially when there are security holes in the software, a newly released feature is needed, or the fact that the old version is so outdated it will no longer be supported.
Even after developers learn about Shopping Cart Elite and realize that it can deliver 100% of what businesses require now and in the future, they will side against it in fear of losing employment.
The self-preservation displayed by open-source cart developers is a natural and expected response, however, unproductive towards the goals of an ecommerce business. What they dont understand is that a good developer will always have something to do in a growing company. Open-source cart developers can still work with e-commerce platform developers to make sure their customizations run smoothly and meet expectations. Developers will also be needed constantly for consultation, research, and overseeing processes. HOW TO DECIDE IF SHOPPING CART ELITE IS RIGHT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?If you're looking for a 100% ready solution today, that will still be viable for the next 12 months, as well as the next three years, all while offering a clear and transparent vision of the process as your business grows, than Shopping Cart Elite is right for you.
Developers will try to convince you that they can deploy features faster and cheaper. And although this may be true at first, eventually they may do more harm than good to your business. This is because overtime they will be fixing their deployments instead of rolling out new features. If you think that the savings and the speed are worth a full-time salary of your developer one year from now, then you should consider the alternative. PROS AND CONS OF THIRD PARTY INTEGRATIONSDevelopers will tell you that open-source carts have more apps than Shopping Cart Elite could even dream of. The thing is, these apps are usually completely irrelevant to your business, but they are nice to have. In truth you will probably have to rig together 10+ software to ultimately make up what Shopping Cart Elite has to offer, and then continue to add 10 more to the mix just to have extra apps, but this really only works in theory. What you have to understand is third party app integrations usually lack features due to incompatibility in the infrastructure (Ex: Software A supports discount per line item, while Software B only supports discount per order and not line item). Even if both software are working as you expected, eventually one of the software providers will upgrade their software rendering them incompatible. This happens all the time and the only way to achieve a perfect integration is if both companies are committed to integrating with the other, rarely the case.
Mind this analogy: Software is an idea that was created by an author and translated into a story on paper, and then translated by a developer into a language that a computer can understand. If the author and the translator worked together to make it perfect, then you will have a polished piece of software that you can use. (This is why working with open-source carts and a developer, especially out of India, will usually result in mambo jumbo.)
If you have one author working with one developer (translator) to make two software work together, then it is possible that both software will work well.
What always fails is when you take different software, written by different authors, translated by different developers and try to make them work together. This is like taking two finished well-written books, and trying to merge them together into one book. And when one author (software provider) does a software upgrade, its like having one of the authors decide to do a rewrite after the two books are already merged.
You are guaranteed to experience a fiasco and this is when the cat and mouse game between two software providers begins. The software providers will be blaming the other for the reason the integrations stopped working. Neither of the software providers will be able to pinpoint the problem on their side, and in most cases, the problem will never be fixed. So all the time and money invested into integration will go to waste.
When comparing the cost of Small business technology plus third party software app partners that you have to buy, versus paying for Mid-size business technology, it will be cheaper to buy Mid-size business technology and not have to deal with all the headaches. WHY ONE SOFTWARE MATTERSAnother reason Small business ecommerce solutions fail to grow your sales is due to poor marketing tools. For example, if you are a small business, chances are you can submit all your products to eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, etc. and quadruple your sales overnight. But you will experience three problems that will quickly make your business fail:
How are you going to handle all these new sales? If you hire more people to process the orders manually, you will risk losing profits because it is not sustainable to keep hiring new staff to do manual labor.
How are you going to synchronize your inventory between all the shopping channels as well as your website? If you only have 5 of an item in stock, and you sell four items on eBay, five on Amazon, and two on your website, which five from your inventory are you going to ship? If you keep canceling orders eBay and Amazon you will close your account. If you keep canceling orders on Google Shopping you will lose the money you spent advertising those items. You will also lose on payroll to customer support having to deal with complaints, and ultimately you will fail to grow your customer base as you are guaranteed unhappy customers.
How much time and money are you going to spend on third party software app partners to address the two problems above? Sure you can sign up for a Mid-size business technology such as channel advisor that integrates with your Small business ecommerce solution, but the integrations wont be compatible, and you will be forced to continually do manual inventory synchronization. Not only will you pay thousands of dollars for this technology and payroll to support it, but it will not allow you to scale to a mid-size business.
When you use Shopping Cart Elite, EVERYTHING is built into ONE software, one platform, one complete solution. There is no integration development needed, you wont need to hire more staff or developers to fix your issues, you JUST USE IT!
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