3d Cart Review - An SEO and Design Analysis

3d Cart has been around a long time, since about 2001 they have been making their cart available for consumers. It has a lot to offer for customers and is priced comparatively to the rest of the market. A few things to highlight just by going to their site and checking things out is that 3d cart looks like an attractive solution. They have numerous templates, while not great are not as terrible looking as Volusions' and they offer some "premium" templates for around $200, which are decent enough. All the template files customizable, which means the developers allow you to go in and edit all the html files, a very big plus since a lot of carts do not do this. URLs and title tags are customizable as well making the cart fundamentally SEO friendly. Lets explore a little further though.

Key Features According to 3d Carts Website…

• Create your store professionally in just minutes (really just minutes? Yeah, I guess if you sold one item and didn't care about anything)
• Choose from over 50 pro templates (Yeah, at $200 a pop)
• Don't waste your time, make money! (How is this even a feature?)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (Ok, we can change URLs and Title tags. Good Job! We can at least consider you.)
• Send E-mail newsletters for free (yeah ok, up to 2000 mailings. We can also use Mail Chimp Instead for 2000 users for free.)
• Manage your store anywhere! ( I love how this is a feature and they have an icon of a smart phone.. In case you didn't know.. You can log into any shopping cart with a smart phone..)
• Use Social Media (Great)
• Professional product image editing (I had no idea about this, so I wanted to see what it was and you need to use Picnik which gives you some nice editing features, but no where near "Professional")
• Generate tons of free traffic (What in the world? This is nothing but one big marketing scam phrase. The right way to name this feature would be "Submit Your Products to Product Feed Sites Like Google Shopping.)

Shopping Cart Management in 3d Cart

This is actually very nice. I have the ability to import and export all the various aspects of my products, categories, and product options. This is an extremely important feature when managing many products and categories.

The admin is clean and easy to use with flyout menus. Finding and managing orders is easy to do. Keeping track of customers is a breeze. Overall 3d Cart offers most everything you will need as an ecommerce retailer, easy management, coupons and even a built in affiliate systems. The only thing I would like to see different as far as usability is concerned, a full width admin area. When working with lists of products and categories you definitely want to see as much area as possible.

SEO and 3d Cart

Annoying is that 3d cart is done in ASP. We prefer PHP. They do give you the options to make custom URLS and edit your own meta titles which are very important for on page optimization. But that is only part of SEO. Having an optimized site with modern web code and practices is also very important. Unfortunately this is where 3d cart lacks compared to well optimized sites like Big Commerce. 3d Carts' templates are based on antiquated table layouts, lack H tag structure and all around use tons of depreciated code. Good thing they give you access to the template files ... what a nightmare that will be to optimize their templates from scratch. I don't have time to fix all that nor would I want to spend money to have someone do this for me when other systems are already optimized.

Designing for 3d Cart

Well the good news is they give you access to all the files through FTP. The bad news as mentioned above in the SEO section, you will need to fix everything. All their layouts are antiquated and looks like a ploy to squeeze money out of people so they can have a "premium" template. To be honest, they need to just have those premium table-less templates available for free for customers. I am sure they could attract a lot more business that way. 

Final Thoughts on 3d Cart

If you are on Volusion and are already used to .ASP types of websites, 3d Cart will be a nice upgrade for you since you will have more control over your site. It definitely has some nice features, but there are a few things wrong with 3d Cart currently we cannot wholly recommend it as a platform to use if you are looking for a frienly shopping cart software. You could get the job done, but be prepared to invest a lot of time and money to get your 3d Cart software optimized. I feel that 3d is almost there, but something is holding them back from trying to become a great system. Your time would be better served using a shopping cart like Big Commerce.

Marketing Your 3d Cart Website

Contact us today or call 888-275-5301 for help marketing your 3d Cart website. Search Placement is an Ecommerce Marketing company specializing in SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click) marketing, and SMM (social media marketing) for online stores. We've helped hundreds of ecommerce stores take full advantage of the web and have experience working with every major ecommerce platform.