Review: 1ShoppingCart's New E-mail Marketing Features

My mother always used to say -"you can be good at many things, but you can only be excellent at a few".  1Shopping Cart is a popular all-in-one   e-commerce software package that combines e-mail management, affiliate management, and  customer order tracking with features like affiliate management and ad tracking.  Many of my virtual assistance clients use 1shopping cart because it provides a seamless experience for customers (people who buy are automatically subscribed to the appropriate e-mail list and the information is stored within 1shopping cart for easy order retrieval).  Although the program is expensive, it is less than other programs that offer the same integration and just a little more expensive than cobbling the services together from different programs (especially if you need to hire a virtual assistant to this for you.

The trouble with the program has always been that it is a "jack of all trades and master of none".  In other words, as a package, the program is good, but none of the component parts are as good as their competitors.  An area of particular frustration for me has been the program's super clunky autoresponder program.  Not only was it difficult to format e-mails within the system — getting it right took several tests on different browsers and the program would drop and make you reset the list selection every time you changed the file — there was no way to set the file to send at a certain time.  The program would send all the e-mails for that day at midnight eastern - causing confusion for the people on the West Coast who received those e-mails at 9 p.m.

Recently, 1Shopping Cart released an update which solves many of these problems.  Here are some of the features that were added in the update:

1. Templates - You can now choose from an assortment of pre-designed templates (or you can design your own).  The templates were nice and easy to work with.  They also worked out-of-the-box on different e-mail systems and with different browsers.

2. Timed Sends - West Coast people rejoice!  You can now set messages to be sent out at a certain time.  It is still Eastern time — but at least you can have messages sent at 3 a.m. (or any other time) Eastern and make sure they arrive on the right day.

3. Simplified Menus -the menu system has been simplified so all of the information about your broadcasts and autoresponders is accessible from one menu. Also, you can categorize autoresponders to make them easier to find in your autoresponder list.  This becomes a huge timesaver as your list of autoresponders grows.

4. The list selections are now saved on broadcast messages.  This seems like a very simple thing but it is a huge timesaver.  I used to get frustrated selected the send list over and over again.

The only downside that I can see to the changeover is that the merge codes that exist under the old system have changed slightly so your old messages may not merge correctly.   Still, all in all I think the company  did a good job of updating their software to get the e-mail to be less clunky and work more like its competitors.

When I re-did my Tame the Shopping Cart Monster class recently, I included some tutorials on the new shopping cart features.  For a free preview lesson to to http://tametheinternetmonster.com/shoppingcart