Posts Tagged ‘1SC’

Newsletters and shopping carts are two of the most used services for websites today.  It seems like everybody has something they want to sell for their business whether it’s a physical product or a downloadable product so they turn to their websites to increase sales.

As a website owner you also want to keep your clients and customers informed with what’s going on in your business and portray yourself as the expert in your chosen field so you start a newsletter.

The most popular service for both a shopping cart and a newsletter is by far 1SC (1Shopping Cart). After all, spending $99/month to offer a newsletter, physical products and downloadable products seems like a steal considering how much you believe you will earn from your products.

The truth is it takes time to get a website found online and even when it does get found, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your visitors will purchase your products.  You have to have a superior product and portray that throughout your website.  Your newsletter has to have something of interest for it to get subscribers.

Depending on what you charge for your product, it could take you a long time to just break even when paying $99/month. What if there was an alternative to that costly monthly fee?

There is and it’s called Virtuemart and Acajoom. Virtuemart and Acajoom are made specifically for the CMS, Joomla and they are both free.

Virtuemart-

Virtuemart is a fully functional, high powered shopping cart made specifically for Joomla.  Some of the features it includes are:

• Shopper groups-this allows you to be able to offer discounts to customer A but not customer B.  This is a great feature so that you can offer discounts to repeat customers.
• Multiple currency
• Shipping address based tax calculation
• Unlimited number of products
• Online Catalog
• Featured products
• RSS feeds to update subscribers on new products
• Easily add and remove products
• Live credit card processing or pre-defined payment gateways like paypal, authorize.net and more

Acajoom-

• Unlimited subscribers
• Subscription through URL
• Create a default HTML template for each mailing
• Unlimited lists, you can have a list for marketing tips, a list for startup tips, a list for whatever you want and have different subscribers to each.

You may be saying it’s great that all this stuff is free but I already have a website so I don’t want to redo it.  That’s perfectly understandable.

It will cost you approximately $900 or less to get a full-featured shopping cart, newsletter manager, and easy to update website. With 1SC, you are STILL going to either have to put in a LOT of work to set it up, template it, configure it, load the products, etc. In fact, the SAME amount of work that is required for a Joomla site. And you’ll have to either do the work, or pay for it, at about the same rate.

The real comparison is not in setup fees – those are the same. The real comparison is in monthly. A Joomla/VM setup can be maintained for $35 or less per month, and with that, you can often get assistance and advice on how to actually EARN with the site. Compared to 1SC, that’s a significant savings.

Let’s do the math:

Shopping cart and newsletter using 1SC-$99/month
Joomla, Virtuemart and Acajoom-$35/month
1SC for 1 year-$1188
Joomla, Virtuemart, and Acajoom for 1 year-$420
That’s a difference of $768 for 1 year

The proof is in the math.

I understand change is tough. Especially when you have virtual assistants, coaches, marketers etc telling you to stick with 1SC but the truth is, you could really be costing your business a lot of unneeded money waste.

If you don’t mind wasting thousands of dollars to keep in touch with your clients and sell your products online because 1SC is the “norm,” then more power to you. But if you are looking for a cost-effective, long-term solution to your newsletter and shopping cart needs, give us a call and we can help you decide which solution is right for you.

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