Shaun
Best solution for my small business - feature rich!
I have a small business where I put in very minimal hours per week to keep it running. My last platform had the letters W and P in it and required a lot of effort to make sure all of my plugins and features had the latest code and worked well with all of the other plugins/themes etc. There were probably 2 dozen different companies/developers managing the full lot of these plugins. Some of them simply stopped supporting their code over the years and I was pretty much stuck. I'd get emails from customers letting me know that something wasn't working right or they couldn't checkout without errors to let me know when i needed to put on my IT hat and try to find/fix the problems - and I'm not a technical person! So finally i threw in the towel and started looking for something better. I researched for a couple of weeks and asked around for feedback and landed on 3DCart because it seemed to have the most features and be the most intuitive for non-technical folk in the affordable price range that I wanted to stay with. Not having to host my site anymore saved me some money that was used to offset the very reasonable monthly fee 3DCart charges. So cost actually ended up being about the same compared to the "free open source" platform i was using. Now that I've been up and running for about a month I've got to sample lots of the features offered and I have to say, this is a truly capable platform! There are modules to integrate with ebay and google shopping and fantastic reporting and analytics tools included for no extra charge. You can support retail and wholesale customers with the same site by adding customers to segments and setting different prices for the products based on those segments. Its going to be able to grow with my business if i decide to grow it. I also like how I can do everything from the one admin site. Email customers, process orders, ship to my customers, etc. And i can do all of this from my mobile phone browser efficiently too. Everything works on the mobile site unlike with some of the competitors. I can answer a customer's question within a few moments while i'm at the bar, at a friends house, or waiting in line at the grocery store. I feel so productive! Last thing that I want to mention is the support. Its real and they do get back to you within their SLA. I've actually found most answers in their robust knowledge base library and only had to get their help a few times on random things. That's really worth a lot to me since i really prefer self-service. Normally you can't expect to get too much out of a site if you don't put in the hours but i work fulltime and this webstore is my side job. Because it is so well thought out I'm able to put in just a couple hours a week and have a perfectly stable functioning store that couldn't be easier to manage. I really couldn't be happier!