Review - 1 Shopping Cart

Most of us who sell our own products on-line follow a familiar pattern. We start off with E-Junkie, because it’s the cheapest option, then we progress to Clickbank to give us access to their fabulous Market Place and all the potential affiliates there.

But there comes a time when we get fed up with the high charges, and the lack of control over the affiliate program. And that’s the time to bring the whole merchant account / affiliate process in house.

For Beyond Blogging, Nathan and I decided we wanted to move to that stage, and we investigated various options before settling on 1 Shopping Cart. Here’s the story:

The software is an effective means of selling digital or physical products online. You can combine it with Paypal and your own merchant account (which 1SC can help you set up), take payments, deliver downloadable products, and deal with all aspects of the affiliate program. Let’s look at each area:

Products

It’s easy to load your products into 1SC, and you are then prompted to set the price and the level of affiliate commission. You can select recurring payments, split payments, on-sale pricing and issue discounts codes to individuals or groups. It’s so versatile, I can’t think of an option you might want, that cannot be achieved.

You can design a custom thank you page, and direct buyers wherever you want once they’ve completed their order.

There is no band width limit on the product downloads, which is useful if you have a big launch planned, and something we benefitted from when traffic peaked during our midnight launch party.

One major feature is called Upsell Express. This gives you the option of offering a further product to someone who has already bought – for example “Thanks for buying product A, would you like to buy product “B” for a special price of $xx” The theory is that once people are buying, if you make it easy for them to buy more, they will. I have to be honest and say I was dubious about this, but we tested it with the blog consultancy package we offered with Beyond Blogging. And I have to say, it works!

Customization

Every aspect of the process, from the customer experience to the affiliate areas can be branded and customized to match the look and feel of your own site. It’s not that easy to use, but the results are effective. From the customer viewpoint, they don’t feel they are being redirected to another site – they’re still buying from you, which adds credibility.

Communication

There’s a terrific communication system within 1SC, which allows you to set up Autoresponders, or send broadcast emails to customers or affiliates. You can also integrate it with Aweber, so for example everyone buying product “A” is automatically added to your Aweber list for product “A” buyers. Emails are sent automatically, and can be scheduled.

Payments

Payments either go direct to your Paypal account, or, via a Gateway if you have merchant account, straight into the bank. There are no fees or deductions made by 1SC.

Affiliate commissions are all calculated, and it’s simple to do a payment run at the end of each month.

Affiliates

This was the most important area for us, as we wanted to build a strong army of affiliates, and 1SC really does the job here. Affiliates sign up through a simple link, and then have access to their own affiliate dashboard. They can see how many clicks and sales they have made, and how much commission they have earned in real time. There are an infinite number of options here – there can be a 2nd tier commission to encourage affiliates to sign up others, and each product you offer can have a different level of commission. You can also create different levels of commission for different affiliates, giving you the option to reward some more than others, via a “Super affiliate” program, for example.

You can also input graphics, banners and text links into the affiliate area, which then creates unique URLs for each affiliate automatically.

The affiliate module is hugely impressive and I would have bought 1SC for that alone.

Reporting

There’s a real time (annoyingly - apart from affiliate’s commissions, which is a day behind) reporting system in 1SC, and it’s easy to pull up graphs or reports showing sales, clicks and income by product.

Accounts

1SC makes accounting easy, and can even export data to Quickbooks and provide (US) taxation reports. I still haven’t look into every aspect of the accounts system, but there seems to be multiple options to export data, which should make this easy.

Summary

I don’t think we’ve even begun to explore all the options with 1SC yet, and I’m sure I’ll come back to this subject. But I think we made a great decision to bring the product sales and affiliate program in house. The set up is time consuming, but the results are a professional look and feel, a fantastic way to stay in touch with and motivate your affiliates, and an amazing depth of data about your products and the effectiveness of your sales pages.

It’s not for everyone – I think you need to be sure of a large throughput of sales to justify the set up time and expense – 1SC starts at $29 a month, but if you want the affiliate module, you need the Pro version, which is $99 a month or $1000 a year. If you’re unsure, you can run a one month trial for just $3.95. You can get your trial here: 1 Shopping Cart.

The only downside I’ve experienced so far is that the site can be slow to navigate, but I can live with that for all the benefits.

Disclosure: Those are affiliate links. If you choose to buy 1SC through a link above, Nathan and I will earn a small commission.