CoreCommerce Review

Full review

If you’re looking to create an online store you need the tools as well as the time to set up your shop. CoreCommerce delivers a solid, reliable package to help you sell online quickly with a range of easy-to-use features. We took a look at what CoreCommerce offers the beginner and more experienced ecommerce provider.

Sign up

A CoreCommerce package includes a number of benefits for the price of the monthly subscription. The benefits you get depend on which package you sign up for, which are different prices. The cheapest package (Pioneer) starts at $24.99 a month, rising to Advanced ($34.99), Professional ($59.99), Expert ($99.99) and Premier ($149.99). You only get unlimited products if you buy the top package; with Pioneer you get space for 150 items and the space increases with each plan. The same happens with bandwidth – starting at 2GB and rising to 50GB – and storage space – 500MB to 4GB. Email accounts are also included and there’s no set up fee. Once you’ve signed up you follow a step-by-step process that takes you through the essentials involved in getting your store on the market.

Design

You get a choice as to how you want to design your store – ready-made templates or the custom design option. If you have the cash then a custom design solution is great. You get the template and homepage designed individually and personally for you, with a range of other features depending on the package you choose – this is not the cheapest option, however, as the Custom Design Packages start at $1,999.

For those on a tighter budget, pick one of the 250+ pre-designed templates from the CoreCommerce list. If you want more design flexibility you can add your stamp to the site by adjusting the HTML and the CSS, and by adding unique content. You don’t need HTML skills, however, to customize your store – edit the webpage using CoreCommerce’s Easy Design Editor and by choosing a different product page design for each of your product lines. There are over 100 free buttons to choose from and you can adjust the fonts in the Easy Design Editor area.

Products

Customers can search for their preferred product using an advanced search facility with an auto-suggest addition like Google. You can set up your store so customers see related products together, and they can sort their results by price or by category/ vendor. Create an unlimited number of categories and control the way in which these categories will be displayed – you can even set out restricted categories so, for example, wholesalers can see certain items while customers see others. In terms of the images, you can upload thumbnail images and also add the Zoom feature. The Zoom allows a potential buyer to hover their mouse over the product and see an enlarged view of the object at the position of the mouse.

Store

Shipping – The CoreCommerce system is set up to link with UPS, FedEx and USPS in order to streamline your shipping. There are other easy offline methods that work when you have shipping solutions that you set in-store. Also, set up zones for shipping where you have preset options for shipping to different parts of the world or country.

Payments – Handle your customers’ payments using one of the 50+ payment processors, including PayPal, Amazon and Google Checkout. With the CoreCommerce package you can also opt for an additional one-page checkout that you can customize, including a customizable HTML order receipt.

Marketing

One of the advantages of CoreCommerce is that it has been designed with SEO in mind – essential when you want people to actually find your store and products. Your store is optimized for search engines with clean URLs automatically generated and meta tags for the creation of website page rankings. You can also customize certain aspects of your store in order to maximize SEO opportunities.

Create your own blog to run alongside your store so you can update customers on what’s new and improved. Also use the integrated email marketing system – Constant Contact or Mailchimp – to create mailing lists and send updates or offers to certain customers, or your whole customer base.

Reporting

When you run an online store you’ll want to know who your customers are and how they found you, in order to make their experience better and sell more goods. With CoreCommerce you get a respectable number of reporting tools, including 15 built-in reports that supply your with graphs, and a built-in customer management system. The reports are run from the admin area, which is pretty easy to use.

Features

With this package you can adapt your site so customers can browse and buy on their iPhones or other smart phones. The design of your site is optimized to be displayed on mobile browsers. If you want to make additional tweaks you can use the HTML and CSS modes to adjust how your mobile site looks.

A Facebook features lets customers view the items you sell from your Facebook page, without having to navigate to your website. Your customers can like and share products too – a benefit for spreading the word about your goods. There’s a Twitter link-in, too. You can also purchase a Social Package which is a custom design for your Facebook page.

Link in with product feeds to take your products to the masses via Google, Yahoo etc product feeds. You can set this up to update automatically.

Security

CoreCommerce gives you a secure solution for online store management. There is a shared 256-bit encryption SSL, advanced firewall protection and secure hosting. The store is backed up daily and the company reports 99.9 percent uptime and guaranteed network time.

Ease of use

The CoreCommerce ecommerce software is designed so that beginners can use it, and in fact the package is highly user friendly. You won’t have problems if you previously knew nothing about online stores. With a number of tutorials and step-by-step set up tools you can get your store up and running in a matter of hours. The interface is simple to navigate and there are no complicated tools to deal with. Design is through the drag-and-drop process where you take the elements you want in your site and place them where you want them.

Help & support

You get a lot of support options with this software and hosting package, including free telephone support, live chat, and an online forum. Phone operators are efficient and friendly and based in the in-house offices in Tennessee. If you want to look for your own answers you can use the How do I...? section for searching for commonly asked questions.

Overall

Overall, CoreCommerce offers a solid, reliable and attractive package for setting up an online store. With a low basic price and a number of add-on options you can choose the look of your store and manage it successfully without technical expertise.