Overview

At the beginning of every eCommerce entrepreneurs journey you will find aspirations of living the comfortably life: rolling out of bed late, commuting to the home office in PJs, and checking the news while checking their morning sales. With this cart you'll be missing out of easy mornings and instead you will be getting inconsistent and poor search, slow and choppy performance, limits on design, cumbersome data, and no marketplaces or multi-warehouse inventory. Sounds like a terrible time? Keep reading it gets better.

Search

Right off the bat I was feeling dismayed after my first attempted search on one automotive website. Im searching for a new exhaust for my 2015 Ford F-250 and I select my vehicle as such, then proceed to navigate to Exhausts Systems > CAT Back Single. Instead of getting results for my vehicle, however, I got results for entirely different cars. And it wasnt just the year or model that was off, I got results for a 2001 GM Duramax.

Next I try typing in air intake into the search bar while my car is still set. This time I get air intakes for Fords but for the wrong years, I also get air intakes for Chevy and GMC. Basically, what is happening is the search engine cant lockin vehicles once selected. It is purely a single-search engine which is neither effective nor reliable. How exactly are my customers going to find products for their vehicles with such a poor search engine? Hands down, search is one of the most important if not the most important engine of a quality ecommerce website, a website that actually makes you money.

Vehicle does not Lock In and instead resets:

More examples of poor Search: When searching for Boost Controllers, Category on top is not relevant to Category on the left side bar:

Take a look at the product page. I had a vehicle selected but after navigating to a product there is no indication of the vehicle I had selected, so I cant be sure if the product I am looking at matches my vehicle. Add-to-cart is not visible unless I type into the t-shirt box, definitely not best practice as it should at the very least be a drop down. And why use tabs for critical information like vehicle fit? It just doesnt make sense neither is it a best practice to embed important info deep into tabs.

The Product Page with no Vehicle Lock, missing Add To Cart Button, and critical info hidden in tabs:

When you compare the search functionality of a top Auto Store competitor you will find results that actually make sense. Shopping Cart Elites search engine can decipher the difference between keywords, make, model, year, and it can lock in vehicles as you search so you always get the parts for the vehicle youre looking for. Its smart enough to identify what you are typing and the products results are always correct and relevant.

Shopping Cart Elite search result example with Smart Results:

Shopping Cart Elite search result example with locked in vehicle.

Shopping Cart Elite product page with Vehicle Set and Add To Cart Button:

Design

The cart is limited in the Design department. The templates are neither aesthetic to the eye nor are they highly customizable. All their websites are the same, with minor graphical differences. Most ecommerce businesses have customers that prefer to shop on websites with a certain design that fits them. Some prefer modern design, others navigate towards an old-school, classic look.

Data

We all know downloading data can be a headache to deal with if you dont have the right tools and that was my experience with SEMA data in some carts. Lets just say it wont do much of anything to make your life easier when it comes to downloading data. Heres how it works. First, It will give you a login to SEMA Data Co-Op. And thats pretty much it. That there is the extent of data automation you will get. With some carts you will have to go and download images separately, descriptions separately, make/models separately. You will have to manually put those files together, and somehow you will have to load it into their formatted spreadsheet, and somehow upload it to their platform which doesnt always work because it errors out. You have to do it all yourself or pay someone you trust to do it. In addition, some also advertises DCI data at $500+ per month but you cant automate it so you will have the exact same data as the next guys, no thanks.

Contrast this with Shopping Cart Elite which automates the entire process for you from start to finish. When you want SEMA data, the download, compiling, and input into the Shopping Cart Elite platform is fully automated. You just choose a brand, press start, and it will go from SEMA into SCE and plug right in making your life a million times easier and your work days short and sweet. In addition, they can load data from Amazon and their own JDM data. What I like about their platform is they have a much more intuitive process to update custom descriptions separately between marketplaces for example if I want a specific description for Amazon thats different from my eBay description.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOWC2hxdHsoFLvvps2hsyF40mVhaPxGvKuzFzVCkN5s/pub?output=html

Marketplaces

As I mentioned in the beginning, some carts do not support marketplaces. Why is that a big deal? If you're in automotive ecommerce its a huge deal being that eBay and Amazon are a couple of the largest online automotive retailers seeing on average 80 million unique views per day. If youre not on either platform you are missing out on serious revenue.

Inventory

There is not way to plug in inventory for multi-warehouse businesses. If you require this for your business, you must enlist the aid of Hublogix via integration, which happens to be another $300 per month. This is especially a concern if you would like to sell on Amazon or eBay because they require sellers with adequate inventory, not what you can fit in your bedroom closet.

Shopping Cart Elite can go directly to your vendor who has an FTP or API and plug in the inventory with no issues, it works out of the box.

Staffing

Some carts only offers consulting so they do not have any professionals familiar with their platform that you can hire. Diving deeper into this I found that their consulting is related only to design and website functionality and not any of the other thousand aspects of running a successful ecommerce business. What consulting could possibly be worth your money if there arent even any marketing tools(no email marketing and no CRM) built into their platform? All they can really offer you is to tell you to go to a 3rd party agency and do adwords. I dont think I need consulting for that.

If you compare the Staffing program offered by Shopping Cart Elite, you can hire trained and vetted professionals proficient in their platform capable of using its integrated marketing tools, email marketing, and CRM.

Warehouse Management

If youre going to be stocking products it is necessary, unless you dont mind daily migraines, to have warehouse management. You also need a way to quickly and efficiently do shipping labels, and it all has to be tied to accounting. Again, these are absolutely essential features when selling automotive products online simply because of the sheer amount of data and variety of data sellers must organize and process.

Testimonials

I found it interesting and had to mention that most of their testimonials were from B2B businesses. Why is this such a big deal? B2B businesses dont focus on marketing thats why. Their businesses are listed catalogs, they advertise in magazines or forums, and their products are sold at wholesale so retailers get their names out for them. B2B businesses come with their own traffic so to speak. A B2C business must have marketing tools like social, email, SEO, Analytics, CRM. Where are all the autopart retailers testimonials showcasing their success with some carts and their lack of marketing tools?

Compare With	SCE
Shopping Cart Technology	Shopping Cart Elite
Technology	.NET
Automotive Data Included	1500 Brands+ SEMA + JDM DATA
Do Your Own Data
Custom Data
Vehicle Fitment Search	Included
Wheel Fitment Search
Tire Fitment Search
Customize Core
Excel to ACES Conversion
SEMA Data Integrations
Guided Search Results
Automatic Software Updates
Ebay Fitment Guide
Automatically Sell on Ebay
Automatically Sell on Amazon
Sell on Newegg
Sell on Rakuten
Sell on Sears
Comparison Marketplaces	20 Plus Marketplaces
Predictive Analytics
CRM System
Quickbooks Integration
Attribute Filtering
MMY Selection Landing Pages
Single Sign-on
MMY Product Fits Listings
Rotating Homepage Slider
My Garage
Multi Store
Fully Custom Design
Paypal
Amazon Checkout
Gateway	100+
Custom Shipping Rules
Biggest Live Clients	2,000,000 SKUs
Email Marketing
EDF Workflow Automation
Mobile Optimized Website
SEO Automation
100% SEO Google Guidelines
Support Desk
Quote Manager
Shipping Manager Integrated
Warehouse Manager Integrated
Dropship Manager
Marketing Advisory
Staff Manager
Task Manager
Open API
Monthly Software	$299 - $999 /MO
Hosting	Included
Setup	$12,00 - $15,000
Data	Included
Marketing Consulting	Available