CoreCommerce offers a large feature set with tools to help you design your e-commerce website, manage your inventory, create reports and more.  It is a suitable platform for small businesses and individuals that are looking to set up new stores that do not have much need for great data storage. This all-in-one hosted shopping cart comes with an excess of advantages for individual sellers, small businesses, and medium enterprises. Some of the advantages include:

• Hundreds of beautiful e-commerce designs, including mobile-friendly, responsive designs
• Affordable custom design solutions
• Hundreds of app and integration options
• Integrated marketing tools
• Customizable discounts and free shipping offers
• In-depth reporting tools
• Secure hosting
• Automatic updates
• Level 1 PCI-DSS compliance, the highest level available
• 99% uptime
• Premium bandwidth for reliable speed
• Free onboarding session with an onboarding coach

Cons

• CoreCommerce is relatively expensive when compared to other leading e-commerce
• The admin interface is outdated and it is difficult to find certain features.
• With the exception of the Enterprise plan, storage space is limited on the remaining plans.

Features:

Admin Panel

The admin panel might seem a bit daunting at the first look. However, getting used to the design only takes a few minutes. The panel is designed to maximize business operations and seamlessly integrates with best-in-class third party tools built to engage customers throughout the buying process, make payments quick and seamless, and increase conversions. Plus, an option of live chat with support techs from within the admin dashboard is also available.

Setting up the Store

CoreCommerce offers a free onboarding program that has been developed to ensure a hassle-free launch of an attractive and effective online store. When you sign up for a free trial, you receive an initial 30-minute call with an onboarding coach. Plus, on-demand content including webinars, support articles, and CoreCommerce blog content are also available to provide user-friendly how-to guides for a variety of tasks related to the setup and launch of your store.

Customization

With CoreCommerce, you can easily design a high-performing online store with features like easy store navigation, attractive and informative product displays, product feeds, promotional banner content and social media sharing. You can create outstanding product displays with unlimited product photos and built-in photo editing tools like Lightbox. You can also add personalized content feeds such as “Recently Viewed,” “Related Products,” “Top Sellers,” and “New Arrivals” feeds to your store. Other features include built-in customizable e-mail templates, layered mega menu and drop down menu capabilities, a variety of home page widgets, NIVO slider, and much more.

If you are looking to start your business instantly without having to spend time in designing, then no worries as CoreCommerce packs hundreds of free, modern template options including 16 mobile-friendly, responsive designs.

Features for Marketing

With CoreCommerce, you can build a high-quality all-in-one online store that is designed to sell. It comes with built-in marketing tools to drive traffic and convert sales. The built-in mailing list, newsletter templates, and store blogging platforms allow you to create customized content that improves your SEO rankings and drive potential customers to your online store. It also seamlessly integrates with third-party marketing and CRM tools, including MailChimp, MyEmma, and ConstantContact. You can also integrate CoreCommerce with your Facebook business page to sell products directly on Facebook and upload product feeds to Facebook for dynamic product advertisements.

You can also reach out to customers with customized offers and coupons generated by the built-in coupon and promotions generation tool. Features like gift registries, customer wish lists, and product reminders keep customers engaged with your products in between sales. Customers can share your products on social media or by email.

Moreover, the abandoned shopping cart email capabilities allow you to reach out to customers who left before buying in order to reclaim lost sales.

Fast and Secure Hosting

CoreCommerce offers Industry-leading uptimes, premium bandwidth, and proven site security to ensure that your site captures every sale. Other features include PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance and fraud and spam protections to ensure you and your customers are protected.

Features for Customers

With CoreCommerce, you can change browsing behaviors into buying behaviors by giving customers more control of their experience in your store. Features like advanced search options and the capability for customers to segment products by price, add coveted products to a wish list, compare products with each other or read other customers’ product reviews all give your customers what they need to make informed purchases.

Promotional Tools

CoreCommerce gives you a range of promotional features to boost your sales like gift certificates, coupons, sale campaigns, quantity-based pricing and bulk price adjustments and free shipping capabilities. You can also increase your upsell and cross-sell opportunities through “Related Products” feeds and bundling discounts.

Multilingual and Multi-Currency Support

With CoreCommerce, expanding your business’s reach to international customers is easy with robust integrations for global e-commerce. You can host your site with free, built-in English, Spanish and Portuguese translations for both the customer-facing online store and the admin dashboard. The language toggling functionality allows you to sell easily in multiple languages, and numerous integrations are available that allow you to reach international customers, including international payments, shipping, and fulfillment. You can also put product displays on your homepage in your choice of 163 currencies that are automatically updated every hour with the most recent exchange rates.

Store Management

The product management functionality is built in the admin dashboard that allows you to easily manage your product inventory and vendor relationships. You can easily import, export and update product information, and generate supply. You can keep track of your products with the inventory tracking tools that allow you to track inventory by product, product variances or product bundles. You will receive email notifications for low inventory or restocked items. You can also provide permissions and vendor log-ins to allow vendors to manage their own products. With the vendor management tools, vendors can log-in to permitted portions of the admin dashboard to add new products and update or delete existing products associated with their vendor ID’s, saving your business time and unnecessary headaches.

Payments

Whether customers are purchasing on their mobile phone or at their desktop, with a gift card or a credit card, CoreCommerce ensures a fully PCI-DSS Level I compliant (the highest obtainable level), ensuring the security of your payments. It offers special discounted rates and fees with CoreCommerce Payments and its preferred payment gateways, CardConnect, EVO International and Sage Payments. On average, online businesses processing $100,000 in credit card payments annually will save $360 with CoreCommerce Payment’s discounted rates and fees versus other payments processing providers. It also offers over 50 additional payment gateway integrations, such as Authorize.net, in case you already have an existing payment processor and don’t want to switch. Multilingual, multi-currency gateways are also supported for international payments. You can also accept payments by gift certificate and money order.

Shipping

CoreCommerce makes shipping and order fulfillment simple. With numerous options for best-in-class third-party integrations available, you get to decide which provider and which services work best for your business. It powers seamless integration partners for domestic and international shipments of all shapes and sizes. You can increase your sales with free shipping options, outsource fulfillment with drop shipping options, and easily print shipping labels. CoreCommerce also allows you to organize shipping methods by location with shipping groups and gives accurate shipping quotes for leading providers.

Analytics and Reports

Every online store built on the CoreCommerce platform houses built-in analytics and reporting tools in the administrative dashboard that can help you track sales and marketing metrics, as well as manage your product inventory. The e-commerce platform is built to integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics for detailed web analytics reporting. You can get a variety of reports, including sales reports, tax report, best performing products report, inventory report (inventory levels and availability), coupon usage report, gross sales invoiced report, affiliate statistics, keyword and search terms reports, vendor sales reports, consigned product reports and bandwidth usage report.

Third Party Integrations

CoreCommerce platform maximizes mobile sales at your store, as well as in social and marketplace platforms. With product content formatted for easy social sharing and purchasability, you can expand your store more easily and efficiently. The seamless integration with big giants like Amazon, eBay, and Facebook allows you to easily sell your products on these platforms. You can upload product feeds to Facebook to take advantage of Facebook’s dynamic product ads. You can also put a social sharing buttons on each product in your store. Moreover, you can create an “Add to Cart” button to install on external sites, redirecting them to your online store. You can also allow Facebook, Twitter and Google logins for quick account access.

Migration from other Platforms

If you are not satisfied with your current platform, migrating to CoreCommerce is easy with the CoreCommerce’s support team. You can easily make the switch to CoreCommerce’s platform with no downtime and no lost sales. Their support team offers a remarkable support to ensure a seamless and hassle-free transition. You can also keep your product reviews with batch import.

Help and Support

As discussed earlier, CoreCommerce offers a great onboarding program that has been developed to ensure a hassle-free launch of your online store. In addition, you will also receive a free 45-minute third party integration consultation. Once the store has been launched, the customer support techs are always available by phone or live chat to answer questions or resolve any issues. Live chat functionality is available within the admin dashboard. Plus, on-demand content including webinars, support articles, and CoreCommerce blog content are also available to provide user-friendly how-to guides for a variety of tasks related to the setup and launch of the store.

Pricing

CoreCommerce offers five different pricing plans which are as follows:

• Pioneer for $40/ month
• Advanced for $90/ month
• Professional for $140/ month
• Premier for $200/ month
• Enterprise for $600/ monthly

You can get a 12 percent discount on the prices if you decide to pay the whole amount annually. All the plans except the Pioneer plan offer unlimited bandwidth. However, out of all plans, only the Enterprise plan offers unlimited storage which is a huge drawback in case you are planning to sell downloadable content on your store.  Moreover, the company doesn’t charge any transaction fees, no matter which plan you sign up for and also offers a 50 percent discount to nonprofit organizations on all plans.

Conclusion

While CoreCommerce comes with an impressive features set and an excellent customer support team, the software’s backend is lacking in some aspects. The admin panel is difficult to navigate and use on a daily basis, which might be the reason behind its relatively lower popularity. However, the built-in marketing tools, seamless social integration, SEO optimization, as well as the excellent security options, make this a great solution. I would definitely recommend trying their 15-day free trial before making a final decision.