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Introduction
AmeriCommerce was founded in 2005 by three entrepreneurs. Their team has since grown to nearly 30 employees between their two offices in the US. Although AmeriCommerce has been around for quite some time, they’re growth isn’t as fast as competitors like Bigcommerce and Shopify – though their platform has been making continuous improvements. AmeriCommerce has over 5,000 active online stores, including some of their showcase sites: My Princess Academy , Shop Inspired Living, and Dilettante Chocolates.
AmeriCommerce is best know for it’s multi-storefront option which lets merchants run multiple online stores all from one backend.
AmeriCommerce Features
Multi-store fronts is the biggest win for AmeriCommerce! It’s one of the only platforms that offers multiple storefront options. Example: You can operate a bunch of different websites from one dashboard.
But AmeriCommerce has tons of other great built-in features.
I especially like their AddTo Cart link generator which lets you generate code to embed a product anywhere you want (other website, blog, wherever) – although, I do prefer Shopify’s “Widget.”
I also like this platforms extensive reporting, and it’s in-depth user permissions editor which is great if you have a bunch of people managing your ecommerce store.
AmeriCommerce Ease of Use
Setting up an online store with AmeriCommerce is fairly easy. If you want to open up a quick and simple shop, it won’t take you long at all. I would say it’s easier than osCommerce, Magento, and LemonStand, but more difficult than Shopify and Bigcommerce.
The backend of AmeriCommerce has improved lately, but it’s still pretty ugly. Whoever came up with orange, green, and black should reconsider their decision. In general, the admin panel is pretty difficult to navigate, and it’s not very intuitive.
AmeriCommerce Pricing
AmeriCommerce offers 5 different pricing plans. They range in price from $24.95 – $299 per month.
No plans come with unlimited bandwidth, so you’ll need to be cognizant of how much traffic your site gets.
I ran across a comment about AmeriCommerce’s bandwidth fees, and think it’s relevant to include here:
I choose americommerce because of the price and features they promised unfortunately, I am paying my monthly subscription plus on demand fees,even though my store is small with not too much traffic,I end up paying on demand fees every month. The slow page loading is a big problem this not only take a lot of my time when creating a listing but also a lot of bandwidth making my monthly bill even bigger! Communication is great but most of the times in stead of helping you they want to fix the problem and charge you for it. Sometimes they don’t know what they are doing or they just don’t care (one time they tried to fixed some corrupted files and they end up deleting inventory on all my products!). I been with americommerce for 2 years and already looking for another venues.(Source, November 2011)
Their most popular plan is $99 per month, and will give you up to 5,000 products, 15GB of bandwidth, 2GB of storage, and no setup or transaction fees. If you’re excited about the multi-storefront feature that I mentioned above, you can add additional stores for $39/month for all plans + bandwidth. AmeriCommerce offers a free 14-day trial.
AmeriCommerce Templates & Design
Personally, I don’t love any of the +25 free themes that AmeriCommerce offers. Keep in mind though, it’s more of a subjective thing. To me, they remind me of popular sites 5 years ago. Theyr’e all pretty basic and not very stylish.
Having said that, everything is customizable, so you can tinker around and make the most out of their themes. I really enjoyed using their ‘live design’ editor which has a drag and drop / point and click interface to make modifying design easy and fun.
AmeriCommerce Inventory
AmeriCommerce offers a robust product management system. This is definitely one of their strong suits. It’s powerful, flexible, and will do pretty much anything you want it to.
AmeriCommerce’s extensive product variant options stood out as a highlight for me. You can control anything you want – variants are fully customizable. The discount engine is pretty standard. You can have unlimited categories, product groups, attributes, and variants…. So I really can’t complain about their inventory management. Again though…. I’m not a fan of their backend, so even though it’s a powerful system, it’s just not very pleasant working away with the orange, green, and black (sorry – last time I’ll mention their color scheme)
AmeriCommerce SEO & Marketing
This ecommerce platform has good SEO functions. It has all the basics you’ll want, including custom meta descriptions for products.
Their popular multi-store function has many upsides, but can potentially (and quite likely) wreak HAVOC on your SEO if done incorrectly. So I would advise anyone who is planning on opening multiple stores selling the same product to be very careful – otherwise Google may punish you badly.
I don’t like that they don’t integrate with any 3rd party email companies. No MailChimp, Madmimi, or campaign monitor… you’re stuck with their system, which will really annoy some people. One great thing about their email system however, is they offer drip emailing which is a powerful marketing tool.
AmeriCommerce Payments
Kind of a downfall. They do have most of the major payment gateways, but it seems very USA oriented. AmeriCommerce (like their name suggests) is an American company and they focus almost entirely on the American market.
As far as merchant services goes, they have partnered with Authorize.net and will encourage you to use them. It will cost an additional $14.95/mo plus a 1.98% transaction fee plus $0.28 per transaction. That’ll come with a gateway and merchant account.
AmeriCommerce Security & Uptime
Very reliable. In fact AmeriCommerce is undoubtedly one of the most secure shopping carts available.
Every store uses a shared SSL certificate, and the platform is PCI-Compliant. They offer dedicated SSL certificates if you prefer.
AmeriCommerce Customer Support
Hit or miss. They don’t really tell you much about customer support in their websites feature tour, or on the pricing and signup page. So, all plans do some with support, but they offer a few different tiers.
Like all ecommerce software, you can submit a support ticket 24/7, but their phone support is only available Monday – Friday 9-5 (Central Time Zone…. annoying)
You can try solving your problem using their knowledgebase or forum, but neither of which are very rich. I would rank their support below average compared to the other platforms I have reviewed.
Here is a comment I found on another review site:
I have to say that I love Americommerce features and design flexibility. Their customer support is, however, the worst. After spending about 80 hours of labor time building out a new site within 4 days, I have been waiting 4 days for them to make the site live. Their network techs have limited technical knowledge, are slow to respond, and generally unapologetic in their behavior. I would say they rank as one of the worst experiences I have had in over a dozen years doing business on the net. (Source, September 2012)
Conclusion
Okay – I know there’s some negativity in my AmeriCommerce review, but it really is a good platform. I had a very good experience building an online store using their system. It’s true that I don’t like their backend, documentation, and their customer support is criticized on a few of the review sites out there, but their multi-storefront feature is beyond awesome, and I really like their product management.
Just wanted to stop by and say thanks for the review. The only thing I wanted to mention is that we do in fact have built-in integration with ConstantContact, CampaignMonitor, and ExactTarget and can potentially integrate with others with our url-based option
Ryan: Thanks for stopping by and reading my review!
Hi Rachel,
This is Justin at AmeriCommerce. I just want to say thank you for the review and consideration of AmeriCommerce. Honest and candid feedback is always helpful and I think you did a good job of summarizing your experience and research. Thanks so much for that!
Right away, let me just say we have some issues and areas of improvement – I think we all do.
The AmeriCommerce app is often criticized for our admin color scheme. Sorry about that! We have a commitment to improve the admin experience in the near future, I promise!
Likewise, I agree that the 25+ templates we offer for free are pretty standard and we often rely upon the power of our drag and drop Live Design tool so customers can push any of those templates into the right fit for their needs. I think our free templates will improve over time, but the design tools we have now will do some amazing things and I hope customers will try it for themselves.
The quoted review you posted from September 2012 is unfortunate and, I think, unusual. That specific case included a perfect storm of miscommunication, a highly technical customer (hence the 80 hours of labor in 4 days on his part) and frustration over our go live process. No doubt that review was posted in the heat of the moment – and who can blame him either. Admittedly, we could have done better. Within about a week that customer was able to custom design his site, fully set up his entire store, and get approved with our merchant services department to immediately accept credit cards. I’d say that’s still maps out to a success and he was very fast to market. But, we can do better and will continue to improve our processes and customer support.
On other fronts, we do support other email marketing services such as Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp and Constant Contact – or you can use the internal email marketing tools which use SendGrid for it’s near perfect delivery of emails ensuring store emails are less likely to be seen as spam or blacklisted. We think every customer should use the drip series emails regardless of their 3rd party email tools – it’s just too powerful to not use it. Plus when you use behavioral rules for orders, abandoned carts, and products – the drip series tool becomes an amazing customer cultivation tool all through email automation.
As you mentioned, it is pretty easy to start a store with AmeriCommerce, but so much of the feature depth goes unseen by first-time ecommerce users and can be intimidating if you aren’t expecting it.
AmeriCommerce seems to appeal to mature internet retailers – usually folks with an interest in customization and addressing specific use-cases they cannot address by our competitors. I think the result, for us, is that many of our customers come to us with custom design expectations, specific and highly detailed needs, and a desire to solve some specific problems. This is where we often excel, but we welcome new-to-ecommerce customers and think we do a good job with those customers too – they just need to expect direct access to some more complex tools they might not yet need.
While we have not fully fleshed out our international tools, we have many customers in UK, Australia, and India already. I feel like this is evidence that we are moving in the right direction to properly support customers who are not in America. Agreeably the live customer support being limited to (these are the correct hours) 8am – 7pm Central Time is a weakness for our international customers and we hope to overcome that as our business grows.
Lastly, I wanted to add that all AmeriCommerce stores include a free Facebook theme and Facebook app so merchants can sell their entire product catalog in Facebook without much effort. The AddTo Cart link generator you mentioned is actually being expanded for 2013 to include even more features to allow for embedding more than just products, but also the items in cart, customer login and more so customers will literally be able to sell everywhere, blogs, apps, etc.
Thanks again for taking a look at AmeriCommerce. We appreciate it.
Please let me know if you have any questions and I welcome your feedback.
Thanks,
Justin McCullough on behalf of AmeriCommerce
Justin: Thanks for your honest and extensive response to my AmeriCommerce review. It’s nice to hear you admit that there’s lots of room for improvement… of course there is, every cart has pain points! I’ve noted your integration with Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and others… I’ll make sure your review is update to reflect that! Thanks so much for stopping by and keep up the hard work over there at AmeriCommerce! Cheers!
Rachel, thank you so much for your informative review of AmeriCommerce! I’ve been pouring over the features of at least half a dozen different hosted e-commerce platforms for several days, and AmeriCommerce was the only one that had absolutely everything I need.
Most platforms, including Bigcommerce and CoreCommerce, didn’t make the cut because they couldn’t handle subscriptions and recurring billing. The only other two that did, Volusion and ModularMerchant, were much more expensive than AmeriCommerce, and they have no built-in blogging features, either. Those two platforms drive up the price by requiring the purchase of an SSL certificate, while AmeriCommerce includes shared SSL for free. Volusion’s design upgrades (e.g., a simple slideshow) are very expensive, and ModularMerchant wants $50/month to host your store on your own domain name.
Starting at only $25/month, AmeriCommerce’s pricing was a very pleasant surprise, especially considering the unique feature set. Its rates for Authorize.net look very attractive, too. AmeriCommerce supports a long list of other payment gateways, like First Data and USA ePay, both of which are of particular interest to my clients and business partners.
I was considering building a prototype e-commerce site using Weebly Pro ($4/month) as the content management system, Ecwid Venture ($15/month) for selling physical products, and JotForm Premium ($10/month) to handle recurring billing for membership subscriptions, but AmeriCommerce combines all the functionality I need into a single platform at a lower monthly cost! Plus, it adds valuable advanced features like SSL protection and affiliate sales. A fully integrated solution like AmeriCommerce will result in a better shopping experience for customers and will streamline site administration for my client.
I’m looking forward to giving it a try!
Keep up the great work,
Fred Chapman
F.W. Chapman Solutions
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
P.S. Thanks to Justin and Ryan as well for their valuable additions to this review!
Haha thanks Fred. I get the feeling we’ve got a lot of AmeriCommerce employees and partners here.
Rachel, let me add this disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation with AmeriCommerce. If my earlier comment reads like marketing copy, it’s because I’ve been evaluating software for many years, and I take professional pride in producing polished prose. I also adore alliteration.
I’m a freelance IT consultant and run my own company. I discovered AmeriCommerce last week while doing a thorough evaluation of potential e-commerce solutions for a new client. I’m enthusiastic about AmeriCommerce because I found nothing else like it after doing three days of intensive research. I almost gave up my search in frustration, but decided to look at one last “Top Hosted e-Commerce Solutions” list, and there was AmeriCommerce. Maybe they could market it a little better???
My allegiance is to my clients rather than any particular platform. I strive to create the best solution I can for each client. AmeriCommerce looks like the best fit for this particular client’s project requirements and budget. I actually use WordPress for most of my client sites, but sometimes other platforms are more cost-effective than a self-hosted WordPress site.
Rachel, do you by any chance have experience with e-commerce plugins for WordPress? WooCommerce looks very attractive. Have you tried it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that!
Fred
P.S. If we do have a lot of AmeriCommerce employees and prospective customers on here, it’s probably because those are the only people who have ever heard of it!
It seems to be a rather well kept secret.