UltraCart Review
Detailed Reviews
UltraCart was founded by a company called BPS Info Solutions which has been in operation since 1997. While the website states that the company is in business for 15 years, BPS Info Solutions has been around for close to 20 years. The company is headquartered in United States.
Unique Proposition
What’s unique about UltraCart in comparison to most of the other popular webshop software is the fact that UltraCart is not provided as a separate website containing just an online store. UltraCart is meant to integrate with your existing website. In order to deploy UltraCart, you have to paste a snippet of code on your website which generates a "buy now" link through which customers can proceed to make a purchase. This may either be beneficial or disadvantageous to you.
Core Features
UltraCart comes with all the useful features you would expect from an online shopping cart, including a product catalogue, variable pricing and shipping, discounts and marketing options as well as optimization for search engines. It is also equipped with industry standard PCI compliant security. It also provides plenty of options for shipping such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. with special additional features like restricting certain locations and also giving customers the option of shipping insurance.
Variable Pricing
With UltraCart, you can heavily customize your finished goods by choosing different sizes of product as well as including add-on features such as printing a company logo on a product for example. You simply need to pre-configure these elements and customers have the option of ordering accordingly.
Chargeback and Refunds
No shop owner wants to hear about refunds, but unlike competitors, UltraCart does not shy away from this very important issue. UltraCart has an efficient system for dispute handling and charge back. The service also prepares the necessary documents to be faxed to your merchant and process the refund when required.
"Buy now" Link Generation
With UltraCart, you sell your products first by showcasing them and promoting them on any ordinary website and then proceed to add the item to UltraCart after which the software generates a “buy now” link for that specific product which can be published on your website. This makes it ideal if your purpose is to sell a limited number of products on a website that offers other services such as content as well. If you want a full-fledged store as your primary and only feature of your website however, UltraCart may not be suitable.
Marketing
UltraCart comes with a few nifty features to help customer retention. One such feature which may be considered obtrusive by some, but can help improve conversions is the exit popup, a javascript pop up that interrupts the user when you attempt to close your shopping website window.
It also provides built-in email marketing features so you don't need to pay separately for an email marketing service, although deliverability and the quality may not compare to a dedicated email marketing service. They also provide upselling options during checkout.
Another useful feature titled "recovery email" is UltraCart's way of describing promoting to users who abandoned their shopping carts.
Mobile Support
UltraCart has no standard mobile support which can raise a few red flags. This is one of the main disadvantages of the product as e-commerce is quickly shifting to a mobile device activity. This factor varies by product type, audience and geographic location so this may not be a deciding factor if your site analytics suggests that most users visit your website via a desktop computer.
Free Trial
This is one of the most beneficial features of the product where you have the opportunity to test the software for a full 30 days without taking your credit card out of your wallet. Most shopping cart software provides a 15 day trial, which sometimes may not be sufficient. So if you go through with the trial, you will have enough time to make a sound decision. On top of this, full support and features are available in the trial version.
Pricing
UltraCart applies a 0% transaction fee on all plans. In addition, UltraCart provides all features for all plans which is somewhat rare among shopping carts which tend to cripple features depending on the plan you select. The tiers of service are separate based on number of products and total sales revenue per month. This may or may not suit you. You can purchase additional bandwidth and other upsell features such as Google Product listings as well as disk storage capacity.
Conclusion
May not be the right choice if you do not have another medium such as a website or blog to sell, but if you have an established user base on another website, UltraCart may just be the perfect option.