Infusionsoft vs 1Shoppingcart. The SMACK DOWN!!
As an Infusionsoft Consultant, or ICC, I am often asked to compare and contrast how Infusionsoft’s CRM / Salesforce Automation (SFA) / Marketing Automation platform stacks up to others options on the market.
1Shoppingcart vs Infusionsoft By Infusionsoft Consultant, Wes Schaeffer.
Copy of my notes with 1ShoppingCart on 5/12/09:
*Let me start off by saying that the young man that took my call for 18 minutes, 49 seconds this morning was polite, patient and helpful. He answered every question and gave me alternatives and examples of best practices for choosing and leveraging the features 1ShoppingCart offers.
(Following are my notes EXACTLY as I typed them into Notepad on my MacBook as I spoke to the sales rep. I’ll give a summary at the end.)
Constant Contact and AWeber are just email – no status.
1ShoppingCart – assign to mailing lists when they purchase, auto triggers. “Not quite a CRM” but it doesn’t give you a place to keep notes…
- can do searches for clients and send emails
- can create forms
- system shows orders for the time specified (hour / day, etc)
- can do recurring billing.
- join a mailing list and they become a prospect. When they buy they become a customer and they can get added to the “customer” list and they no longer receive prospecting emails.
- Pro Package – allows selling of eBooks and Affiliate Module. Not available in any other of their packages.
– Otherwise Basic is fine.
- 10,000 – 25,000 client records – customer / affiliates / prospects
– Basic – $88.50/mo - optin message must be sent to contacts that are imported the first time. I also get a “Second Chance OptIn” because we will lose some. It can be turned on every 6 weeks.
– Pro – $148.50 –
- As soon as they order they are automatically double-opted in and sent from protected white label server.
Only manages marketing and orders. Doesn’t keep tabs on people or projects long term.
AWeber / Constant Contact are good if you’re not doing eCommerce but 1ShoppingCart offers the basic autoresponder features, etc.
9/17/12 Update:
1Shoppingcart now offers three packages:
- Plus: 1 user license. $59/mo with a 1.25% Transaction Fee. Sell $5,000/mo your *real cost is $59 + $62.50 = $121.50.
- Premium: 2 licenses. $99/mo with a 1% Transaction Fee. Sell $5,000/mo your *real cost is $99 + $50 = $149.00.
- Ultimate: 4 licenses. $249/mo with a .75% Transaction Fee. Sell $5,000/mo your *real cost is $249 + $37.50 = $286.50
*THE 1SHOPPINGCART GOTCHA #1: That little (*) for 1Shoppingcart says they will bill you 13 times a year if you opt for monthly billing. So the REAL REAL cost is:
- Plus: $63.92/mo + $62.50 = $126.42.
- Premium: $107.25 + $50 = $157.25.
- Ultimate: $269.75 + $37.50 = $307.25
Fine print on 1Shoppingcart vs Infusionsoft. 1Shoppingcart bills you 13 times a year!
Why would 1Shoppingcart sneak in a 13th payment on their clients?
I understand the time value of money but I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut a ton of their clients never notice this at all and a ton more only notice it after they are ass-deep into using the program and are too invested in it to switch. I WOULD NOT want to be the 1Shoppingcart sales rep taking THAT call when a client realizes they have to pay more than they were led to believe!
More realistic pricing:
If a company is using the 1Shoppingcart Premium they are probably doing $10,000 per month in sales and if they are using the 1Shoppingcart Ultimate they are probably doing $20,000 in sales. Here is what the realistic 1Shoppingcart pricing would be at those levels:
- Premium: $107.25/mo with a 1% Fee. Sell $10,000/mo your real REAL cost is $107.25 + $100 = $207.25.
- Ultimate: $269.75/mo with a .75% Fee. Sell $20,000/mo your real REAL cost is $269.75 + $150 = $419.75.
If you ordered Infusionsoft’s Plus Package you’d have:
- 5 Licenses.
- 20,000 Contacts.
- 500,000 emails/month
- Unlimited storage.
- A shopping cart with no additional fees.
- True monthly billing.
- Automated follow-up sequences with If/Then segmentation.
- A CRM with Linked Contacts, Opportunity Management and Automated Triggers.
- An Affiliate Marketing platform.
- Free, unlimited support. (Not an added $34/mo like 1Shoppingcart.)
- All for $1,999 setup from yours truly and $299/mo.
- Premium: $207.25/mo + $34/mo support = $241.25/mo.
- Ultimate: $419.75/mo + $34/mo support = $453.75/mo.
12-24-36-48 Month Real Cost of 1Shoppingcart vs Infusionsoft
- 1Shopping Cart Ultimate at $453.75/mo = $5,445 + $5,445 + $5,445 + $5,445 = $21,780 over four years.
- Infusionsoft Plus at $1,999 setup + $299/mo = $1,999 + $3,588 + $3,588 + $3,588 + $3,588 = $16,351.
So if you’re doing $20,000/mo in sales you are paying 1Shoppingcart 33.2% more over 48 months. Not only that, I can guarantee you are also paying for some other type of tool such as:
- Constant Contact or AWeber for Email Blasts / Newsletters so go ahead and tack on another $1,600 – $2,500 over four years.
- Salesforce or Sugar CRM or Act! for your CRM so go ahead and pile on another $1,440 – $3,120 per user over four years. Want 5 users like Infusionsoft offers with their Plus plan? That’ll be as much as $15,600 for four years if you have just the Salesforce Professional at $65/user per month. Yikes!
- Excuse me while I take off my shoes to add this up. These are SOME BIG numbers: $21,780 + $2,500 + $15,600 = $39,880 vs $16,351.
Why did I pick 48 months? Because as of this update, 09/17/12, I have been an Infusionsoft Consultant for four years and I know many Infusionsoft users that have been using the software for that long and longer. So four years is what I know so far.
If you have a business doing just $240,000 in sales you are paying $24,097 too much every four years if you are running the mishmash of programs listed above and you owe it to yourself to take a long hard look at working my team and me to help you implement Infusionsoft.
Conclusion: 1ShoppingCart is an excellent tool for businesses whether they have a product / eCommerce offering established or not because they provide the same email functionality as an AWeber or Constant Contact for about the same price.
However, as your business grows and you develop products for sale (which I highly recommend) 1ShoppingCart lets you stay within their system
and simply upgrade your package to activate their more advanced features.
However-However, the sales rep made no bones about the fact that 1ShoppingCart is not a CRM! There are no places for notes to keep tabs on longer term prospects and/or clients. While this is not a big deal for some businesses an IT client of mine just received an RFP from a city in California 5 YEARS after they first met! If they did not have a CRM in place to store notes, diagrams / schematics, etc. they would have had to keep those notes in Outlook or printed out, which a ton of small businesses do, unfortunately.
One of the benefits of a CRM is the ability to keep a history on your customers in one place to ease and accelerate the transition of accounts between sales people when there are promotions and/or turnover.
Infusionsoft gives you CRM, email, eCommerce, webforms, sales force automation, marketing automation, etc right out of the gate.
While Infusionsoft may appear to be overkill for some businesses that’s really only the case for hobbyists and/or people that just really don’t want to grow. I’m sure there were businesses in the early and even late 90′s that said,
- “Email? We don’t need no stinkin’ email. We have an olive green rotary phone that has taken orders just fine since Great Grand Pappy opened “
- “Website? We don’t need no stinkin’ website. People know right where we’re located and if not they can look us up in the Yellow Pages.”
- “Broadband internet? What in the heck is so important on the internet that you need to look at it that fast? Dial up is just fine.”
You have two choices in business: Grow or Die.
Napoleon Hill said to surround yourself with successful people. So look beyond those that recommend the minimum if your goal is to truly grow. By surrounding yourself with visionary friends and partners and associates you’ll make back the extra you may spend on Infusionsoft in as little as 30 days because we are all entrepreneurs ourselves doing everything we can to grow and grow rapidly.
Like Home Depot says, “You can do it. We can help.”
Give me a call to see if Infusionsoft really is right for you, even if it requires a bit of a stretch and a little dreaming. If it’s not right for you today I’ll tell you. I’ll also tell you what you must do to get to the point that you need Infusionsoft.
Either way I can promise you three things:
- It will cost some money to get where you want to go.
- It will take some work and a heck of a lot of thinking to set it up.
- Once it’s set up you’ll be set free and you’ll never look back.
Ready to get started with Infusionsoft today and lock in these bonuses?
- Save up to $2,896 on your first year of Infusionsoft by working with the guy that literally wrote the book on Infusionsoft.
- Get up to $847.99 in Infusionsoft bonuses and training material.
- Get access to $599.64 in live weekly Infusionsoft training.
Simply follow this link to Order Infusionsoft Today and my team and I will get you started with a bang!
Good selling,
~Wes
