About seven years ago AmeriCommerce seemed to be poised to become one of the leading ecommerce platforms. And maybe seeing that the financial industry giant Capital One bought it. Then something went wrong. First AmeriCommerce became SparkPay and then it just seemed to lose all the traction it had. However, a while ago the team behind the AmeriCommerce platform acquired it, raised funding and thus AmeriCommerce was reborn. In this review, I look at how good this old and new AmeriCommerce is.
What is good about AmeriCommere
The first thing I really like about AmeriCommerce is that they have no sales limits. In practice sales limits mean that you can only generate a certain amount of revenue before you are upgraded to a more expensive plan – and unfortunately those sales limits are quite common among ecommerce platforms.
The lack of sales limits means that using AmeriCommerce might in practice be cheaper than picking an ecommerce platform that is initially cheaper, but that forces you to quickly upgrade to a more expensive plan once you start generating revenue.
The second thing I like about AmeriCommerce is that their platform makes it easy to design traditional (but not outdated) looking ecommerce stores. Those stores where the products, instead of flashy graphics, are the main thing. Obviously, the fact that is that the traditional product grid -look fits some industries much better than others.
The third thing I really like about AmeriCommerce is that all their store themes are free. While all the major ecommerce platforms have some free themes, most of the themes on other platforms cost at least $100. Depending on your budget even that $100 can make a big difference.
The fourth thing I like about AmeriCommerce is that they give a good amount of freedom for modifying the URLs of store pages. That might not seem like a big deal but at least Shopify can be annoyingly strict with how the URLs of your store pages have to be.
What I don’t really like about AmeriCommerce
The main thing I don’t like about AmeriCommerce is their pricing. The cheapest plan, Essentials costs $49/month with a monthly subscription and while you can get a small discount on that when calculated in per month basis when picking an annual subscription, AmeriCommerce is still not as cheap as at least most other ecommerce platforms.
The second thing I don’t really like about AmeriCommerce is that it can be difficult to do dropshipping when using their platform. This as it appears that at least at the time of writing this, there are no dropshipping app intregrations available for AmeriCommerce.
The third thing I don’t like about AmeriCommerce is that while they don’t have a sales limit on any of their plans, they do have a product number limit on all but their most expensive plan. Meaning, for example, that on the cheapest plan you can have at most a selection of 500 prodcuts for sale. Granted, for lot of businesses that is well enough to have all the products they sell listed in the store.
And the fourth thing I believe AmeriCommerce could improve on is their transaction fees. That is as even on their most expensive plan you have to pay 2.3% + 30c of each sale you make in transaction fees.
That at least 2.3%+30c might not sound like a lot, but if you manage to generate a lot of sales those fees can really add up. If you are looking for an ecommerce solution that does not charge transaction fees, I would recommend BigCommerce.
Summary of AmeriCommerce reviews by others
For the sake of this article, I wanted to find out how others felt about AmeriCommerce. Here is a summary of some of the pros and cons mentioned by them.
AmeriCommerce pros:
- Great customer service.
- Allows for a lot of customization.
- Themes and plugins are free with a subscription.
AmeriCommerce cons:
- The platform can be a bit complicated.
- The platform is not maybe as technically advanced as it could be.
- It can be pricey to get customization done on your store – this obviously assuming that you need to hire someone to do it.
Should you use AmeriCommerce as your ecommerce platform?
The boring and maybe somewhat annoying answer to this question is: it depends. This as while AmeriCommerce is not the cheapest nor maybe for many situations the best ecommerce platform, it can be a good choice for running a simple, traditional, ecommerce store.
Quick questions and answers about AmeriCommerce
Which AmeriCommerce plan should I pick?
In a lot of cases the cheapest AmeriCommerce plan, “Essentials”, is good enough to start with. Then if your store starts getting popular you can easily upgrade to a more advanced plan.
Can people from outside America use AmeriCommerce?
Yes. Despite of its name people from at least some other parts of the world than America can also sign up for AmeriCommerce. However, it is good to note that if you are from a country that AmeriCommerce does not see as a key market for them, your options regarding the possible payment gateways to integrate with AmeriCommerce might be quite limited.
Which payment gateways does AmeriCommerce work with?
AmeriCommerce works with a rather large number of payment gateways. Some of the most well known of them include, for example, Stripe and PayPal.