3dcart vs SiteCube Website Builder
Choose the right eCommerce platform to start and grow your business
VS.
Sitecube, a software company founded in 2006, currently sells technology for building websites using HTML 5 or Flash. According to their own website, they designed this solution specifically for small businesses and “independent professionals.” Sitecube’s tools cover a range of eCommerce website needs, including SEO, image galleries, and even extensive animation. Sitecube’s goal with all their products is to make everything as simple as possible for people with less experience in both business and technical matters.
3dcart began development in the late 1990s, grown directly from the shopping cart software experience of Gonzalo Gil, founder and CEO. Gonzalo developed shopping cart customizations for numerous eCommerce merchants, and he conceived 3dcart as the ultimate eCommerce platform that would bring all the most-demanded, necessary features together into one streamlined solution. Since then, 3dcart has continued to grow its capabilities through integrations, apps, and more built-in features including the best SEO tools on the market.
Many eCommerce solutions offer tools and services that take care of the most essential tasks for running an online store. Sitecube offers these basic features and little else, severely limiting what you can do. However, they do stand out with an emphasis on graphics and sound, pushing users to add animated intros, flashy button graphics, music integrations, and sound effects. All this is largely because Sitecube’s program is not specifically for creating online stores, but for building websites in general — and flashy, excessive ones at that.
On the other hand, 3dcart offers a wide range of features, design possibilities, and apps that were all designed with eCommerce companies in mind. We are serious about providing a complete solution specifically for online retailers, and we strive to give people anything they might want to create a beautiful, successful store.
Free trialPeople who like testing something before making any commitments will be disappointed by Sitecube’s free trial, which lasts only ten days. 3dcart offers a 15-day free trial, and with the purchase of any plan, you can get an extra month for free. Plus, unlike Sitecube, we’ve never had customers complain about being drafted into paid plans after their free trial ended.
Number of products and pagesSitecube’s Flash Website Builder caps the number of products your store can carry at 240. This might not sound like a big deal to smaller businesses, but limiting your inventory like this can seriously hold them back and stunt their growth. For plans starting at $29.99 per month, 3dcart lets you offer as many products as you want. That’s one less obstacle on your path to success.
“Sitecube ‘has it all’ in the least pleasant meaning of the term. An obsession with tacky animation? Barely any room for customization? Outdated technology? They’ve got all this and more. Yikes.”
– Ex-Sitecube customer
Technical supportNegative stories about Sitecube’s bizarrely belligerent technical support are abundant. 3dcart knows that you only call when you need it the most, and our highly-trained tech experts are ready to provide you with excellent service. We’re available to answer your questions any time and any day, and we can assist you with problems big and small.
Sitecube and 3dcart offer free templates for your online store, but which ones are the best? Let’s note the differences.
Sitecube’s themes all come free, but compared with other solutions, there are not many to enjoy. Their HTML5 Website Builder offers little more than 40 designs. While their Flash Website Builder does include more than 100 pre-built themes, Flash does not work on iPhones and other Apple iOS devices. With more and more people doing their e-shopping on mobile devices, choosing this as your platform would mean alienating a potentially massive audience. They also come at the stiffer price of limited customization options and rather dated design philosophy. Combine all this with Sitecube’s insistence on prioritizing an overuse of animation and media players, and you find that this platform’s themes tend to produce websites that are difficult to take seriously.
3dcart offers 50+ free ecommerce themes, each with their own unique designs, and we are constantly adding more. These modern and professional templates cover a wide range of moods and styles so that any client can find one that best suits the tone of their brand. Because we do not rely on Flash, all of these website designs also work on mobile devices. They even automatically scale to the size of the screen. 3dcart’s own site builder program gives users extensive options for customization, and having some knowledge of HTML and CSS only expands the opportunities. You can control just about every aspect of your website’s look.
3dcart support more than 160 different payment solutions. You can see them all on our long list of eCommerce payment gateways.
Sitecube isn’t a dedicated eCommerce platform, so they only let you enable Paypal, 2Checkout, and a few others.
3dcart knows that eCommerce businesses need to rank high on search engines, so we provide all the SEO tools you’ll ever need. Learn more about our SEO features today.
Sitecube’s SEO features are limited, and they only get less useful over time. Google constantly changes their standards, and Sitecube doesn’t keep up.
The information on this comparison page that was created by 3dcart was believed to be accurate as of 11/1/2013.
