Fortune3 Review
Fortune3 is a Florida-based company with a long history of e-commerce experience. First starting up the Fortune3 wizard may generate one of two impressions. If you have done your homework about e-commerce, are aware of your needs, and have your website planned out then you will find the plethora of options and settings to be exactly what you are looking for. If not, and are merely dabbling with the idea of selling products or services online, then you will almost certainly be overwhelmed. Fortune3 is what you would call a high-end and full-featured shopping cart application.
Highlights
Regarding the SEO aspect of Fortune3 shopping cart software, you have the ability to add title tags and description and keyword meta-tags. Note that the importance of these fields are not stressed so if you are not SEO-savvy, you may miss opportunities to properly optimize your online store and product pages. Yet the fields are there, so that is a step up from many other e-commerce solutions. The cart offers breadcrumbs which can help with SEO.
From a content perspective, this cart allows you to add text in the category section above the product listings. That could help you if you are tyring to optimize your category pages. As it should, the product pages allow you to add and edit text as needed.
Your store is meant to be found but smart store owners know that sending out email marketing news letters from time to time is important for repeat sales. Fortune3 comes with basic software to send out mass emails. Keep in mind that this does not fully replace a professional service which typically gets more emails to an inbox than a junk mail folder, but it can be very useful. Fortune3 is one of the relatively few shopping cart systems to offer this advantage.
Another good sales feature is the ability to cross sell your products meaning that once someone is interested in a given product, you can point out that the consumer may also be interested in other specific items.
In terms of usability, other than one or two pop-up tips there isn’t any hand-holding when using the Fortune3 wizard which is fantastic for those who pick up information relatively easily and prefer to figure options out on their own. Passing through a step-by-step process full of descriptions, help bubbles and suggestions for this type of robust e-commerce platform would be overkill given how many possible fields are available. Instead, Fortune3 provides a help options on every screen that opens up the help section on their website where you can easily and quickly scan for the field you are interested in and obtain immediate clarification as to its purpose. While this may intimidate some inexperienced users only a couple of hours creating practice pages are needed in order to get into the flow of creating your e-commerce pages.
An important consideration for many programmers when it comes to e-commerce platforms is the ability to integrate it into an existing website. This means being able to use a store template that matches the template already in use. Fortune3 offers a template editor which allows you to take an existing template which they offer and modify it to match your website’s style. This can be done through the Fortune3 HTML Editor, a WYSIWYG behemoth that allows you to edit nearly every aspect you wish. Alternatively you can edit the template in Dreamweaver. For those not inclined to edit templates themselves, Fortune3 has an option to purchase professional templates or even have a template custom designed for you.
Limitations
As a store owner, you have a limited ability to adjust your permalinks. You have the ability to have a mix of hyphens and underscores, and cannot customize the words in the permalink.
As previously stated, this platform is not for those who aren’t dedicated to their e-commerce venture. There is an enormous amount of options so that if you are not dedicated to your project you may very well abandon this wizard for one with not so steep of a learning curve, otherwise be prepared to read and explore for several hours before the system begins to make sense to you as it lacks a certain degree of intuitiveness. To be fair, most shopping cart systems tend to take several hours of “figuring out time” to learn what needs to be done. In this case, the vast selection of cart options may require a little more effort to figure out. That said, keep in mind that running a business means taking time to use the tools to make it great. It is strongly recommended that you try the demo before purchasing your package to ensure that this cart suits you.
Fortune3 is a hosted solution meaning that you point your web address to their servers and the entire store resides there. There’s nothing wrong with that but to edit the website, you have to download software which is unusual. (The editing software does not work on a Mac).
Overall
Fortune3 is a feature-rich hosted solution shopping cart. It has several elements of SEO and Internet marketing that you could benefit from. The system will take some time to learn and it is recommended that you hire a professional web/graphic designer to customize the look of the site. While basic SEO involves getting target market consumers to your website, an unpleasant design will turn many of them away. Out of the box, Fortune3 provides a good basic template to work from.
I am very pleased with the Fortune3 ecommerce software and also with their website hosting services and customer support.
The Fortune3 shopping cart offers an efficient ecommerce website solution to sell online anything from products to services: From real products that can be customized by the customer while shopping online to photos, downloadable products, and gift certificates as well.
The PC base interface to build the online storefront is fast and easy. The product import feature through Excel is organized and so fast that creating and modifying the online store takes just a few minutes.
From the data entry to managing the online store, the Fortune3 shopping cart software is an incredible tool to run and online business seamlessly.
I think that this program can achieve results comparable to the large online shopping carts. Among hosted shopping carts Fortune3 is an excellent choice.
Aside from the fact that they try to hide the fact that they charge a transaction fee, their software is fragmented, disjointed, and buggy. Their technical support is downright lousy.
Their software is fragmented into two parts- a so-called Wizard that runs on your PC (sorry, MAC users), and a web interface. There is overlap between the two which causes confusion.
If you make a product change, you can not preview the changes without first uploading your store, which means it goes on-line. You then have to upload it a second time to be able to create a rescue file- otherwise you can not retrieve your store. There is even a situation where you have to do a dummy upload from your PC when you use their web interface, otherwise changes made on the web interface won’t take effect. Ridiculous!
Technical support is insulting and rude. They consistently push back if you report a problem in their software to them. For example, if you click on a product, and a DIFFERENT product opens for editing, they say that is fine and there is no problem.
Fortune3 offers an over-priced and very clumsy approach to eCommerce, and their support is worthless. If you need eCommerce, go elsewhere.
a less than average cart with very few or no feature upgrades,they say it is easily customizable but it is not, and if you need fortune3 to do any customization, then get ready to pay through your nose, for a normal Geotrust ssl(quick ssl premium)
certificate which cost$149, fortune will charge you $349 a whopping $200 margin.
like this you will be paying a premium for every small modifications/changes
and above all like a cherry on top the most abusive support staff I’ve ever seen, they will insult you without any reason
if I have to rate them, I will give a generous 1/5
if you are planning to subscribe, do that at your own risk
BEWARE! Providing my domain name was required just to try them out. They don’t inform you that from the moment you sign up for a trial, they put your ‘site’ out on the Internet for search engines like Google, etc, and your customers to find. People were ordering from my site (they thought), but it was going into Fortune3 cart. Months after I cancelled my account with them. I only tried their service for 2 weeks (horrible support!), yet they still have my account active! I’ve lost customers, sales, and credibility. Fortune’s explanation? “It was a misunderstanding”. I’m reporting them.