The shopping cart (whether you use 1shoppingcart, kickstartcart, autowebbusiness, etc. — they’re all the same) has announced a price increase on its Pro package which amounts to approximately 30%.
And everywhere people are complaining and looking to leave the cart.
Before getting all riled up, let’s take a quick look at the facts:
- I’ve had the Pro version for about 7 years and this is the FIRST price increase. Other things have consistently gone up, not the cart, despite adding new features over the years.
- Many business owners don’t understand the full capabilities of the cart and so don’t earn as much revenue as they could be just from implementing a few one-time-set-and-forget steps such as related products, featured products, upsells, downsells, etc.
- Many business owners rave that Infusionsoft can do so much more and yes, it can absolutely do a lot more than the standard cart — at almost twice the monthly price. And, when one client told me about all the great things Infusionsoft was going to do for her, many were things that “the cart” can do — her VA just didn’t know it. Some simple examples are ad tracking (it’s great to know whether social media is really bringing you revenue), auto unsubscribe (no sense sending promo emails to people who have already signed up), etc.
Am I thrilled about a 7 day notice of a roughly 30% price increase? HELL no! I think the person in charge of that announcement needs a serious lesson in Extreme Client Care™, but before racing off to the next “solution”, we need to do our due diligence.
For example…Many of the “solutions” require more than one system: a cart and an autoresponder (and those costs — in terms of time to learn/use, energy and money — add up) whereas the cart has them “all in one”.
I recognize the importance of the bottom line in our businesses. I also recognize that while we’ll do our due diligence to see if there’s a better option for my business, I’m not going to waste precious time complaining about someone’s poor implementation of a decision.
And realistically, we’re talking about $30/month. If people spent as much time on their business as they are complaining about this, they could have generated the revenue to pay for the increase over the next year.