Constant Contact is a full-featured email marketing solution with capabilities such as social media integration, drag-and-drop editing, and real-time reporting. It is a bulk email tool designed for SMB customers. Since 2019, Constant Contact also offers marketing automation features, a website and landing page builder, and other tools to support midsize businesses.
$12
per month
X-Cart
Score7.8 out of 10
N/A
X-Cart is an eCommerce and shopping cart platform built through PHP code.
$199
per month
Pricing
Constant Contact
X-Cart
Editions & Modules
Lite
Starting at $12.00
per month
Standard
Starting at $35.00
per month
Premium
Starting at $80.00
per month
Platform
Starting at $199
per month
Auto
Starting at $299
per month
Marketplace
Starting at $399
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Constant Contact
X-Cart
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
The SMS Marketing tool can be added to any Standard or Premium Constant Contact account. SMS is only available in the US for Standard and Premium paid plans. SMS can be added when logged in to an account after purchase. Plans start at $10/month for up to 500 messages.
Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
X-cart uses Smarty Templates in a PHP environment which means there are many developers who could probably pick it up relatively quickly to provide new features. The smarty template engine is very robust and well documented, and the cost of x-cart is very low which makes it easy for anyone to get started with their e-commerce business. It is a really great e-commerce software and suitable for every business. I actually cannot find any serious objection to what it does. They regularly update it, add new features, fix flaws, offer support. The software itself offers many integrations for shipping and payments, everything you need for sales. Although it covers many things, there will always be something missing, because many things happen in between customer visit and final delivery. Therefore, if you plan to expand your business, also plan to expand your X-Cart - but do not worry, it won't be hard.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.
For everyone. From small to huge business you get everything out of box. Just setup company details, payment and shipping methods and you are ready to go.
Upgradable. There are many plugins one can integrate with X-Cart. Over time, many of them became part of the software, and you are one click away to enable them.
Well organized code. It uses Smarty template engine, which I find great, specially for debugging (famous Webmaster mode).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Creating new plugins the way X-Cart wants is maybe not complicated, but hard to implement because there are no hooks. One has to manually change each file. This is similar to patching the core and therefore one has to know basics of web development.
Even if you get everything styled correctly with base skin, there is a bunch of unused styles you have to cope with. Start skin should be much cleaner. You may find thousands excess lines of code.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.
There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours
I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.
Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding
Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.
Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Flexibility in presentation as well as functionality
Full open source software allows for unlimited possibilities with the store function, though some developers who create modules do encode their modules which have errors in their code which therefore can't be fixed
A fully functional professional level application at a fraction of the cost of similar applications such as magento.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
