Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform. Beyond just tracking how campaigns perform, Mailchimp takes it a step further by analyzing data from over half a billion emails to show why campaigns perform, driving informed decisions.
$0
per month
X-Cart
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
X-Cart is an eCommerce and shopping cart platform built through PHP code.
For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.
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.
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
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).
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.
We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.
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.
