About the CMS
If you're wondering why Propcart's CMS and website builder is super basic or why we use Markdown, this article is for you.
The Big CMS Platforms
You might be familiar with CMSs or website builders like WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, etc. These systems specialize in helping you create professional websites and web pages using a "no-code" CMS. All of them now offer an ecommerce option that allows selling products off the website.
Propcart doesn't try to compete with these companies. They're already excellent at what they do: general purpose website builders for the mass market. And there are many wonderful web designers you can hire to build you a beautiful website on one of these platforms. If you have a small retail or service business, these are great options.
How Propcart is different
These Big CMS Platforms are not purpose-built to support rentals or the unique needs of prop houses. And that's where we shine.
At Propcart, we focus on creating the best overall ecommerce solution for prop houses, prop fabricators and cleared art galleries.
Usually, the main goals for prop companies are:
- Get prop inventory online efficiently and affordably
- Make it discoverable to customers, and
- Streamline the sales and billing processes
All so you can serve customers FAST.
Creating an expensive and flashy homepage almost never comes up in our sales calls. And that's because set decorators and prop masters care more about the inventory than the home page. Does the prop house have what they need? If so, a good website helps them find those props fast. Otherwise, the sale is lost, or the busy staff have to respond to another email or phone call.
Propcart only works with prop companies. Since our beginning in 2018, we've learned a lot about what they want and how to solve their tech problems quickly. After surveying our customers, we wrote the prop house hierarchy of needs for how most of our clients prioritize their business. This informs how we prioritize our software features.
Propcart's CMS
Propcart does not offer a Squarespace-level website builder or CMS with "no-code" control over the web page design and website theme. If you are expecting that experience, you will be disappointed.
The market for prop house software is small. Thus, our engineering team is small and we just don't have the resources to create a world class CMS like Squarespace. And we probably never will. But you're probably not choosing Propcart for our CMS anyway, so this is not a dealbreaker for most prop houses.
Propcart's CMS offers nine simple templates that cover most use cases. Our goal here is to give our customers control over the content of their web pages so that they can make changes without our help.
Enterprise Clients
However, should you want a custom web page that our templates don't support, and you have the budget for it, we'd love to work with you! If you provide us with a design or examples, we can build it. We support several Enterprise clients with custom web pages that don't use our CMS templates.
Agencies
We welcome third-party web design and development agencies. Agencies who specialize in web design, branding, storytelling, copywriting and SEO usually provide a higher quality service than what Propcart can offer. These are not our core competencies, but we're happy to work with them and incorporate their work into your Propcart website.
We also have a way to allow third-party web pages to use our CMS and integrate with our website builder.