SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Host Tom Antion wraps up his three-part series on modern shopping carts by explaining how using a comprehensive shopping cart system—specifically Kartra—can save entrepreneurs thousands of dollars per year by eliminating the need for various third-party services.
Key Points Covered:
• Part 1 (Episode 985): Covered the essential features of modern shopping carts.
• Part 2 (Episode 986): Focused on automation capabilities that save time and increase revenue.
• Part 3 (this episode): Focuses on cost-saving benefits of an all-in-one system like Kartra.
Major Tools and Services You Can Eliminate:
1. If-then automation tools for email behavior triggers.
2. Text broadcasting systems.
3. Webinar software (e.g., GoToWebinar – saving $700+/year).
4. Help desk platforms for customer support.
5. Online scheduling tools (though Tom personally dislikes them).
6. Email marketing services (e.g., MailChimp) – warns against using free providers due to poor deliverability.
7. Funnel and page builders – these are included and integrated in Kartra.
8. Online course platforms (e.g., Teachable, Udemy) – promotes building and selling courses on your own system to retain full control and profits.
Additional Highlights:
• Tom emphasizes saving money is as crucial as making money.
• He warns against using free tools that compromise deliverability or professionalism.
• He reiterates that integration across tools boosts efficiency and ROI.
• Advocates for his Internet Marketing School (IMTCVA.org) – the only licensed, dedicated internet marketing school in the U.S., ideal for people who want real, high-demand skills without the baggage of a traditional degree.
Tom encourages listeners to:
• Review all three parts of the series.
• Take advantage of his free automation eBook.
• Explore his mentor program and digital marketing school.
• Check out Kartra with a free trial and discount at screwthecommute.com/kartra.

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Episode 987 – Modern Carts Part 3
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute, the entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multi-millionaire Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 987 of Screw the Commute podcast. This is the third part of a three part series on modern shopping carts. Part one was all the kinds of features that you should have with your shopping cart, so you look modern and it automates things for you. And part two was specifically on the automation, things that can save you enormous amounts of time and make you a lot more money. Now, this part three is how you can save a ton of money by having all of these kinds of features that you would have to buy external programs, for which I have done, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on them over the year, and get rid of them, because it's all included in a modern day shopping cart system. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And you probably want to listen to those other episodes if you if you missed them, anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number part one was 985, part two was 986, and this is 987. Also pick up a copy of my automation book. It's free, and check out these two major things that you can't get anywhere else.

[00:01:43] That's my mentor program, the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And I always triple dog dare anybody to put their program up against mine, and they go hide under rocks because they can't even come close to the kind of service that I give over all these years. And then the other thing is the I think it's been running 13 years now, the longest running and only internet and digital marketing dedicated school in the country, probably the world. You see a lot of people calling themselves a university and and a school, but they never went through any scrutiny or or anything to get actually licensed, which we did. We're certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But it's distance learning, so you don't have to be in Virginia. It could be anywhere and go to this school. So that's at IMTCVA.org.

[00:02:40] All right. Let's get into some of the the money you could save if you had a good quality shopping cart system. And after 100 hours of evaluating 44 other carts, I chose Kartra because of all the criteria that you'd see on the, you know, part one of this series. So that's what we're talking about. And while I'm at it, I'll tell you you can get a more in-depth treatise on all this. I did a webinar on this where you can go to.

[00:03:12] Access the free course that I built and go to the webinar section. And you can watch about an hour long webinar that really goes into more depth on this stuff and gives you a lot of marketing tips while you're there. Okay. Let's see. So here's some of the the things, in no particular order that have saved me a lot of money and has saved lots of people, a lot of money because they don't have to buy these individual services. And one of them, I remember spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars not only to purchase the system, but to get it to work. Okay. And that's if then things. So back in the old days, I mean, I haven't. Oh, jeez. It's been a while since I spent this money on this. But if you had an email and you wanted to see, okay, if they click on a certain link, send them down a certain path. If they don't click on the link or they click on another link, send them down a different path. If they don't open the email, what do you do if they open the email but don't click on any links? What do you do? Well, that cost me hundreds of dollars to put that into play. I mean, it was worth it because it made money, but spending hundreds of dollars on things that aren't integrated with the rest of my emails and system and everything. I wish I had that money back because this these kinds of carts now, like Kartra will do that.

[00:04:42] So that saved me hundreds of dollars and made me way more money. Because when you can send somebody something specific based on what they did, your closure rate is much higher to get them to do what you want them to do if you just blast out things in general. Most of the people don't care. Don't open it. Don't do anything you want. And it makes your email reputation look bad. And this also nowadays can be added to text broadcasting. So that's also part of the deal. Now you do have to usually pay extra still to this day for a text broadcasting, but it's integrated with Kartra. So instead of an email sending out it could be a text being sent out. Okay. Next thing is webinars. So I was grandfathered in on go to webinar, but it's still 700 plus dollars a year for go to webinar. And if you're just buying a webinar go to webinar. Now it's thousands and thousands of dollars. I don't even know what the latest prices are, but I got rid of all of that because the webinars are included in this, this particular shopping cart system. I didn't really use that as a criteria because I never even thought of it. So anyway, it saved me a ton of money on a webinar service. In fact, the webinar that you go see that I told you about in the beginning of this episode was created right in kartra.

[00:06:15] So anytime I can save a lot of money, folks, saving money is just as important as making money. As long as you don't chintz out and do stupid things and try to get everything free, because a lot of the free stuff is is bad. Now I'm the first one that will go for free stuff. That's good, but I don't want you hurting your business reputation and hurting your business because you chintz out on things. But anyway, this was a beautiful thing to get rid of a $700 a year service when it's right. Included in my shopping cart. Okay. Help desks. So if you wanted a help desk where people could I'd get frequently asked questions answered about your business. I'm not talking about you logging in to one to get it. Put a ticket in because something's not working on some other service. I'm talking about your your stuff where you can put a help desk in that has all your frequently asked questions, and they can search it and everything and get answers to things without bugging you to death and then get them fast. See, that's one of the big things when you can respond fast. And that's what I complain about to companies that I've evaluated. They're too damn slow. I mean, I put a ticket in on a Tuesday on a company, and I didn't get an answer till Friday afternoon.

[00:07:37] That's just not acceptable. That's that's negligence for your business. And the company that might be listening to this knows who I'm talking about. All right. That's negligent. So having a help desk allows your customers to get taken care of really fast if possible. And of course, you're still going to have to answer questions individually through email. And if you're really a good company, you'll take phone calls. All right. This is what cracks me up about all these young, wet behind the ears little punks, you know that. Want to pretend they're at the beach, you know, and, uh, and living the great life and they can't, you know, pay their car payment, you know? So. So, no, you got to take care of your business if you want to be in business. Okay? So anyway, that's help desks. You can have them included. And those that service is available on an outside basis for hundreds of dollars. No, you don't have to if you have a good shopping cart system. All right. Calendars. Now, a lot of you that have listened to me for a long time know I hate online calendars. I hate them with a passion because the only time I ever missed an event ever was because of an online calendar. Switching the time zone. Somehow, it clearly was a mistake. I didn't make the mistake because I'm a I'm a fanatic about being on time or early and and not missing things.

[00:09:00] So. So anyway, um, but if you do like online calendars and use them, uh, they can be very sophisticated. And the other thing, when things are integrated, then you can tag them and email back to people and all this stuff automatically through your system. Even if it was some appointment they made with you a year ago, say so. That's really, uh, a powerful thing if you like online calendars. Okay. Auto responders and your email program. Now this is one of these. Do as I say, not as I do things, because I had 150,000 subscribers before shopping carts were even invented. Okay, that's how long I've been around. So I have email lists that are perfectly good, but that I don't have the first name, so I can't really personalize them. So I kind of leave them on some other system and I've got like 4 or 5 different systems going, well, I don't want that for you. If you're relatively new or you're just on one system and you're moving to a new system, yeah, you want everything integrated. So auto responders and broadcast email are critical, and you can get rid of outside programs like MailChimp, and especially if you're using free versions of email programs, folks, that's just the dumbest thing you could possibly do. And and I know just don't say that because I'm Mr. Guru, arrogant guru. I'm going to tell you why that's stupid.

[00:10:38] Well, if it's a free email system, every spammer on the earth that's got a union card, okay, is going to use that system, get kicked off, open up with their VPN again, from again to the same system and spam the hell out of people. Well, that email server has a reputation, just like you have a reputation. And so servers around the world say, hey, if we see emails coming from that server, they're probably spam. We're not going to do delivery. And you might be perfectly legitimate, but you're lumped in with all the spammers. So that's crazy to think you can do an e commerce business and and go for free email stuff that's just stupid or unknowing. Put it that way. Um, because now you know. So if you keep doing it well, God help you. It's no wonder so many people fail at this business. Okay, so that's emails. Okay. Funnel builders. So this is again, for years there have been you pay outside services or get free worthless ones or some very well known overpriced ones that are great hipsters. Uh, to, to build funnels. So those things you can get rid of if you have a good shopping cart system that includes it. Uh, another thing is page builders. We used to buy hundreds of dollars a year for page builders. There's some very well-known ones. And and they were good programs. But it's again, they're not integrated with all your email and your broadcasts and your sequences and your automations and all that stuff.

[00:12:19] It's an external page builder. So when it's included in your system, then everything is coordinated. See, and that doesn't mean you can only use it there. You can still take that page and put it on another website that you've built. And I've got probably 70 different websites, you know, doing all this stuff. And I can build a page though easily and put it on one of those other sites. So I'm not telling you to tear down the stuff that you've built already. I'm just saying that you can use a coordinated system so that you're not pulling your hair out. You're not duplicating things and paying extra for stuff. So you don't need to buy page builders separately anymore. And in a place like Karcher's got over 500 templates, you can build them from scratch if you want, but they've got professional designers that created 500 more of them. All right. A course builder. So this was another thing where you can go with teachable or Thinkific or even Udemy and, you know, put courses in, but they don't really help you promote it. In fact, I've heard bad things about some of those companies that are screwing the people out of their their payments and stuff and changing the payment system. Well that's ridiculous. You can get all the money and all the customers in your database if you just build it on your own system.

[00:13:48] And again, you have all the automation tied into it. So a course builder is there. And so that's just some of the things. But if you saved on everything I just told you you're saving. I don't know, $5,000 a year on stuff that that's included in one good shopping cart system nowadays. So times have changed, folks. And in the old days, this stuff didn't exist. But now it does. And so it's time, you know, to to move up and get in the modern world and save yourself some money and make more money because of all these automation things that can be selling for you while you're doing something else. All right. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Make sure you check out all the parts of this series. 985. 986 and this is 987. And then also check out my school IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. Certified to operate by SCHEV the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. A lot of people say, well, there's an e-commerce course at Penn State. Well, yeah, I can tell you one thing. That's one of thousands of courses at Penn State. They probably don't update their material that often, which ours is updated sometimes daily because of the fast changes in the internet. It's probably not run. I can assure you it's not run by a multimillionaire that lives and breathes this stuff every day.

[00:15:17] So? So, yeah, don't get sucked in just cause it's tied to some big university. It's not going to get the kind of absolute nuts and bolts good training that you would get in a boutique school like I have. And also you can gift it to somebody and it would be the best gift you could ever give. You know, they're all talking about how four year degrees are worthless nowadays. I have a lot of information on that, that I'll probably put a course in March about it. But, it's a situation where you're taking all these courses, you're out of the workplace for four years or more, six years. Sometimes if you go to a junior college first and all that lost revenue that you have, and then you get out and you're you're competing for jobs at Starbucks because you don't have any real skills. So this is a highly in-demand skill. It's actually considered vocational by the Department of Labor. So in every company on earth needs these kinds of people. So it's a walk in the park to get hired or you can run your own business or both. So anyway, check it out at IMTCVA.org. If you want to get a free trial and discount on this shopping cart system, check out screwthecommute.com/kartra. And I will catch you next week. See you later.