Forum Moderators: buckworks
I am trying to decide between xcart and clickcartpro.
Has anyone here used both?
I intend to use the SEO addon features for whichever I pick. Just having trouble deciding. Xcart seems to have more developers for hire to do modifications.
I have read xcart is better due to being in php - faster and wont crash as easy. But it seems clickcartpro has more built in features.
I have read xcart is based off oscommerce. So maybe I would be better to just stick with it. Either way I will be hiring someone to setup the cart how I want it. I just want to pick the most stable, fastest, feature rich, easy to use (on both the front and back end) cart of the bunch.
Thanks for any help.
-Mark
xcart has plenty of features, good support, is stable, has good SEO, easy to customise ect.
X cart has more mods available, which is really helpful for business growth. X cart also has more programmers available to work on it. Which is my biggest beef with CCP. Every single programmer I've worked with in CCP, and I've worked with ALL of them, has put me off for weeks without contact about projects. It's ridiculous. In kind of goes like this.... You email them about a mod or you order a mod, they are really quick to get back to you and tell you they will do the job, they email you for the job description and tell you it will be ready in 1 week, I email them in one week to check the status, no response from them, I email them again 3 days later, still no response, I email yet again 3 days later, no response, I call, no response, I wait a week, no response. Finally I look into another programmer, I get a quote from them. Then finally, the original programmer sends me a bill over a month later saying the work is done. This has happened on more than 12 mods with my clickcart so I'm trying to move everything over to x cart. Most of the mods I had to have custom written with CCP are already offered with x-cart, so it ends up being cheaper.
CCP: like the way it handles product options, don't like the checkout process, needs mods to be shortened. It's simple enough that non-geeks can manage orders and add products, but they do need ftp skills to add photos. Mods aren't as easy to apply, and there aren't as many sources for mods. The forum has less activity than X-Cart's. You'll need knowledge of Perl if you plan to mod this cart.
X-Cart is my preference these days. We've done mods, purchased mods, and had mods custom developed by X-Cart, very satisfied with that process. PHP is easy to work with. It's also easy to reskin, if you understand the Smarty template system, you'll be right at home. The basic layouts are a little heavy on nested tables, but it's easy to fix. X-Cart has a busy forum, lots of good mods are detailed there.
X-Cart has a function called 'webmaster mode' that helps you figure out which template you need to edit, which can save you time if you're making changes to the layout or functions of the cart. It pops up a little javascript driven window you can use with the front-end of the cart, that shows the templates that are called and how they're called to make the page, kind of a drill down. Makes pinpointing some things much easier. CCP doesn't have anything like this.
X-Cart also makes it easier for non-geeks to manage products since they can upload product images directly from the product admin, no ftp needed.
Both carts work with a variety of credit card processing options, no complaints there.
X-Cart has an option to collect stats about which products are more popular, etc. These are great to look at, but enabling that function is a definite draw on resources - you'll want to make sure you have more than a basic shared hosting account - it generates lots of MySQL queries and can cause problems on a busy site not hosted in an ideal environment.
There's more, but a lot depends on the specific situation of the business that will be using the cart. Hope this helps!
LisaB
>> I have read xcart is based off oscommerce.
Not in the least. X-Cart is a totally different animal with a different approach. While both carts are templated, osCommerce uses PHP only and X-Cart uses the Smarty template engine to separate the PHP code from the skin.
Sounds like xcart is the way to go.
I had also considered getting a custom cart made from scratch but I guessing xcart would be better for future modifications.
Seems like it would be easier to find people to modify an "off the shelf" program compared to going through someones custom made cart and trying to modify it.
[edited by: lorax at 7:39 pm (utc) on Aug. 18, 2006]
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[1][edit reason] fixed typo [/edit] [/edit][/1]
Re: X-Cart customization. The X-Cart folks are available for hire and do the work for relatively cheap. They are Russians, however, and their English is somewhat limited to the King's English. In other words, use clear concise & complete sentences with them. Avoid street slang and shortcuts or abbreviations.
-Search Engine Optimization - Manual control over url's, page titles, and meta tags/alt tags used for product and category pages.
-A way to import customer addresses into Fedex shipping site - so that each order does not have to be entered by hand into fedex program.
Anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks!
Very nice software but too slow for hi-vloume e-commerce. if you will experience a large number of page-view to buyer. i wouldnt use it.
Not good for PPC marketers.
I have paid for several mods with CCP and am a bit therefore reluctant to switch. However, there are one or two more I need doing, so I'm wondering whether now is the time to switch before wasting time and money.
Does anyone know how well X Cart deals with downloadable products?
Why is X Cart not good for PPC Marketers?
