X-cart - anyone got a bad word?

[Mark Barrett]

I need a PHP/MySQL shopping cart. I am happy to pay for it as long as the price is not exhorbitant.

I have done all the homework I can and provisionally decided to go the X-cart route.

I backtracked over as many posts as I could on this forum and did not really find a bad word said about X-cart. There was an issue that came up more than once - i.e. that for X-cart to run the server must have PHP's safe mode turned off - but this was countered by others who said it should not be considered a problem. And I see plenty of people prepared to host X-cart which seems to concur with that argument.

I would like to know if there is any downside I have missed along the line?!

I am grateful for any advice and opinions.

Mark Barrett

[lorax]

X-Cart is a licensed product and if you need help from the X-Cart team you should be aware that they are in Russia. They speak relatively fluent english and have been very responsive to me. Other than that, getting modifications done is a do it yourself, hire someone, or hire X-Cart affair.

The only downside I've heard of is that X-Cart is somewhat sluggish because it places a significant load on the server. I haven't seen this yet but I won't discount it either.

[Mark Barrett]

l

Thank you for that. I had read in one of the earlier posts that they are a Russian based business but I don't think that is too big a stumbling block.

I hope I don't have to eat my words here - but I am specifically going for a cart using PHP/MySQL because I have some knowledge there already and plan to use it as a vehicle to take my skills to the next level.

So the aim is that I try to look after any mods myself. If I get in trouble there is doubtless a helpful and knowledgeable group on their forum - as here.

So I think my mind is pretty much made up now - time to take the plunge!

Mark

[shinyblue]

I would strongly recommend *against* X-cart. I used LiteCommerce, made by the same company, and demo'd X-cart. It's badly written code--X-cart is worse in this respect because it's older and more bloated. They are in Russia, which isn't necessarily bad, but their support is awful.

Also, and you may not care about this, but they aren't a pro-active company - there are lots of people developing plugins, but they don't like that, they look at it as competition while they should be working with them, since it is like free marketing to seem popular enough for people to develop plugins for your product.

I have a site limping along with LiteCommerce, but I'm going to switch to Pinnacle cart as soon as they release their new version. The LiteCommerce installation has never operated very well - all these performance problems. Right now it's throwing segmentation faults in my apache log files, killing apache deamons for no reason. blah. It's an ongoing struggle with this software.