X-Cart

[ahirai]

I've read some of the older threads discussing X-Cart Gold, and I'm wondering if there are any new opinions of the product.

I've got a typical client: low budget, wants an e-commerce site set up quickly, wants it fully customized, wants it to be scalable, etc. etc.

The client will be selling a combination of physical products (music CDs) and downloadable products (MP3s). Each CD product should include a full track listing, along with brief (roughly 30 seconds) sound clips of selected tracks. They will ultimately sell over 40,000 SKUs.

After examining a variety of carts, it looks like X-Cart is one of the few affordable alternatives that can handle this straight out of the box. It also uses PHP Smarty templates (which I have never used, but looking at the documentation, it seems easy enough to learn), so I'm hopeful that customizing the look and feel will be easy enough.

I had previously looked into osCommerce, but I have been warned by several people about its spaghetti architecture and potential security vulnerabilities.

I consider myself to be a reasonably proficient PHP coder (procedural style; my object oriented coding is a bit rusty) and a reasonably expert html/css coder. I have reasonable MySQL skills. I have never set up an e-commerce site before.

I e-mailed the X-Cart sales team with some questions and was impressed by the detailed response. I'm aware that they are based in Russia, but I can live with the overnight question/answer cycle.

So, my questions:
- Does anybody have any additional pros/cons of the most recent release of X-Cart?
- For somebody with my skill set, what kind of effort am I looking at for various aspects of the installation/configuration/customization (e.g., initial setup, customizing the look and feel, configuring SSL, configuring the payment gateway, configuring tax and shipping, uploading the first few dozen products)?
- Are there other carts that meet my criteria that might be a better alternative to X-Cart?

Thanks in advance!

[shrirch]

I'm in a slightly similar position and am looking at them very strongly, to migrate an OSCommerce store to their Pro version.

Have been impressed with their responses and also their daily rates for custom work.

Would strongly recommend downloading and testing their demo version on your local machine (install Windows Apache, PHP, IonCube's loader and test away) before you purchase.

[gr8tango]

I mentioned on another forum a guy named "Clay Loveless" (sp?) that used x-cart for 10quicksteps.com. He mentioned that x-cart was not as straightforward as they make it seem. His implementation on the site looks good, and should give you an idea on how you can use it. I recommend walking through the buying process or adding items to the cart, removing them, etc, trying different payments, then closing out before buying anything.

I don't think this site will generate enough traffic to skew his numbers, but I also hope nobody slams his site when they look at the X-cart implementation.

- Duane

[shiva777]

I tried the demo of x-cart and had serious problems with it. The administration area was a nightmare...very difficult to navigate. Also, although it is template based and graphics can be modified it is extremely difficult and involved process. Don't expect to 'dreamweaverize' it. Finally, although the tech support was reasonably fast, they were rather unhelpful with several of my questions.
I am currently looking at clickcartpro if anyone has any comments on that program.

thanks,
-shiva777

[dragon]

i've built several stores with x-cart. all my clients were pretty happy with them, or the things i've done perhaps. i'd recommend it to anyone willing to built a good store fast.

[budbiss]

Anyone have knowledge on how spiderable xcart is?

[dragon]

budbiss,

i do. it's spidered far not bad
go to google and type "X-CART. Powerful PHP shopping cart software" (don't miss the quotes) in the search string it is not a kind of a particular key phrase - it's default content of title tag for x-cart
so you will get the list of indexed stores the default title was not changed for some reason.
that's the home page. if you want the others indexed better, you can get your store into static html. the cart has such feature.
one of my clients insisted badly to have all the store in html. well, she has it.