X-Cart vs. ClickCartPro

Which do you like better?

[purrfect]

I've had a website for quite awhile. I had vcart and liked it, however it is quite expensive at $249 per year. My sales weren't adding up to being able to keep paying that every year. I sell crafts and my customers expect a creative site. One that doesn't look like a cookie cutter.

Anyhow, I've started working on redesigning my site without frames and am now looking for a shopping cart as we are gearing up again. I have a mock up of what I want my site to look like. I don't think I can put my site here, so email me if you want the address.

I need something that has integrated real time shipping for UPS, USPS and FedEx. We live in Oregon and shipping is not exactly all that even across the board. May be $4 to Seattle and $18 to New Hampshire. I also sell candles which are quite heavy and price does not always reflect weight of the product.

I was looking at x-cart and ClickCartPro. I have never used PHP and have okay HTML skills. I coded my current site by hand and not WYSIWYG. I'm just wondering what you would think would be a good solution, even if it is another cart for a person of my skill level to go with. I have installed the x-cart demo, but am finding I can't really do enough with it to tell if I like it. I am almost leaning tword ClickCartPro because of the HTML customization.

What about security issues? Once I pick my cart I will get an SSL certificate for my site. Is this enough?

Any other cart suggestions? I'd really like to find add to shopping cart buttons. I'm not so into the whole store thing. My understanding is that using a store catalog isn't so great with search engines. I'd rather the products be on an html page anyhow. The inventory isn't such a big deal although it would be nice.

Thx bunches!

[purrfect]

Forgot to mention we take Paypal and also take visa and mc and process offline.

[Buck Turgidson]

I can't speak for your specific issues, but I have some experience with X-Cart. I think it's a great product, I've used it on two sites, but I also think you'll have trouble getting it going without at least some PHP experience. A lot of the layout customization requires editing Smarty template files, and it's easy to accidentally break things and not know how to set them right again with only HTML knowledge. That said, it's a great product, if you can get a PHP person to help you out.

Edit: I think the payment types you listed are all supported out of the box on X-Cart.

[purrfect]

Thanks Buck! I've been playing with it a bit. I probably just need to sit down and play with some PHP Smarty Templetes and see if I can figure it out.

[jo1ene]

I just asked my hosting/programming friend about this. He said stay away from xcart. They have very serious security issues.

[Buck Turgidson]

I just asked my hosting/programming friend about this. He said stay away from xcart. They have very serious security issues.

There were some issues published recently about the 3.4.x branch, but I haven't heard anything about newer versions. If your hosting friend is handily accessible, could you get some links from him? I'd be interested in knowing what he's heard, and if there's anything else I should watch out for. From what I've heard, though, there aren't any known security issues with 3.5 or 4.0.

[tolachi]

Just because a program does not have open security bugs does not mean that itw was not designed in a way that is fundamentally flawed from a security point of view. Unfortunately I think a lot of the software out there, open source and otherwise, probably is.

[etrader]

Hi, possibly your friend is talking about PHP safe mode?

I have been looking at X-cart and was put off by the fact that it would only run with safe mode turned off.

I am not a programmer but turning off something called 'safe mode' does not sound like a good idea to me.

Also the fact that my host(webhost4life) would not have it on their system because of disabling safe mode was also a factor for me. I do not know about clickcartpro.

cheers
Simon

[tolachi]

[php.net...]

The word on safe-mode from the php site. I don't blame a host for not wanting it turned off.

[Buck Turgidson]

I run X-Cart on Hurricane Electric, which is one the most respected ISPs on the net. I'm not a huge X-Cart apologist, but I am a PHP programmer, and I don't think requiring safe mode to be off is a huge restriction. X-Cart has a built-in template editing system, and I believe there are UID/permission issues with creating directories in safe mode, which the editing system allows you to do.

I believe the permissions issues addresses in safe mode can also be addressed by just having a secure umask set for users. I don't see it as a big issue, and neither does my ISP.

Like I said, I'm not an X-Cart apologist, and if it has security issues, it has security issues, but nobody's yet raised anything here that would stop me from using it.