X-Cart  Software Review

X-Cart is an open-source template-based shopping cart. Not much information is available on the X-Cart company on its Website. Our reviewers [how about we write this as a reviewing team, i.e. plural first person?] speculate that X-Cart may have been developed in Russia.

The company claims X-Cart is used by 14,000+ businesses. Other companies, e.g. MagneticOne, offer customization services to enhance the core functionality of X-Cart.

Functionality and Features

X-Cart Demo or Free-Trial Experience

The X-Cart free trial is a demo that one may configure in a large number of different ways with add-ons, store front visual schemes, and so on. You can also take a Feature Tour, which guides you through various options and services available.

On virtually every page you see a phone support block, with a Skype ID access; I am 99.9% certain this is an eastern bloc product based on personal experience with their support. We did not continue with the tours or demos; look and feel is very programmer-centric, obviously not going to be an easy-to-understand, plug-and-play experience.

If you’re more the sales and marketing type and less of a “tech head,” then X-Cart might be more than you bargained for.

General Observations

You have the choice of several product packages, the major two are:

• X-Cart Gold (base: $115.00)
• X-Cart Pro (base: $431.00)

X-Cart recurring costs are not clearly explained yet it’s obvious that there will be additional charges for ongoing support and product upgrades. (For example, notes indicate, say, 30 requests to the anti-fraud service and 200 technical support points, but you don’t know what happens when you exceed those allowances.)

Other services offered by X-Cart

• Web design
• Website decoration
• Graphic design
• Flash design
• Usability analyses

The service summary page lists the fees for said services. Again, it’s not obvious what exactly you receive for a given fee. (For example, the “e-commerce Web site design, short set” is priced at $957, but you have to access some other pages to determine what the short set is… vs. the full set and the extended set.)

No doubt, if you go with X-Cart, you are going to be chatting with their people on a continuing basis because of the technically challenging nature of the product.

Limitations

The following observations of X-Cart are drawn from several sources, including the experience of the review staff at Scam Detective.

We also looked at some secondary sources of published and posted and comment on various attributes of the X-Cart package that may affect your interest. Some of the limitations may have been resolved since the reviews were made:

From the SEO Shopping Carts Review

Some potential Web store owners will be discouraged by the limited page-naming ability of the cart. From visits and analysis of several of the X-Cart client Websites, it is determined that Google sees most of their PHP URL pages as repetitive and barely indexes them. For this reason, buyers would want to develop the HTML version of the X-Cart implementation.

If you need a merchant account company, you will have to find one on your own. X-Cart does not offer or recommend any particular merchant account company or companies.

Other evaluations

• It is noted that X-Cart is not a hosted service. If you need hosting, you will need to make arrangements with a separate hosting company, for which extra charges occur. Reliability is generally compromised when the software and the hosting operation are provided by different entities.
• No one-page checkout.
• Catalog display capability is limited with X-Cart.
• The number of email accounts included in your implementation depends upon the hosting company with which you sign the contract.

Whether these are limitations or simply tradeoffs between products will depend largely on what your requirements are.

Support and Documentation

Technical support is free for a limited time period. It appears that you have access to toll-free phone support and email access for at least some amount of time during the initial use period.

But X-Cart seems to be a “big” product requiring substantial time and personnel to put into place on your system; it appears you purchase a license that comes with an agreed-upon level of technical support.

A cursory review of X-Cart documentation does show a serious effort to adequately document the product; although probably not written by native-English writer(s), the quality and completeness appear to be acceptable.

Conclusion

X-Cart may be a satisfactory e-commerce product for larger businesses and dedicated staff to maintain and keep it running, as well as manage the multiple relationships entailed. But usability issues are apparent for small and mid-sized enterprise.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

For an alternative, check out our Top-Rated (5-star) Premium Web Cart, which offers a more fully integrated solution, built on the latest Web technologies, that focuses on the rapid, integrated growth of your enterprise.

Best Wishes,