Todd Jensen says:

Thursday, August 27, 2009 · 09:24 PM

Xcart is decent generic cart, but poor for multi-channel retailing

a. X-cart requires learning smarty to customize and is hard/expensive to maintain. X-cart uses smarty templates for skinning. These templates are not cleanly abstracted from application logic. As a result any upgrades to x-cart require custom development to reintegrate the retailers skin. Some of the updates contain security fixes and are therefore critical. Arrgh!

b. The 3rd party gift registry solution for x-cart is terrible. It’s both hard to use and unreliable (doesn’t always deduct purchased items from the list). The user forums are full of complaints but to date no one has taken the time to fix this application.

c. The integration between x-cart and our point of sale (Microsoft RMS and POS2009) provides only the most rudimentary sharing of data. We used x-cart to upload inventory and download orders but we never got the inventory sync to work (to work around inventory issues we would periodically re-upload our entire inventory from RMS to x-cart). There’s no way to redeem gift certificates online if they were sold in store (or vice versa). Shipping and tax rates need to be entered and maintained online and does not sync with RMS. Category images also need to be specified and maintained online.

d. X-cart out of the box does not support a back order system for out of stock items and the 3rd party add-on purchased for this feature was not usable. We wanted to remove small items from our store when out of stock and leave big custom order items on the site even when their inventory level was 0. X-cart forced us to choose between:

i. manually revising the inventory levels for custom items on the website so they would also appear to be in stock (not practical)
ii. removing out of stock items from the site automatically (also not practical because the store sells a lot of custom order furniture) or
iii. leaving all items for sale and then calling customers when they order items that are out of stock (not good as this leads to cancelled orders and reduced customer satisfaction).

e. Images need to be resized before uploading using a separate application not included (I ended up writing a script for Photoshop).

f. Store checkout process in cumbersome and we suspect it was impairing conversion rates.

Todd Jensen
http://www.nitrosell.com

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maildodge says:

Thursday, October 15, 2009 · 12:50 PM

Very happy with X-Cart

I have been using X-Cart for about 4 years now and our online store has grown and grown. We have a large number of custom mods and if there is anything we ever want to add to our website the x-cart tech team is always there to help.

The majority of the support team is very helpful and knowledgable. Any problems or new ideas they can resolve.

Roger Martin
www.stand-out.net

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qrichou says:

Friday, October 16, 2009 · 01:13 PM

X-Cart is a fantasic ecommerce system

We have been using X-Cart for about 3 years now and have developed many sites. We have learned to customize the system and developed a Filemaker/MySQL system to ingrate with X-Cart for Orders, Products etc.

The Support department at Qualiteam have been fantastic and are always very helpful and polite with what ever requests or questions we have.

It would be fantastic if in the future builds of X-Cart it was made with more of a core system that the modules hook into, this would make applying security patches so much easier. It would also be great if an API system was part of the new releases.

Richard Houghton
www.isos.com

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ozjohn says:

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 · 12:53 PM

new xcart setup

I'm currently setting up an x-cart store. I've been playing with the demo for a few days now and it seems stable and comprehensive. I can see that once I become familiar with teh templates and filenames etc. editing templates will be a breeze. As a regular user of solutions like joomla, zen cart, and drupal, paying for addons for xcart will take a bit of getting used to.... I can see that during the next twelve months its going to cost a tidy little sum to develop the store the way we want it by purchasing add-ons. Other than that I'm happy with what I've seen and will be going with a new domain name, host and xcart this week.

In response to the last post by grichou, I'd be keen to chat to you about your filmmaker xcart solution. I tried your website, but there's no email address on there.. or I couldn't find it. Contact me if you have a sec. Cheers.

John
ozportals.com

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Bill says:

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 · 05:18 PM

IT's OK

We've used X-Cart for the last three years. Our store has about a thousand products and we do about a quarter million a year out of it.

Overall I've found X-Cart to be stable but hard to maintain. If you do any customization at all get comfortable with a versioning system or be prepared to spend a week upgrading.

The "mods" are not integrated via an easy to maintain hook system or anything else and many don't work well, (or at all). This makes them hard to pry out of the system when things don't go as expected. Postings on the forum go unanswered even when there are several covering the same topic.

The styling cries out 1999 and the Smarty template system, (good caching) contains much of the logic, (again the hard to maintain thing).

We're upgrading our store this year and I don't expect to be using X-Cart next year.

Bill
williamakelly.com

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dnault says:

Tuesday, October 05, 2010 · 09:58 PM

Great for new merchants

X-Cart is a great solution for merchants. We are a proud partner.

David Nault
Director Business Development
Pivotal Payments
http://www.pivotalpayments.com/

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