X-Cart is one of many shopping cart solutions available on the net (we’ve already worked with Magento and CubeCart) and recent developments in the Blueclaw e-commerce team has enabled us to work with this shopping cart solution and test its capabilities for one of our clients.

Yes, the client may consider using online shopping cart solutions like Bigcartel (up to 100 products only) and Shopify (up to 50, 000 products only at 699USD per month) and think these may be a simpler solution but is it really cost effective?

“Why spend 700USD a month just to keep the site running when you can buy a shopping cart software yourself and get it customized and have full control over it for much less? Isn’t the point of an online store to reduce overheads as much as possible and concentrate more on selling?”

Like all ecommerce solutions, X-Cart has its own pros and cons but right now I’m going to talk about the features that I believe will help clients with

• large inventories
• medium to large customer base (dealing with delivery and returns)
• utilizing different payment gateways
• run affiliate schemes
• and desire a fully customized, stylish and professional shopping website

On the development side of things, X-Cart is 100% fully customizable, right down to the T, a factor that Magento could probably not beat. Its php based and the way it works is the developer will integrate your required design into templates before implementing the functions. The code is extremely light-weight, meaning coupled with a decent server the site will load extremely fast. Most of the functions come as default but you can add extra extensions and mods easily.
The cart can handle:

• j-Query (mega dropdown menus and featured content sliders anyone? speaks volumes for user experience on the site)
• product zoom and rotate functions
• one page checkout (instead of clicking 3, 4, 5 times before getting to the checkout page)
• content managed landing pages
• customer reviews
• discount coupons and codes
• customer profile pages
• newsletter management and returns management
• real time shipping calculations with major couriers like UPS, Fedex etc.
• and the usual stuff that you’d expect from a cart like inventory management and tracking

Actually, I haven’t seen anything that the cart cannot handle from my years of experience using this system.

Customer service and management
The discount coupons can be scheduled on its own and set to a whole catergory, a particular product, a shipping value or anything else. In terms of marketing, this means you can reward your customers for shopping with you and give different benefits to different customers in varying levels of membership.

With customer profiles, you are able to track the customer’s purchasing history, failed payments, membership details and wishlists and referring sites. The latter an important feature to keep up to date on trends and what customers are looking for.

Inventory and product management

Unlike other shopping carts, X-cart enables you to have unlimited product options, variants (sizes, colors, brands / manufacturers) and properties (texture, make). These features are built in. And its simple to execute too, from the backend. A client selling clothing for example in different sizes, colours and models in the same brand will find this feature extremely useful. They will also be able to update and add products quickly.

SEO and Google Adwords Optimization Another thing that you will find useful is the ability to download all the products into a CSV or TXT file to enable uploading to Google Base. You can create content-managed landing pages for specific main categories or brands, especially important if the client is already using Google Adwords for their PPC campaigns. This and the ability for a custom one page checkout system play a major part in conversions.

Hardcore SEO fans like us will be pleased to know that X-Cart is designed according to most search engine requirements, giving you full control - from the customizable meta tag catalogs for each page, product and categories, to the way the categories and pages are mapped.

Payment Gateways

The cart can be integrated with Paypal, Google Checkout, Sagepay and loads of others, and it can accept credit and debit card payment methods. For best results, its always a good idea to offer as many different payment methods as possible.

“My advice is always to offer Paypal, Credit Card and Debit Card Payments (Visa, Mastercard, Maestro, Solo, Amex) as well as Google Checkout. This gives customers more reasons to shop with you because while one customer may be more comfortable with paying only with Paypal, another customer will only prefer Google Checkout. Don’t lose out simply because you disabled that option!”

I could go on and about their exciting features but they will each deserve their own individual posts. X-Cart is definitely a PREMIUM cart that I will recommend to clients with higher requirements. What does everybody else think? Have you used X-Cart? Prefer a different cart? Let me know. I’ll update this blog as we go along.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to make a comprehensive feature comparison of X-Cart and other solutions.

Posted In:

Conversions, SEO Tools, Web Development