X-Cart Review
The X-cart website offers many products but for some reason gives little information about the company itself. It is possible that the product was developed in Russia. The company claims X-Cart is used by over 14,000 online stores.
Highlights
There are multiple grades of X-Cart products (Gold and Pro). Once you purchase the software, it must be installed on a server (you must procure hosting). There is an admin back-end from which you manage products, customers, the store’s layout and so on. The company encourages users to contact their technical support team to respond to questions.
X-Cart is a PHP and MySQL database software product. As with many shopping carts, in order to use X-Cart, you must create a template site design and stick with that framework.
Pages can be PHP-based meaning that many sites using it can have PHP URLs. However, you do have the ability to create static HTML pages. Note that these pages are based on the product names so your page might be called something such as “www.yourstore.com/p-934-black-shoes.html” which is still good for search engine spiders and optimization. It seems that depending on how you use the software, some URLs might be underscores and others are hyphens.
You can alter the important tags and make many modifications as needed.
Limitations
The page naming ability of the cart is a bit limited which may turn away some potential web store owners.
After visiting and analyzing their client websites, it is clear that Google sees most of their PHP URL pages as repetitive and barely indexed them. For this reason, focusing on the HTML version is important.
As with some other companies, X-Cart does not offer or recommend outright a merchant account company so you must find one on your own.
Overall
The X-Cart is used by a large variety of online stores. It has many features that are search engine friendly.
Visit the site: http://www.x-cart.com/
My website runs on EROL which is a desktop html shopping cart application. Unfortunately directors of the Company who make and support this software have just gone into voluntary liquidation hence the reason for looking for an alternative on your site. I have be told that X-Cart is good but did not realise that is didn’t name the pages – will have to check out the html version as you suggest. Thanks
The X-Cart is used by a large variety of online stores. It has many features that are search engine friendly.
First off, tech support is in Russia and they work 9-5, M-F Russia time, which on the east coast of the USA is midnight to 8 am. So if you have a problem and need tech support, they will be happy to help you after midnight, once they reach you on their queue. For example, my store is not sending the download keys for egood purchases. I have 2 Xcart stores, both the latest versions (4.5.5). One works with egoods and one doesn’t. It used to work fine until I upgraded and switched to XPayments for credit card processing (to be PCI compliant). Now one works and one doesn’t. I submitted a trouble ticket last night. In the middle of the night they responded with “read the directions.” I have a paid tech support account. I replied with a reiteration of the problem. They replied, “Thank you for the response. Please accept our sincere apologies for the delay with a reply and possible inconvenience caused. The engineer working on your request will be available on Mar 25th at 09:00 and proceed as soon as possible then. Your patience is appreciated.” Today is March 22nd. I have to wait at least 3 days before my paid in advance tech support will respond. I recently upgraded my 2 xcart stores to the latest versions after searching other shopping carts, considering switching. I have 8,000 customers and about 500 products and I decided that rather than switch I would upgrade instead. It has taken about 2 months, I have lost many thousands of dollars in business and a lot of customers. My sales are down to about 50% of what they were before upgrading, thanks to so much down time. And I still have problems.
We had been running X-Cart for 3 years. Had to close our store because we had nothing but problems with X-Cart. Lots of integrity issues, Google said the Mobile Module has lots of issues such as the buttons being to closes to each other and gave it a very low ranking. X-Cart Tech Department told us to stop using the Refine Filters and Infinite Scroll Modules as they have issues. I highly suggest you don’t invest a dime in X-Cart software. We had full Tech Support and they could not fix the issues. Some issues they said were not covered by Tech Support and wanted us to pay a ton of money to fix them. X-Cart Techs will blame 3/4 of the issues on your server host and try to get you to switch to their hosting. In most cases you will turn in a Tech Support request and get an e-mail within the following couple days saying they need more info to work on the issue. It does not matter how detail you make your request. We had some support request handed to personal that were heading out of the office on vacation. Over all experience with X-Cart was a nightmare each day.