X-Cart is an open source shopping cart platform that can be downloaded as a freemium product, a one-time license, or made available as a hosted service. The company that owns X-Cart, Creative Technologies LLC, is based out of Russia and released X-Cart in 2000. There are more than 30,000 e-stores using X-Cart and it was the first PHP shopping platform worldwide. X-Cart initially developed a business strategy by offering lower price segments than companies such as IBM WebSphere Commerce. In 2009, X-Cart developed a freemium product, helping customers get acquainted with the service. X-Cart's cloud service is listed as one of the best-hosted e-commerce platforms. It also allows certified developers to add customized functionality to hosted shops. There are also three downloadable packages.

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The Good

Mobile features
Auction capabilities
SSL security
Cloud subscriptions
Scalable

There were many benefits that came with the different X-Cart, which stood apart from the rest of the providers in the industry. There aren't that many companies that let businesses manage their website from a mobile device, which is something that is standard with X-Cart. We also liked the fact that rather than a free trial period, there is a freemium version that lets you try the product for as long as you'd like.

Mobile Features

The X-Cart Mobile Admin: An app feature that lets you capture payments, view orders, and manage your store on the go.
Responsive design for visitors who use their mobile device to visit your e-store.
Shopgate, which is a mobile app that gives your e-store a unique look and feel on a mobile device.
Other great features, such as a mobile skin and point of sale to process credit card payments anywhere you want to take the physical location of your business.

Auction Capabilities

We also really liked the auction capabilities of X-Cart. It is integrated with eBay very easily. Also, it is possible to set a price floor on your X-Cart so that you can do an auction for particular products on your website.

SSL Security

SSL security was another very important feature for us. There are six different hosted solutions with X-Cart, some with a shared SSL and others with a dedicated SSL. Here are the prices we found and the SSL features:

Starter: $29.95 per month with shared SSL
Basic: $49.95 per month with shared SSL
Standard: $89.95 per month with shared SSL
Enhanced: $199 per month with dedicated SSL
Professional: $299 per month with dedicated SSL
Enterprise: $399 per month with dedicated SSL

Not only are the pricing options scalable for small businesses with the promise of an SSL (some companies require that you buy an SSL certificate through a third-party provider), but you also get a server with a lot of storage and bandwidth. You get anywhere from 20 GB to 160 GB of SSD storage. There is also a cap of 6 TB of bandwidth on the Enterprise option. We found that the SSD server space and high bandwidth means that your e-store loads very quickly on web pages.

Cloud Subscriptions

All cloud subscriptions feature:

Solid State Drives
99.99% uptime guarantee
Daily backups
PCI compliant servers
A dedicated IP address
Virus scanning and spam filters

Scalable

We found that X-Cart was scalable, upwards and downwards, instantly. You can choose a lower subscription tier at a later date or you can upgrade at your leisure. In addition to the hosted services, you can also download a permanent license for X-Cart. This lets you install the service on your own servers and use your own existing infrastructure.

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The Bad

Subdomains
App integrations
Themes
Extra costs
Single lifetime licenses

There were a few things that concerned us about X-Cart.

Subdomains

For the lower subscription levels that use a shared SSL, you have to use a subdomain, such as www.yourbusiness.xcart.com. With the higher-end subscriptions, you get your own dedicated domain.

App Integrations

We also did have some concerns about the app integrations. There are many great app integrations to help improve the functionality of your e-store, such as translation modules, but these cost anywhere from $40 to $60 (though there are many available for free).

Themes

While we did like the high number of themes, both free and premium, the premium themes were priced out of this world. One theme that we saw advertised, a health theme, costs $99. If you have a legacy version of X-Cart, you have to pay $959 to use this.

Extra Costs

We also liked that you could migrate your current e-store to X-Cart, but once again, this came at an extra cost. There is a migration price calculator on the X-Cart website that gives you an estimate for moving your e-store. We would like to see migration help included with the X-Cart cloud subscription.

Single Lifetime Licenses

While the single lifetime licenses may seem like a good idea, there were some red flags, in our opinion. The prices range from $495 to $3,995. You have to pay for additional upgrades and this quickly decreases any savings you might expect from buying a single license.

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The Bottom Line

We recommend X-Cart. We think that their hosted cloud solutions are among the best in the industry. They offer SSD servers, which make your e-store run a whole lot faster. We also felt like their mobile versatility was unmatched in the industry. Overall, X-Cart represents one of the best solutions, in terms of scalability, for businesses. We also liked that all the cloud service subscriptions don't charge a transaction fee. While there are a few themes to choose from, we found that the premium themes were much more attractive (and a bit more expensive). At this time, we really don't see a need for customers to purchase a one-time license from X-Cart. The upgrades make the single licenses prohibitively expensive. We also encourage users to check out some of the free and premium integrations that are included in their app store, too.

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Robert Katy, TX

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.

10 years ago