X-Cart Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

X-Cart can be either bought, downloaded and installed on a server, or you can use their cloud-based version, X-Cart Cloud, which was launched in 2013. For the first version of the product you can also choose a third party hosting provider if you like, but you will have to deal with security issues, meaning you have to purchase and install an SSL certificate.

X-Cart has 4 plans to choose from: Free, Business, Multivendor and Ultimate.

The Free plan is an entry-level product that includes only the basic features needed to start a small, online business. It comes with no transaction fees, unlimited products and orders, unlimited admin and staff accounts, 5 free themes and more than 50 paid ones, multiple languages support, more than 120 payment gateways, the ability to import or export data via CSV and a lot of integrations.

The Business plan costs $495 in the form of a one-time lifetime license. After one year though, you have to start paying an annual fee if you want still get software upgrades.

This plan includes additional features such as an Wordpress Blog, advanced top menu, multiple currencies, Amazon S3/Cloudfront integration, product reviews and product filters, Facebook, Google and PayPal log in for customers, downloadable products and file attachments, custom order statuses, mobile admin app and many more.

The next choice is the Multivendor plan, for a lifetime license of $1,495. With this option you also get separate stores for each vendor and individual commission rates for each one, transaction history/vendor and others.

The most expensive option is the Ultimate one, which is $3,995. This one also comes with store installation by their X-Cart team, 1 year of X-Payments Hosted, antispam, call for price, customer satisfaction, abandoned cart recovery, Google shopping, Shopzilla, Nextag, Pricegrabber, loyalty prpgram, advanced banner system, exit offers and many more.

All plans, including the free one, can benefit from fully managed hosting for prices starting at $29,95/month.    

X-Cart is compatible with any operating system: Mac, Windows, Linux and others, as long as it permits deployment of PHP, MySQL, Apache.

If you are not up for downloading and installing the software yourself, you can use their installation service, for an additional $75.

The software also includes a free 7 day trial, so you can first try them out before actually deciding on a plan. They don’t require any credit card details.

There are no transaction fees or setup fees with X-Cart. Your payment processor is the only one that might charge you.

As we already mentioned, there are more than 120 payment gateways available, so you’ll certainly find an option that best suits you. There are 36 out of the box free integrations available (Authorize.Net, payPal, InternetSecure, Pay with Amazon, Fast Lane Checkout and many more), 31 paid add-ons and 55 via X-Payments.

X-Cart comes with eBay integration, Facebook Messenger integration, MailChimp, REST API, Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Twitter adds, Zendesk, HelpScout and many more, for all 4 plans.

If you are not pleased by their free themes you can also purchase others, for prices from $49 to $149.  The themes are mostly responsive, which is a good thing. You can also edit the templates with their ‘webmaster mode’. On the other hand, X-Cart only offers 5 free themes, which is way below standard.

One interesting thing you can do with X-Cart is host an auction. The shopping cart allows you to set the entry price, the duration and so on. This feature can be useful for vendors who sell antique items or collectibles.

In terms of marketing, there are plenty of SEO tools that help you promote your store and make it more search engine friendly. There is an XML sitemap available with all 4 plans and tools that allow you to configure metatags, rich snippets, clean URLs and so on.

The admin interface is well organized. The menu bar includes orders, catalog, promotions, users, content, store setup and so on. The dashboard is very intuitive and comes with helpful tools such as the drag and drop editor, which simplifies your configuration and design process.

It may take you up to a few hours to fully configure and customize your store to your liking.

You can add sizes, colors, you can set up order tracking and there is also a real –time shipping calculator available.

You can also preview the products when you edit and change them, before saving them and actually making them available.

In terms of security, this is one of the few if not the only shopping cart that fully meets the new PCI requirements that will come into effect from 2018. X-Cart offers TLS 1.2 encryption and also XSS and CSRF-attack protection, two-factor authentication, failed login attempts notifications and database backup and restore.