The last few months has been an up hill battle against shopping carts, particularly X-Cart. We have been using primarily X-Cart for a little while now and once you figure them out they seem to be pretty good. Turns out that we were actually being deceived.
The initial X-Carts were very cut and dry. Many clients chose things like flat rate shipping or only to use UPS. Well once the honeymoon was over with X-Cart we have had two clients that need special shipping options such as UPS Ground to domestic addresses and USPS Global Priority to any international address. Setting this up in Magento is simple and pain free. Making this work in X-Cart is apparently impossible. I have read through pages and pages of forum posts, on the official X-Cart forums, read through the manual, I have read any thing available for X-Cart trying to get this sorted out and the best advice I could find was that the whole system has bugs so you should go into your core files and hack this code around and change this other code until it works. This is unacceptable to me as a programmer. If I write code and it breaks then it is my responsibility to fix the code and release a patch, take that Microsoft. So since we have paid 250 dollars for an X-Cart Gold License then why am I having to hack around core files and fix someone else’s mistake. If I wanted the trouble of fixing bugs and writing my own code for shopping carts, which I don’t, I would of just built it myself. This is only one of the many problems we have had with X-Cart so, Enter Magento.
Magento Haiku
Magento is good Magento is open source Refrigerator
Magento Web Site
Ok the Haiku sucked but from a quick look at Magento it is very good AND community involved. The biggest selling point for me on this system is shipping. If you have used a few carts you know that all carts have crappy menus and that they all do the same thing they work with products and let you sell em, no duh huh? Well to me the make or break points of a cart are its ability to make shipping easy and make it work, the checkout process, and the theming section. Theming is not my thing but I feel for Steve because he will have to spend hours doing this and in X-Cart I have seen him real pissed on more than one occasion. Well not to my surprise Magento shipping was setup and running within minutes after install. This is with me doing it and never having seen a Magento before and also refusing to read the manual. So that means to me that most people can use logic to find options in this program. So I had UPS, USPS, and FedEx working together perfectly within minutes. That never happens in carts, short of Ubercart, so it is completely amazing to me. Checkout I have not played with much yet because I got sidetracked but there is a screen cast labeled “One Page Checkout” so that means to me that it is possible and that also amazes me.
Older carts are older carts and they stay that way. I don’t think we will ever see a 2.0 osCommerce. Then again we probably will but not until 2014 when it will still just look old. So if you are thinking of getting into a cart for the first time or if just want to go the hell somewhere else for you carts because your current one pisses you off then please for your own sake check out the Magento, I think that you will be impressed.
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I’m very happy to have found this review. I’m just now in the middle of building out my third X-cart application. Your point about setting things up in X-cart being simple but making things work in X-cart was spot on. It tries to do to much, and in my opinion, is should considered as a beta version of itself. Also, if you customize your site so it’s SEO friendly (X-cart by default uses umpteen thousand nested tables to display itself properly) you then have to manually patch the bugs in your cart, which means: going in line by line and adding and removing complex lines of code. And I spent $250 for this?
I’m excited to try out Magento and am glad that MediaTemple has added it to its list of One-Click Applications.
Thanks for your reveiw, Tom.
Matthew Stroh
http://www.matthewstroh.com
Thanks Matthew for the great comment! We gave Magento a pretty good testing run and it does appear to be somewhat slow compared to some other carts, not much slower than X-Cart, but still a bit slow. I think that this is a small price to pay overall though for the overall niceness of Magento. I am sure that the speed will also improve with future releases.
On the note of X-Cart I couldn’t agree with you more. I am actually at this moment working with modifying core files to make shipping work properly which I just can’t accept as something I should have to do for a cart I paid for and is supposed to be “stable.” I will probably be sitting here for two or three hours hashing out the cause of these problems and at our hourly rate for development that more doubles the price for X-Cart for us, as a small development company that really hits us where it hurts!
Thanks again
Tom
I agree with Tom. You spend an initial $250, but then once you factor in research time and development time, $250 becomes abstract wishful thinking.
I wish x-cart had a nice fallback style template system, so that I could override only the templates I need. This would make it so much easier to customize, as opposed to (double dog dare you to!) creating a spankin’ new template folder. Guess which os cart system does utilize a fallback system? Magento!
Hi,
Especially, if with the bought cart you have a trouble.
I have worked in the Qualiteam in Russia, producer of X-Cart, so I know it very well. I am not familiar with Magento but I want to say that only X-Cart 5 is able to save the X-Cart Shopping Cart.
About customization a shopping carts, I think that it is better to use an opensource shopping cart and buy customization services if needed than buy a shopping cart with the same functionality and pay more money again for the customization. It is obviously
Hey Nikodim,
I agree completely. We do all our own work as far as customization and setup goes. We have built a good number of X-Carts and you are right. I really hope that X-Cart 5 will really be an entirely different cart. There are a lot of really good open source carts hitting the scene right now so they have a lot of competition if you compare the 250 dollar gold fee vs free and on top of that the fee gets you support points not just support. Don’t misunderstand my criticism as a lack of knowledge in X-Cart, I am more than familiar with using it and customizing/configuring it.
My two new favorite carts have to be Prestashop which will be great with a little more work and Ubercart. Ubercart is really an awesome cart because on top of the cart you also have the entire CMS of Drupal which is just completely awesome. For our company a lot of time we have people start with a cart and want more options. With most carts that means we have so much more development to do but with Ubercart we can either download or write a module and it is clean and quick.
For now as far as our company goes we are using Ubercart for all our E-Commerce needs. We just launched what I anticipate to be our last X-Cart over at http://mosaicmix.com and it is a great cart and I think it will do very, very well for them but I just can’t help but think back and be irritated at all the work that went into making the X-Cart do what they wanted. I am not in any way annoyed with the requests they had because they were very normal requests but with X-Cart many of them involved several hours of coding and custom development which is unacceptable after paying for the cart license.
Either way, I appreciate your comment. It really shows that even those who work with Qualiteam are annoyed with X-Cart.
I’ve been an avid fan of the X-Cart software since their inception in 2000. We’ve hosted hundreds of X-Cart Shopping Carts through the years and are seeing a definite sway to the Magento software for a number of customers. The Stability of X-Cart is a driving force that is hard to ignore. Magento, while functional and personally I like it better, still has a way to go to beat the giant that is X-Cart.
In 2006, X-Cart launced their Ready-2-Go Hosting solution and we (Hands-on Web Hosting) were the hosting company they picked to host their customers with. This was a great boost for our company, however we quickly found a number of people who signed up for the software were cancelling within a couple of months due to lack of support by the X-Cart Staff. So even though WE did out job, THEY did not, and lost the client for both us and them. They didn’t care too much as they already had their money it seems, but it sure makes it difficult to maintain a relationship with a customer when their software doesn’t perform as they had hoped.
It is a very powerful cart, it will continue to be (hopefully). We still support it, and see a number of sign ups each day with clients that want the software.
CS-Cart is another good solution, as is Magento. We haven’t seen the flood of requests for Magento that we had hoped, but I”m sure that will come with time.
Interspire is another cart that we have been following quite cloesely. It gives the competition a run for their money, but with an expensive out of the box price tag, it’s geared at established businesses. They also have some issues such as the ability to change client details (a no brainer you’d think) and even changing Variables such as [small, medium, large] on tee-shirts causes problems. If you later offered Extra Large, you have to DELETE the variable and re-add it to all the products. Not cool. Especially on COLORS of shirts!
We’re still a happy X-Cart Host and use the product ourselves on our SSL site. There’s few carts out there that can do what X-Cart can, but with a little more love on the Magento software we’re sure to see if rise up and be the cart that we want it to be.
Upgrading of software is the hardest part for clients. X-Cart is cumbersome to say the least. Expensive if you outsource the work. And if you need to go from version 4.0.12 to 4.0.14 you must first upgrade to 4.0.13 and then to 4.0.14. This creates a nightmare for the customer. One wrong thing in 4.0.13 and it’ll never work again.
In 2008, X-Cart cancelled their Ready-2-Go program and instead launched their own hosting company for the software. While financially sounds like a smart move, the infrastruture and support was seriously lacking (and still is). We routinely aquire customers that were with X-Cart’s Hosting and are moving to us becuase they can’t wait the 3 days for a response time on simple general hosting questions. X-Cart questions – no problem, but general questions seem to be not supported.
There’s my two cents. Hopefully it’ll help someone along the way.
Conor Treacy
Hands-on Web Hosting
Thanks for the comment Conor, I appreciate the feedback and the your feelings on X-Cart. I can completely understand your clients being fed up with their support, we used their support once to report a bug in their system and have them fix it so we could launch a site instead of having to hack the core ourselves and I am pretty sure they charged us points and I don’t know if we ever got them refunded. The points system for a cart you already have to pay for really annoyed me, I always thought some sort of “One Year Free Support” would be a bit more fair.
We have been searching trying to find the cart that meets our specs. We were looking for the following things.
* Easy for client to use and add products to
* Nice checkout process for buyers
* Good code
* Non-table based layouts
* Supports multiple payment gateways
* Supports multiple shipping methods, and can be mixed
* Extensible system, many of our clients decide they want more than just a cart after they get it.
These are not all but the ones that pop into my head as the most important ones. In searching and trying out as many carts as I could find offered for PHP, ASP, and Java, the gold medal winner came out to be Ubercart. It has always been at the top of the list since we use Drupal a lot anyway but it really is in our opinion the most well rounded cart out there.
The downside to using Ubercart is that those who aren’t familiar with Drupal might have a hard time building one for a client. But that being the only negative I can find I think that is a pretty good trade off for a free cart that meets our needs and does so much more than just handle products and checkouts. As the core is a module added to Drupal it is also easy to add a cart to any CMS that is already built in Drupal.
Thanks
Tom
Ok guys, I normally do not stop and post on blogs, etc., because as most people running a business I am far too busy to spend the time responding. But I thought responding to this thread was worth a second or two.
There is a lot I could say about what I have read above but what I noticed most of all about this thread is that it seems like what is going on at many of these blog posts. People who have some self-interest in what they are saying putting out half-truths about other companies products. This method can be very effective to use on novices trying to figure out what product to buy. Most of users are not like those in this tread who will be trying to modify for a fee or hosting the product they buy, but will need knowledgeable people to do so.
When I go out looking for information and happen across a blog like this I am hoping for good informative information that will lead me down the correct path. I am going to direct your attention to one comment although I could discuss many of the comments in this thread but this is one I know for sure.
The Qualiteam “X-Cart” hosting service is excellent. Not only do they give help on the X-Cart questions but any question we have had of a general nature has been answered the next day. The longest I have had to wait is two days. As a business owner I find this service incredible. My fear is that others will realize it and they well go through a period of big growth like their customization services have. When that happens at first any company will experience a slowdown in performance at getting to customers quickly until staff can be adjusted. That’s why if you notice their customization services take a little longer to be able to start on the work because they have grown so busy. It is not because they are bad, it is exactly the opposite, it’s because they know X-Cart so well they do an excellent job at modifying it.
You have a person from Hands-on Web Hosting, who hosts the X-Cart product telling you bad things about X-Cart. Then that person attacks the hosting service that X-Cart has created because it is now in direct competition with their company.
To be nice I will not mention any names. But I was at one of the X-Cart hosting companies before X-Cart hosting was created. One of the reasons Qualiteam needed to create a hosting company because of complaints from their customers about the host providers not keeping up with the changes in technology that provide a secure and stable platform for their users.
I remember I would ask for things from a particular hosting affiliate and get told no we don’t do that on many occasions. I have never been told no from X-Cart hosting. They get me the help I need.
I have come to realize when you read threads like this you are just not going to get unbiased information that a business person needs to make good informed decisions.
Hi DMW,
I wouldn’t go so far as half truths, anything I have said has been 100% truth. I may come across as biased but I work with these things everyday for clients so I would like to think that my bias is because of expierience. People have their opinions of different carts and the main point of what I am saying is that X-Cart is starting to become dated as far as the new carts coming out. Believe me we are waiting for X-Cart 5 and hoping that it will be an awesome cart. But I could go down a list of things that we have had to do for clients that were custom and we spent so much time working around X-Cart that it only reinforces my point that it is not the cart you want if you need something that is going to be customized all over the place. For instance Mosaic Mix is a pretty standard looking cart as far as carts go but there is a lot of custom coding all around that cart to give them what they wanted.
The X-Cart system of applying “mods” shows how much they need an update. Almost all the newer systems being built now are modular and allow you easily add additions and options to your application. Having to change, comment, add code, and then apply an SQL patch and hope to god you backed it all up before the change incase something goes wrong is simply just not acceptable anymore.
I am not saying that X-Cart is horrible as a cart I am saying that it is not the best to do something outside of the box with. Magento also has it’s own problems, as does Prestashop, etc… So the best cart we have found that really gets the job done every time no matter what you need is Ubercart. With the good solid Drupal base it is outstanding.
I understand that Ubercart won’t be an option for the average person who doesn’t know how to program and doesn’t want to spend anytime learning, but in that case you should probably hire someone who does know how to program and knows the ins and outs of E-Commerce. In addition to gaining a programmer when you hire a company you also get the benefit of experience and knowledge that you may not have as a business owner when it comes to the web. The same way that I don’t know everything about your products and what you sell applies to the average business owner having no idea which payment options suit them the best, which fulfillment options will be easiest for them and their customers, why they need an SSL or why they don’t, what other things they can do to get the word out on the web to make more money, etc…
Just to get it straight though, I don’t mean to bash X-Cart at all, their support to me has been a little slow to me but if they helped you quickly then that is awesome. I do think that now is the time for them to either shine or die off and I hope that they do an awesome job on v5. If it were good I might be tempted to try it for a site but as of now I am sold on just using Ubercart and being able to really specialize in one CMS that can be a cart instead of having to know so many different systems and all their quirks.
Tom,
Thanks for your response. It seems to me I will have to pay closer attention to who the person is doing the blogging when I am on these sites.
Believe me when I say that I will review what you have said here to ensure that I am getting the best product for my time and money. It good to hear such positive improvements are and have occurred in this industry and I will be paying close attention to what you have mentioned here. As a business owner I would be a fool not to.
But for me at the moment X-Cart has been fine and the hosting service has been excellent.
Everything I have posted here is 100% true also. I am not BASHING any particular cart or service – I am only stating my experience and the experience of my users who have contacted me on various occassions.
I was contacted by QualiTeam on 9/3 to retract my statements that our clients had to wait “X” days for a response. I informed them that I will not retract the statement, and that I also would not provide them a list of people who have left their service. For me to hand out a list of clients to a competing hosting company so they can then offer a special to bring the client back seems a little odd doesn’t it? Besides, as stated in my conversation with QualiTeam, it is against our Privacy Policy that we have with our users to give this information to any party.
I can not say beyond a doubt that the post by DMW is QualiTeam responding to my post, but is sure feels like it. Either way, I’m not concerned.
Is X-Cart a good product? Yes. Do we use it? Yes. Do our clients like it? Yes. Are there others on the market that will give X-Cart a run for their money if they do not make some big changes? Most Definitly.
We host a number of different types of shopping carts – more than 600 of our ecommerce accounts are running X-Cart, so obviously it *IS* a good product.
With regards to the hosting solution they offer, all I can comment on is what our customers have told us. Two days for a response however is not good in my eyes however – that’s potentially two days worth of lost business (depending on the issue).
I’m sorry Tom, I didn’t mean to hijack your thread. Going back on Topic with regards to Magento – I liked it 6 months ago when I tested it out, and inquired at that time with them to send one or two of our staff to their training seminar so that we’re 100% familiar with the product and the limitations. Having the source available is necessary in any of our custom programming so we can extend the product beyond what it was intended. We had some initial issues with permissions due to suPHP installed, however once those were resolved, everything worked as intended.
Tom, if you feel the need to remove any of my comments to keep your thread more on topic, please feel free. As I stated at the beginning of this post, all my comments are 100% accurate through both my own experiences, and those relayed to me through our clients. Any users that feel they need to address concerns further, please contact me through the support desk at Hands-on. Also, please state “FOR CONOR” in the subject line so my staff knows to forward it to me, and not take it upon themselves to answer the ticket.
Conor Treacy
Hands-on Web Hosting
Now this is interesting. If you read my original post you will notice that I said I hardly ever get involved in responding to threads. Most of the time I am just searching for good information to help my business.
The reason I responded to Tom’s post to me was that it wasn’t about the hosting and it seemed to be on a subject that I feel we as a company may need to look into as we advance. I thought this may be a site that I could add to my list of trusted references.
Now I find out that you have an argument with Qualiteam about something only proves my original point about trusting information at blogs. Everything you said could be true but I know what I am saying is true. Since you have a self-interest in this how do I know? I will assume that Tom does not work for or own the company Ubercart that he is recommending?
You don’t have to answer the questions above they are rhetorical. I made a mistake ever responding to the post in the first place. Time is money as this time has been wasted.
I am closing comments on this post before it just gets more out of hand. I appreciate all the comments on this post and I hope that it helps someone to make a choice as to which cart is better for their situation and what they need.