X-Cart impressions?

Does anybody have experience with X-Cart shopping cart? Suppose to be very good, open source. We are looking to get it and have some customization done with external services.

 

Heard a lot of good things though never used myself. Quick googling gives this nice link to read - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484167,00.asp#disqus_thread

 

Seeing is believing. There's a very simple way to install it right on your PC/laptop to test - use a bitnami stack for the purpose:
https://bitnami.com/stack/x-cart?page=3
BTW there are lots of reviews from real X-Cart users, who comment both on the software and services the company offers.

 

Actually, we are using basic version on one of the sites and like X-Cart a lot. Missing some plug-ins to make it 100% attractive solution for us

 

Nice to hear you like it! Could you probably shed more light on what plugins it lacks? (Just today morning the company CEO was planning another release and raised the question, what features the customers request most often, so your feedback will be a good contribution) BTW, what X-Cart edition do you use?

 

Main module missing for us would be integration with Signifyd anti fraud protection service. We already communicated with someone from X-Cart about it. They offered plug-in that exists already but it is not even close. Signifyd is about only ones that will insure their purchase ratings!

We checked Fraud.net, Kount, Subuno, Siftscience and others. They either want large volumes, too much money or there is no insurance. Signifyd puts their foot where mouth is and already paid 2 chargebacks where their rating system failed to recognize possible fraud. X-Cart development team asked for a lot of money for plugin. If it would be in range of all other plugins 29-59 dollars we would already purchased it. Hopefully third party developers might recognize opportunity there and jump in with solution. API is all in the open: https://www.signifyd.com/docs/api/

We had Shop Factory integrated shopping cart software for years and had 5-7 WEB sites developed and working fine even today. We replaced 2 of the sites with WordPress/Woocommerce and are not really delighted with things. We are testing one site with X-Cart free edition. What is kind of bothering me is that with Shop Factory for one single cost ($750) we got unlimited sites creation and usage. There is no plugins, everything is included in single package. Woocommerce didn't cost even close to that amount and features are pretty powerful. Free plug-in for Signifyd, 29 dollar plug-in for Fedex integration.

Talking about X-Cart we like it as solution, much simpler to work with than Woocommerce but it is too expensive! License cost is $500 per shop + plug-in modules range from $29 to $59 or more dollars. We want to replace 3 shops and that would cost about 2000 dollars. We are not big and rich company that can throw unlimited money into WEB development. We have to watch investment.

So comparing things: as I said Shop Factory about $750 (unlimited sites), Woocommerce about $150 (per shop), freelancer developers from Bangladesh and India about $75 - $100 dollars per site and X-Cart $500 per site + about $250 at least 5 plug-ins to make it more functional.

 

Thank you for finding the time to explain, compare and provide links: what, why and how. I don't think this feature will get the highest priority to get included into the core, so I have forwarded all these details to X-Cart in-house developer who has already created several dozens of commercial addons for X-Cart 5. If he decides to release such a module, it will be ready very soon, so I hope he will be positive about this idea=)

 

I understand what you are saying. Those ones I checked one by one:
Fraud prevention

https://fraud.net

www.kount.com

www.subuno.com

https://siftscience.com

https://www.signifyd.com

http://www.riskified.com/

http://www.experian.com/decision-analytics/credit-card-verification.html

https://www.maxmind.com/en/minfraud-services

If you make comparisons you will find out that Signifyd is best choice for small business running on-line store. Again, biggest advantage is that they not only rate but also insure transactions against fraud. It is optional decision and by click of mouse one can take it or not, per single transaction. If I knew how to post picture here I could post screenshot of real transaction. Trust me, recommendation only is not good enough. Every card processor has filters and some merchant tools but none of them is sophisticated enough to be reliable and there is no insurance.

Take a look at this post about losing money with shopping carts: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/how-we-lost-thousands-on-credit-card-payments.2786954

 

Hi Zack,

Thank you for your explamations. I have found an alike discussion in X-Cart's own community forums. Based on that discussion, one of our employees has posted an idea in the Ideas portal to check if there will be other users that need this integration too:
http://ideas.x-cart.com/forums/229428-x-cart-5-x/suggestions/16985722-signifyd-integration

The manager responsible will check in a couple of months if it collects some votes, and if yes, it will be implemented. You should not be sceptical about this portal, the ideas do work, you're not posting them only for the sake of posting. For example, this announcement of one of new releases implements a number of ideas from the portal.

 

I have used X-Cart since 2006 or so... It's difficult to customize, but it can be done. I highly recommend hiring Mercuryminds for customization. They are VERY affordable and do good work.

If you create an account with X-Cart, they will give you discount coupons sometime between December 18th and January 5th. They do this every year... I think about 30% off their shopping cart software and modules. So the $495 license becomes about $350. They have had higher discounts in the past too... They have this sale twice a year. Just stay on top of it. I think they advertise the discount right on their website once the promotion is offered too.

For credit card processing, you can use Stripe to accept credit cards. It's only $0.30 per transaction and 2.9% commission I think. No monthly fees to accept credit cards. You can also run credit cards through the stripe portal without a monthly fee. X-Cart has many other payment accepting methods too.

If you have any questions about X-Cart, I may be able to help to steer you in the right direction.

I hope you like my post and find it helpful.

 

Thank you for post about X-Cart. That was useful. We will wait for discounts to happen. The thing is, after buying Business License one has to buy few more plug-ins to make site more functional. So far we were using Shop Factory CMS and that software allows creation of unlimited sites. We have 6 so by that token X-Cart would be expensive proposal.

 

Thank you Greg, appreciate your contribution into this thread. Nice to hear your feedback about Stripe - when we were only discussing partership with them, we were very enthusiastic about the benefits they give.
I wish I could "like" and thank you for the post but it looks like I lack "karma"/experience/some minimal amount of posts on this forum - for some reason this button is not available for me yet.

I see your point, A good businessman never wastes his money, every dime is spent carefully. But what you speak about is rather a positive thing: a ready-made module is always cheaper than an alike modification developed from scratch. So the more commercial modules developed by the X-Cart community developers are available, the cheaper this or that feature will cost you as a merchant. Say, "hover image", a lovely module for apparel store, costs only $19.95 while creating the same mod from scratch would cost no less than $350-$450. At the same time, given there are hundreds of very _different_ and rather _specific_ modules from Auction to Booking feature, inserting each and every module into the commercial package will not only increase the cost of package significantly, but also make the platform monstrous and potentially slow down its performance. That's why we created a package with the most popular and universal modules in it, available at the lowest possible cost, and offer the rest modules as separate products.

BTW I found out that X-Cart integrates via X-Payments with another Fraud Prevention service, https://www.nofraud.com, its rates seem pretty acceptable and the insurance you were speaking about is also available as an optional addon. You may not like it since X-Payments (a PA DSS certified payment application for X-Cart and several other shopping carts) is normally used by larger companies, it's available as a SaaS or for quite expensive one-time payment. But at least Signifyd is not the only company with insurance aboard.

 

You are right, NoFraud is really useful and exactly what we were looking for. Pricing is reasonable.
Only problem I see here is that it requires X-Payment. That is another expense and not a small one. 50 dollars a month, and we don't quite understand what it does anyway? It says that it is connector between X-Cart and our payment processor (PayPal in our case). I don't really get it. It is 600 dollars a year

 

Hi Zack,

Thanks for looking into this.

I believe this video created by my colleague answers the question, "what is X-Payments and what it can be used for" best:


In brief, it is an intermediary between your store and a payment gateway of your choice, that allows you to accept credit cards ( i.e to show the credit card form right on your checkout page without redirects to external pages) in a PCI compliant way, as this application is PA DSS certified.
Besides accepting the credit cards directly in your store, X-Payments:
-supports recurring payments (subscriptions)
-allows the returning customers to store the card ( actually, the token, not the card itself - security is priority!) to reuse it for future purchases
-integrates with a number of payment gateways that do not support "payment-gateway-hosted payments", so gives more options to a merchant when it comes to selecting the payment gateway with appropriate terms and fees.
-integrates with several antifraud service providers to minimise the merchant's risks.

The smaller businesses may feel pretty comfortable without X-Payments, accepting payments via PayPal just like you do ( I really love PayPal, btw - for a customer it's one of the most reliable options, I believe). So probably a one -time investment into a custom development of a direct integration with the fraud prevention service is going to be the most cost-effective solution for you. I know that you contacted X-Cart dev team, probably you found the quote too high. I can recommend that you also check how X-Cart partners estimate the costs. Say, Greg recommended Mercuryminds, it's a trusted partner of X-Cart, a reliable service provider. Also, X-Cart developers offer their services at freelancers' websites, it may be even cheaper.

 

BTW The discounts are happening now =)
https://blog.x-cart.com/christmas-sale-2016.html

 

Right! Got it and used it, have Business License now