Please note: this is a completely new review for X-Cart Multi-vendor platform. The older review can be found here.

When first investigating your shopping cart approach, your most basic needs are simple. You should be able to observe inventory, track purchases, and accept payments. The truth is not so simple, because you want confirming tools to see what your customers are buying, search engine optimization (SEO) tools to be sure your store shows up in browsing results and ways to acquire payments from alternative sources such as Facebook and eBay. You might find all this a little bit discouraging, but you don’t have to worry because X-Cart can make things simple for you.

X-Cart gives sellers the utmost flexibility by providing the program with the hosted service or a licensed version you can download and mount on your hosted website. It really is a solid system offering a wide selection of advanced tools for selling online. It is not simple to use, but it does offer everything you will ever need in one place.

In this specific article, we’ll offer an in-depth overview of this leading PHP shopping cart e-commerce software.

Introduction

X-Cart is a commercial open source shopping cart software platform. It can help users to make and operate an e-commerce site. X-Cart offers both a cloud-based cart and a downloadable self-hosted licensed software option that users can purchase and install on the server. There is also a multi-vendor system in its special version called “X-Cart Ultimate” where you can create an online store where multiple suppliers can sell their own products and control their purchases through an individual web store.

Before we get into its features and functionalities, let’s take a look at the quick summary of its features.

• Good marketing and search capabilities
• Better than average SEO
• Traditional, express, ‘fast street’ and one-page checkout
• Order monitoring and customer order history
• Option to add customer reviews and ratings
• Completes UPS, USPS, and FedEx delivery calculations instantly
• Offers printable invoices and receipts
• Includes a CMS editor and a WYSIWYG catalog
• Product option component may be used to sell solitary items with variations
• Intuitive back end
• Reporting offers valuable information regarding web page views and conversions
• Better product filters

Now let’s take a detailed look at the features this Online shopping cart software offers.

Customization and Design

Awesome Design Templates

Plenty of great design web templates to quickly setup your store without adding much work in developing. The users can pick a common template and begin customizing. HTML-enriched product descriptions, custom product report and tabs and manual attachments, plus record uploads for the clients and the capability to create members-only categories.

Adaptive Design

There’s no dependence on another mobile storefront. The standard storefront automatically adapts when opened on a cellphone or tablet. On resizing, the web browser windows the elements automatically rearrange. Plus it’s fully appropriate for Google’s latest recommendations for mobile, and the single URL results in better SEO.

Customization with Webmaster mode

With the Webmaster mode, the user can quickly modify a template by clicking on the element while browsing the storefront and the results are displayed instantly once the changes are applied. It’s as easy as modifying the HTML page with “Firebug” or “Developer Tools”

Extensive Modifications

Every feature or design aspect is fully customizable. Because of X Cart’s modular architecture, you can customize individual elements without fretting about making global changes. The upgrade remains a breeze if the website is tailored to your requirements.

Smart Zoom and Thumbnail generator

An unlimited number of product images and images for variants, in-page Smart zoom to show every detail of the product and a product thumbnail generator with a built-in sharpness filter.

Features for Administration

Advanced Order Management

Modify orders on behalf of your customers: add/remove products, modify selected options and variants. Update pricing, taxes, discounts, delivery methods and shipping costs.

X-Cart POS system

With Point of Sale (POS) system, you can control products, orders, and inventory of both retail and online stores within a single web interface, where you can also accept payments, print receipts, and bar-code labels.

Mobile POS System

Process credit card payments on your iPhone, iPad or Android device. The Point of Sale is with you anywhere you go with your business, be it a trade show or your brick-and-mortar boutique.

Root Administrator account 

The Admin can control every aspect of the store and can moderate the provider’s accounts and the goods they are selling.

Vendor Specific Features

Sell almost everything

X-Cart supports a variety of physical goods and digital goods. Product options with optional price modifiers are also available. Vendors can also set product variants, global and product-specific attributes.

Inventory tracking

Vendors can track the number of products and variants in stock, plus they can see bestsellers and low stock products on their dashboard.

Auction

With this feature, Vendors can set the initial price, duration, and the minimum bid increment. They can also monitor each lot and change auction parameters on-the-fly as needed.

“Call for price” Feature

With this feature, the entire store can be converted into a plain catalog or a “call for price” button for selected goods can be given to the customers.

Separate Vendor Back-End

Each Vendor manages his/her own products and orders independently of other providers via a personal password-protected account. The handy dashboard also shows quick statistics like recent orders, bestsellers, low-inventory products, the number of orders and revenue for a selected period.

Additional Features

With features like “Customers also bought” and “Recently viewed” displayed on the store, the sales of products can be boosted up. Also, vendors can display options like Cross-sale, New arrivals and “Coming Soon.”

Features for customers

Refined Filters

Powerful product filters narrow search results by price and in-stock availability, as well as specific attributes like size, color, fabric and pattern, capacity, display size or any other custom parameters.

Better Search options

Lightning-fast search with suggestions and spell-checking powered by “Cloud search” makes it very easy for the customers to reach their desired products accurately. Synonyms support, promotions, and statistics make it an even more powerful marketing tool.

Multi-currency and multilingual Support

Customers can see product prices, as well as shipping costs and totals in different currencies. The storefront can be translated to any language or an existing translation to make the store closer to the audience from around the world.

Product comparison

Allow your customers to compare alike products side by side to find exactly what they are looking for.

Quick access

Quick access to shopping cart contents and check out on any page of the store. Optional “Pay with Amazon” and “PayPal Express Checkout” buttons can be enabled.

Social login

Customer registration can be made simple and fast by enabling the usage of an existing Facebook or Google Plus account.

Anonymous checkout

Customers can place orders without account registration, whereas admin can easily tracking all “anonymous orders” assigned to the same email address.

Product Ratings & Reviews

Customers can provide valuable ratings and reviews about the products and their shopping experience. Similarly, Tweet, G+ and Pin buttons make it easy to share content and products.

Payment and Shipping Features

Over 25 payment integrations enable secure payment gateway-hosted payment page to accept credit cards without any PCI-DSS hassle at all, without ever actually touching the sensitive credit card info, including popular gateways like Authorize.net. X-Cart makes PCI compliance easy whether customers check out right from your storefront via a merchant-hosted payment page or are redirected to a payment gateway-hosted payment page.

Security and Fraud Prevention

Powerful fraud prevention tools: in-house “anti-fraud” service and integration with Kount, all-in-one fraud and risk management solution.

Complete Order Status

Payment status and fulfillment status of the order are separated to manage the orders effectively.

Multiple Transactions Support

Support of multiple transactions per order, which the administrator can manage independently from each other.

Flexible tax system

Sales Tax for the United States, VAT for Europe, PST/GST/HST for Canada. VAT exemption with online VAT ID validation via the free web service Vies.

Integration with AvaTax

AvaTax automatically assigns hundreds of thousands of taxability rules and the latest jurisdiction boundaries to deliver the right rate and tax calculation

Enhanced Shipping Features

Features like real-time shipping quotes from Australia Post, Canada Post, FedEx, UPS and USPS, custom-defined delivery methods with flat rates, weight, order total- and per-item based shipping cost, pre-login shipping cost calculation, order tracking numbers and Shiplark that automates your shipping and prints FedEx, UPS, and USPS labels in one click are also available.

Features for Marketing and SEO

X-Cart gives you all the tools you need to get top ranks and high CTR in organic search

Multilingual Catalog

Setup your catalog (titles, descriptions, metadata, options and attributes, products and categories) in multiple languages. Everything is SEO friendly, so both your customers and search engines will love it.

Integration with eBay

Connect your store and manage your eBay listings. Individually or in bulk, manually or automatically. Add or update products, orders, product attributes and variants, images, descriptions, and prices.

Newsletter

Power your newsletters with MailChimp, an email marketing app that allows up to 12,000 free emails monthly.

Other Features for SEO

• Clean URLs generated automatically based on the product title or defined manually
• Configurable page titles and META tags for products, categories, and static pages
• XML sitemap to help Google crawlers index your website properly
• Rich snippets shown in search results make it easier for users to understand what the page is about

Expansion and Upgrades

 Large marketplace for third party Extensions

Install Extensions and design templates in a couple of clicks without leaving the admin area of the store, just like in Google Play or App Store, and instantly enjoy your new features!

Easy Upgrade 

The flexible modular architecture allows you to tailor the e-commerce platform to your precise needs without affecting the core, guaranteeing that even a heavily customized store remains easy to upgrade.

X-Cart Hosting Service

If the idea of handling your own X-Cart software on your site makes you nervous, you might want to consider X-Cart Hosting Service. Hosting makes X-Cart similar to Shopify and BigCommerce, as everything is managed for you by a virtual private server. So you don’t have to worry about upgrades and configuration.

Conclusion

There are always a lot of useful features that can be personalized to fit the bill. The program lands prepared to customize with basic styles that may be shaped into a one-of-a-kind store. In contrast to some other shopping carts which may have become clunky or obscure with age, X-Cart keeps improving. However, it requires a high level of technical competence, which may raise the barrier of entry above what many merchants can manage. Large downsides of X-Cart include additional fees, including fees for support, the regular monthly hosting cost, and the one-time license agreement, which makes this service very costly. However, if cost is not really a concern when deciding to add a shopping cart software to your site, then X-Cart is a sound choice.