Wix vs. X-Cart

The fact of Wix moving away from their ADI web-building tool in favour of Editor, in my opinion, makes a huge mess of everything. I feel a lot of the ease and automation of designing my website has gone to such an extent that I now "recommend" Wix only for professional developers. Worse is that I have to redesign a big part of my website as items are now linked to each other in a different way than used to be the case. In my opinion, A big ZERO for Wix, who clearly should do their homework again.

X-cart uses Smarty Templates in a PHP environment which means there are many developers who could probably pick it up relatively quickly to provide new features. The smarty template engine is very robust and well documented, and the cost of x-cart is very low which makes it easy for anyone to get started with their e-commerce business. It is a really great e-commerce software and suitable for every business. I actually cannot find any serious objection to what it does. They regularly update it, add new features, fix flaws, offer support. The software itself offers many integrations for shipping and payments, everything you need for sales. Although it covers many things, there will always be something missing, because many things happen in between customer visit and final delivery. Therefore, if you plan to expand your business, also plan to expand your X-Cart - but do not worry, it won't be hard.

Incentivized

• User-Friendliness: Wix is a lot easier to navigate than other web-building sites. Oftentimes it's like Wix does the thinking for you instead of just throwing endless options at you and complicating the process.
• Unique Content: Many services for generating websites, images, videos, etc. are starting to look the same and, for that matter, they're starting to look stale. What Wix offers feels fresher and cleaner.
• Reliability & Respectfulness: We have yet to incur any issues that have affected our web properties or routine to this point. Furthermore, Wix does not constantly throw new offers or new pricing or new requirements at us. They value you where you are.

Incentivized

• For everyone. From small to huge business you get everything out of box. Just setup company details, payment and shipping methods and you are ready to go.
• Upgradable. There are many plugins one can integrate with X-Cart. Over time, many of them became part of the software, and you are one click away to enable them.
• Well organized code. It uses Smarty template engine, which I find great, specially for debugging (famous Webmaster mode).

Incentivized

• One place where Wix falls short of other CMS's is with insights and analytics. On other platforms, I can instantly see how many page views I received, what time the pages were viewed, location, etc. But seeing this information on Wix requires a Google Analytics integration that is not automatically included when you make an account. You have to first go to Google Analytics to make an account, then come back to Wix to activate the integration, it's a little time-consuming for a feature that most CMS's come with instantly.

Incentivized

• Creating new plugins the way X-Cart wants is maybe not complicated, but hard to implement because there are no hooks. One has to manually change each file. This is similar to patching the core and therefore one has to know basics of web development.
• Even if you get everything styled correctly with base skin, there is a bunch of unused styles you have to cope with. Start skin should be much cleaner. You may find thousands excess lines of code.

Incentivized

I’m happy with Square space as of now, and right now I don’t also have a team that would be able to review for me whether it’s worth switching again. Wix was great in the beginning of my career, but I needed something different to support the release of my new music. I like the price for Square space more too!

Incentivized

Great customization, but a pain to backtrack. They recently added the ability to set fonts etc as headings, title, body etc, but if you did not begin your build with these presets you are screwed if you ever try to change font/ colors/layout etc.

Incentivized

I never had an outage issue per say. I would say it was very reliable of a website building platform and as a marketing source there was never any issues connecting it to the server. I don’t recall there being any editing tools or hosting issues. Nothing went down when using it.

Incentivized

Not complex at all. It teaches you how to use their platform in a dynamic way. Each tutorial offers an explanation that can be reviewed later on. The connection speed of a web page has been smooth so far, with no major problems regarding this subject. Overall, Wix can manage 10+ pages with great connection speed.

Incentivized

As stated before I didn’t use the support as I did not have the feature and did not often enough need the help. I was able to figure it out mostly on my own by exploring the site. I’ve found exploring and playing on it told me how to do most things.

Incentivized

Like I said I was a beginner so it was fun to navigate and teach myself how to implement the features when building and maintaining my site. It was a fairly easy place to host my domain, and creat something simple.

Incentivized

Wix is GREAT for a drag-and-drop website editor, but I prefer Squarespace. Squarespace has a lot more polished drag-and-drop modules. Squarespace feels more like a name-brand editor, as it's frequently discussed by many influencers online and has a high level of brand awareness. Wix is more customizable and can create a more tailored end product than Squarespace. Additionally, it is cheaper, which is another advantage for Wix.

Incentivized

I give this rating to Wix because it's a great content creator. It has a great platform and also offers great customer service. If you encounter any technical issues, with Wix you will find a solution. For premium members or domain holders, this is the same as for Trial members or non-domain holders.

Incentivized

• Affordable - for those on limited to zero budget it is easy to get started and getyour business online. I was able to create a portfolio website that I could direct my clients to in order to view my previous projects.
• There is no need to pay a website designer (save on costs)- it is easy to get a website up and published on Wix that you save on not needing to pay a professional to do it for your start-up business.

Incentivized

• Flexibility in presentation as well as functionality
• Full open source software allows for unlimited possibilities with the store function, though some developers who create modules do encode their modules which have errors in their code which therefore can't be fixed
• A fully functional professional level application at a fraction of the cost of similar applications such as magento.

Incentivized