8 years of rock'n'roll with X-Cart
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Pros
- 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).
Cons
- 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
