Online shopping has become an everyday affair for many people around the world. It is quite superior to traditional forms of shopping, and has created a permanent place for itself in the daily lives of people. Due to this ever increasing popularity of online shopping, more and more eCommerce site owners are seeking the services of online shopping carts like X-Cart and Magento. Such shopping cart software help in the development and smooth running of highly efficient online stores, which offer great shopping experiences to online customers around the world. Out of all these shopping carts, X-Cart is the most popular one followed by Magento. X-Cart is a PHP based platform which was launched in 2001. It delivers the best possible shopping experiences ever with it’s feature rich make, along with a great range of other aspects. Let us take a look at the advantages of X-Cart in the contemporary shopping scenario, and why it is preferred over every other online shopping cart in the market.
Shopping features and mobile compatibility:
Firstly, it offers a wide range of shopping features which provide the best to online merchants. It boasts of many advantages like:
- Helping to sell a wide range of goods, services etc. along with downloads, which makes it suitable for any business type.
- Options to compare and review products before a customer buys something from an online shopping site.
- Special offers as well as rating options are also provided by X-Cart.
- Integration with all major payment gateways as well as with famous social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Secondly, it is mobile compatible and brings online shopping ‘to the customers’ palms’. It’s responsive interface comes in all shapes and sizes, syncing well with desktops as well as mobile phones. Thus it breaks the barriers of time and space effectively.
Administration features, friendly support system and security:
Some of the administration features of X-Cart worth mentioning are:
- It is user friendly and does not demand any special skill from the users to be able to operate it.
- It makes the aspect of store administration easier.
- With it’s features, store owners can track inventory which includes detailed statistics and catalog manager, so that they will get an idea of how much stock is remaining at any instant of time.
- It also provides a number of reports, which facilitate the tracking of sales.
- It additionally offers the added advantage of being able to limit customer access to certain products.
The friendly support system of XCart ensures that customers are given 24/7 support via live chat, phone etc. The large community forum it provides is very resourceful to people from all walks of life. Another great feature of this software is that it is 100% PCI-DSS compliant, and offers security like none other in it’s genre. Any platform created with XCart will be under international security standards recognized by the worlds’ major credit cards vendors. Additionally, there are also options for backups and access control list.
Other advantages:
Apart from all these, it offers hosted as well as self hosted services. During the unlimited trial period, it offers a view into all of it’s positive and negative aspects. Another important feature of X-Cart is that it helps company websites to get rated in the first few positions in search engines. In today’s internet dominated world, this aspect is definitely a plus and matters a lot in increasing the traffic to a website. X-Cart also lets the online sites to adapt to the company’s process in every possible way. For example, it can automatically calculate the tax rate in your region and send information to the accounts department accordingly. It can also take care of the inventory and let the purchasing department know, when it is time for refilling and resupplying the products and goods. Using XCart to customize a site can also make the online store more attractive visually (Visual appeal matters a lot, as it makes the clients browse through the entire site and buy a product or service). Thus a visually appealing site can act as a great sales tool for a company.
Update for the year 2014:
Just like every other shopping cart, X-Cart also goes through frequent updates from time to time. An important update for the year 2014 is X-Cart Next V 1.2.4. It has an edge over the other versions, when seen in the context of functionality. It has already started becoming one of the most preferred tools for eCommerce sellers to outdo their rivals. It is the first cloud hosted platform from the company and has many interesting features like:
- Real-time shipping rate calculation
- Social network integration
- Multiple merchandise type facilities and social login
- SEO-Friendly URLs and meta tags
- Automatic tax estimation
- Publicity tools
The latest version is highly customizable according to personal choices. It also facilitates access to new features through just one click. Additionally it features colour schemes module, which allows users to choose from four colour schemes. X-Cart Next is integrated with UPS, Canada Post and FedEx, so as to help online shopping sites to provide shipping service of trustworthy carriers to their customers easily. This will lead to an increase in the customer inflow for their services. Apart from all these features, X-Cart Next V 1.2.4 also boasts of additional features like gift certificates, mobile skin, product variants etc.
In order to power up your online shopping site with XCart, try out one of the best XCart service providers around at MercuryMinds Technologies Pvt Ltd