7 replies to this topic

[cabz]

My company is entering into a contract with a web development firm to create a new site for us and I was hoping to get some opinions on whether or not the shopping cart we're about to go with, X-Cart, is a good solution for us.

Here are our main requirements:

1) SEO-friendly. Out-of-the-box would be great, but as long as any of the major changes can be coded fairly easily we could live with that.

2) Excellent catalog structure that can make use of multiple sub-categories and be customized with a reasonable amount of effort to allow product information pages to be customized for each category. We have a few thousand products, from books to bulk herbs and spices that will need vastly different information based on what category they fall into.

3) Ultimately, the shopping cart will need to interact with our accounting/inventory system (Syspro). From what I've read, this interaction will need to use XML.

4) Longevity. By this, I mean that whatever cart we choose we prefer it be able to grow and be customized as we expand our web presence and is compatible with the latest technology to make that as easy as possible.

I've read through the [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showforum=65]Shopping Cart Forum[/url] quite a bit, but other than the SEO-friendly requirement I didn't see much on X-Cart. Any input you have on any of these particular concerns, or X-Cart in general, would be greatly appreciated.

[mitash]

X-cart is a very powerful software and has a good support system.
You may want to visit x-cart.com to check the features in details.

It is certainly seo friendly and you can make further modifications.
You can have as many categories as you want and you can have unique features for each product.

Cheers

[arteworks]

Am I allowed to do a shameless plug here?

Take a look at our new seo friendly product - www.primecart.com - and please consider it. We built it specifically for search engines.

[cabz]

Looking through the forums, I keep reading about a version of osCommerce (CREloaded) that has already been tweaked to be more SEO-friendly. Does anyone know of any particular add-on modules or other similar solutions for X-Cart?

[Randy]

x-cart is pretty SE-Friendly out of the box. It's even pre-loaded with a module that'll make your pages Static instead of Dynamic if you want that. Off the top of my head I can count 30+ sites that either I or some friends have developed on the x-cart platform and they all perform well with the engines.

There are also several folks out there who do special tweaking or add-on modules for x-cart for a fee that are usually quite reasonable if you need something special. I've used a few of them to tweak things or purchased special reporting modules that I wanted. A search on any of the engines for something like x-cart add-on will bring those up for you.

Disclaimer: No, I'm not affiliated with x-cart in any way. I just like their product and the flexibility they've built into it. The robust 3rd party development modules are an extra bonus IMO.

[cabz]

Thanks for the feedback, Randy! On a related note, since you've developed many x-cart sites, how demanding is it in terms of server resources? I've been trying to decide on a hosting plan - shared/vps/dedicated - that will be able to handle an x-cart store with thousands of products.

[Randy]

Yup. Any of 'em should be able to handle it with ease.

FWIW, if you use the SE Friendly (read static) URL module in x-cart, it actually creates static pages on the server. So other than the times you are going in to add products or change something and re-publishing the site, no database hits ever occur. No more strain than having a plain only .html site.

[cabz]

Thanks Randy, I really appreciate your help!