Shift4Shop vs. X-Cart

At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent

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

• In my opinion, charge you too much for what it is worth
• In my opinion, tech support is always blaming client and end up fixing it own issues
• In my experience, make you believe client is important

• 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

• Page structure is all over the place. It can be difficult to find where to go to make page edits.
• Base platform isn't very robust and requires multiple add-ons in order to add CRM, Taxes, and other capabilities
• Reporting isn't very strong, necessitating outside analytics
• File system is also pretty wonky and feels very primitive
• Customer service and technical help leaves MUCH to be desired.
• Not as many supported add-ons/plug-ins as other platforms, and many of them cost additional fees. Many of them also don't seamlessly integrate, meaning you'll need to dev the integration yourself.
• In general, what you see in the WYSIWYG is not what you get.
• Order System is not very intuitive for the modern era

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

Not applicable - as a franchisee, the franchiser took over the web site and shopping cart capabilities, so I no longer need the tool. But I would recommend it.

If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...

regular updates braking our site

You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.

Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore

We used them for 2 years and had minor problems up until the end. For the last 2 months, customers were unable to checkout, or connect to our payment processor. We put in like 3 to 5 hot tickets to get fixed and day after day nothing was fixed and support got ruder and ruder with us! We lost thousands of dollars online with this company and now they are chasing us for a renewal payment! Simply put, this is bad software with a poor customer care staff!

• We have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart.
• We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us.
• They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%.

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