We have had a few emails lately about the future of X-Cart and what is going on over at Qualiteam. To make sure everyone is up to date here is the short version.
- Late January 2009 Qualiteam (the people that make X-Cart) announced that they were no longer going to drop X-Cart and Lite Commerce and develop a new shopping cart that was a merge of both and would be created from scratch to include all the fancy new features modern shopping carts have.
- This announcement came out of the blue (they continued selling software the whole time) and came on the back of two horrible upgrades that cost there users an awful lot of money
- The off and developed http://www.ecwid.com which is a massive failure of an apparent 4th generation shopping cart. Zero SEO, Extremely Limited Options and Features, Almost no developer documentation – shall we continue – check it out for yourself – it is appalling that’s why the link is click-able – we don’t want to look like we like it :0(
- The only dribble’s of information getting stuffed into the forum’s speak of supposed upgrade path’s and late 2009 releases.
We know why you are frustrated – we know where to look and we know the phone numbers to call and we can’t find out anything substantial – certainly we can not find anything that reassures us that as an investment they are worth backing. Before we sandbag them and say do not hitch your online success to this nightmare we will step back, drop a little emotion and remember all the good things that have come form this development shop.
For along while X-Cart was the bee’s knees. It was powerful, fast, useful and cheap. As time went by they stopped keeping up with internet trends. There idea’s of SEO, presentation layers, ease of use became very outdated and now to see an X-Cart shopping cart it is hard not to gasp in horror.
Do you want our professional opinion ? Sure you do, who doesn’t ?
If you are thinking about using X-Cart – Don’t.
If you have X-Cart and have to move forward soon – move it all to Interspire or something similar.
If you have X-Cart and are not pushed for time – wait until the new year and see what X-Cart 5 is like – hopefully is put’s Qualiteam back on the map – they deserve to be there and we would throw them a big party if they could get back on top.
We will set the monkey’s t task to create you a few lists of X-Cart alternatives and assess the cost and difficulty in moving your website – hopefully you don’t need it – but just in case.
For the record the two consulting jobs I have had with X-Cart since the announcement the decision was made to cut loses and ditch X-Cart and use the import feature of Interspire to move. In the end it was a massive money saver and moved the clients onto a stable, supported and shopping cart with a clear future.
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