Free Shopping Cart Reviews
Are you looking for a some free shopping cart software? Instant-e-Store.com have reviewed a few of the major players in both the free & paid shopping cart software arena.
Do you need a shopping cart? Maybe you already have an online shopfront but would like something with more features, better security & easier to maintain? Give our Basic or Professional Instant-e-Store a try. You can even get it installed and completely customized to your liking.
X-Cart Review
Pros –
To be honest I am still very new to this software but here are some of the things I have seen about it so far. It is easy to install. It really did take me ( I know the basics of PHP etc) less than ½ hour to install software and have it up and running. Once I had it installed I found that the setup took a while as I was finding features and working through them. I loved the easy of the payment methods and shipping. Almost everything has been thought of in this product and I paid $140US for it and found it to be good software. The design I am still working on but I like the look and feel and the security features are great. People feel so much more comfortable I believe with giving their details to a secure site that looks professional. Also the back of house admin panel is great you really don't need to get into the coding you just need to be able to click your mouse and type. You get free upgrades with your software whenever they are released also the support is very good. Also when you buy the software you have access to the forums which is great to find solutions to your issues.
Cons –
Most of the plug ins will cost you money. Which will increase the cost of this software for every new feature that you wish to use. Be careful to take you time with the admin panel understand fully what you are implementing so as to make it profitable to your business. I found a couple of issues in regards to support as the support is based in Russia you have to be aware of times that they are open. Also be careful not to be taken for a ride with companies selling you the software with hosting. You don't need the bells and whistles to get this running. Just take your time in deciding what you want to do and go from there.
Features -
Setup and Support
- No programming required
- Web-based installation wizard
- Complete store-builder package
- Easy-to-use web interface
- Export/import all types of X-Cart store data (config data, states, users, categories, products, destination zones, taxes, shipping rates, orders, membership levels, etc.)
- Out-of-the-box storefront system
- Customizable localization: multi-language, configurable currency symbol and weight/dimension measurement units, configurable list of states/provinces
- Free customer support
- Free access to all future releases
- Built-in self-upgrade engine
Design and Layout
- 100% template-based storefront
- Fully customizable design & layout
- W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant code
- A choice from several pre-designed template schemes and color sets
- Intuitive navigation
- WYSIWYG editor for product/category/manufacturer descriptions, language variables and static pages
- Support for thumbnails
- Category thumbnail images
- Side-bar "mini-cart" viewable at all pages
- Build-in template editor: preview, edit and restore templates
- WYSIWYG text editor (webmaster mode)
- CSS-compatible design. Cascading Style Sheets allow you to easily change styling of your pages.
- Debug console: displays a tree of templates for all pages
- The possibility to find, create and modify static HTML pages
- Customizable heading tabs HTML emails
Customer Care
- All orders stored in MySQL database
- Customers can search & browse personal order history
- Integrated configurable store product search
- Real time order tracking
- Customer can choose between account registration and express checkout
- Fast Lane Checkout module for quick and intuitive checkout
- The possibility to disable checkout without registering
- Password reminder for customers
- Customizable e-mail notifications/invoices
- Wish list
- "Send to friend" section
- Ability to save the customer's cart
- Newsletter management for multiple lists, edit/import/export of subscribers, news archive for customers
- Printable versions of pages
- Multiple customer types w/unique pricing for every customer type
- Memberships and special pricing
- "Clear cart" button
- Edit product options in cart/wishlist/Gift registry wishlist
- Printable invoices
- Configurable contact form
- Second address line for user profiles
- Ability to change the order of products on the customer side
Product Catalog
- Unlimited number of products
- Unlimited number of categories
- Unlimited category nesting
- Products can be assigned to unlimited number of categories
- Ability to modify multiple products simultaneously
- Members-only categories
- "Featured Products" box
- Automated display of bestsellers
- Related products, up selling and cross selling
- 1-click enable/disable switch for products and categories
- Support for up to two different currencies in the products catalog (NOTE: payment processing is possible in one currency only!)
- Automatic currency conversion Configurable search by title, description, category, SKU, price and weight
"Stop words filter" for product search facility (a special filter ensures that service and link words occurring in the search pattern are ignored when search by individual words is performed - available for English language only)
Product Details
- Unlimited product options/variants/properties w/optional price modifiers
- Unlimited custom input fields for products
- Customer-defined prices
- HTML-enriched product descriptions
- Unlimited number of product images
- Storing images in DB or on a file system
- List a product in several categories
- Manufacturers module
- Ability to display product detailed images in popup windows
Merchandising and Inventory
- Discount coupon codes and gift certificates
- Full inventory control
- "Out of Stock" Messages
- Quantity discounts
- Retail and wholesale price
- Limit minimal order amount
Shipping and Tax
- Real-time USPS, FedEx and UPS shipping calculation from one location
- Unlimited number of custom-defined delivery methods
- Flat rate, weight, order total and per-item based shipping
- Different weight limits for different delivery methods
- Markups for realtime shipping
- Mark your products as "free shipping" products
- Promotional "free shipping" coupons to your customers
- Add handling/freight charges
- Handle international, domestic and local shipping
- Ability to clone a zone and all zone information
- Restrict shipping by location
- Allow your customers to choose delivery methods
- Full support for downloadable goods (e-goods)
- Customizable tax calculation
- Product-specific taxes
- Taxes & shipping fees depending on client's location
- "Tax exempt" feature
- GST/PST (Canadian tax system)
- Canada post shipping
- DHL (Airborne) ShipIt API support
- Australia Post's Delivery Rate Calculator support
- Shipping Label Generator for USPS and UPS
- Australia Post order tracking
Sales Analysis & Tracking
- Comprehensive statistics:
- Number of orders
- Number of customers
- Product views
- Category views
- Products removed from cart by customers
- Sales by product / best sellers
- Total sales
- Client environment settings
- Statistics on search patterns customers use when searching products - Searchable order data
- Order data is easy to print
- Printable shipping labels
- Automatic creation of shipping labels for orders intended to be shipped by USPS and UPS
- Search engine & incoming traffic tracker: the cart keeps referrer data for all customers Shipment/fulfillment interface
- Export sales & customer data for use in a spreadsheet
- Export orders to Quick Books format
Payment Gateways & Methods
- Accept payments in any currency
- Allow payment via several online payment modules
- Payment systems (including PayPal payments)
- High variety of real-time credit card processors (over 100 payment gateways)
- Check processors
- Manual (offline) credit card processing
- PayPal payments
- Google Checkout as an alternative to X-Cart's standard checkout
- Predefined set of payment methods (offline): checks, purchase orders, phone orders, wire transfer and etc.
Search Engine Friendly
- Pages can be indexed by all major search engines
- Define custom META tags for every category
- Customer referrer info is stored in database
- Product catalog can be generated as static HTML pages for better SE indexing and ranking
- Search engine optimization options group
Database and Platform Compatibility
- Open source PHP code
- Support for UNIX/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X servers
- Powered by MySQL database
- Multi-language: your e-store can work with unlimited number of languages
- Multi-lingual products
- Multi-lingual categories
- Multi-lingual product options
- Payment processing modules for all major gateways
- Flexible implementation: you can easily add new features and/or disable existing ones.
Repeat Customer Accommodation
- All customer's data is stored in database
- Greet regular visitors
- Registered customers can be offered discounts
- Registered customers do not have to enter their data again
- Registered customers can edit their profile
- Registered customers can access history of their orders
- Built-in newsletter engine
- Real-time order tracking for registered customers
- Moderated product reviews and ratings
- Return Merchandise Authorization add-on to return customers' payments.
Web-based control panel
- Password-protected administrative access
- All changes are real-time
- Control the cart from anywhere in the world using your web browser
- Unlimited number of admin accounts
- Support for restricted "shipping/fulfillment" admin accounts
- User-defined date/time format
- Ability for administrator to act on behalf of other users (e.g. to place phone orders for customers and use X-Cart as web based point of sale system)
Security
- Full HTTPS/SSL support
- Secure HTTPS/SSL administrative access
- Password-protected administrative access
- Strong Blowfish encryption for sensitive customer data
- PGP-encrypted e-mail notifications
- Real-time security notifications of all failed login attempts
- Anti-Fraud module validates customer's address during checkout
- Stop list module allows disabling shop usage from specific IP
- Backup sub-system
- System fingerprints: ability to compare the status of the store files before and after modification and to discover which files have been deleted, added or modified
- Protect registration pages and e-mail forms with a random-number image
Overall Experience –
Great so far. Upload of products has been easy and I have found that I am able to do a lot of things with this software that the free software wouldn't allow or I just didn't know how to implement. I love not having to look at code to fix issues. The admin panel is very powerful and I like knowing that my cart is working 24/7. I hope to keep with this software. I am very pleased with X-Carts service and I would like to continue to learn more about it.