X-Cart Next released
Hello, X-Carters!
Today is a great day and I am very proud to announce the release of our new platform!
As you may have guessed I am writing about X-Cart Next. Huge works stands behind such an event. The new modern powerful e-commerce platform is feature-rich, flexible to customize and easy to upgrade at the same time!
In a sense, complex upgrade was one of the reasons why this ‘Next’ platform was ever intended, and we’re very proud that this problem is finally cracked! No more expensive time-consuming upgrades, no more laborious patching the files manually, no more nerves – just press the “next” button several times and your store is up-to-date! This video demonstrates it
At the same time I should comfort you guys, under no circumstances do we plan to replace the good old X-Cart Gold (GoldPlus/Platinum) v4 with this new platform. We do understand that the existing platform has tons of features and very strong community with a lot of 3d party extensions, while the new platform will need some time to come into bloom. That’s why first and foremost we launch it as SaaS platform for those new users who want to get a store immediately without thinking about such boring things as installation, hosting and administration. We will take care of all this technical stuff!
The store creation procedure has never been that simple. Just fill in your name, email and password, wait no more than 20 seconds and… that’s it! Add your products, tune the store settings and you’re ready to launch.
Making the platform friendly for merchants was one of our top priorities. We even added some cute tools which were not present in our beloved X-Cart v4. Say, you may utilize inline editing and enjoy the drag-n-drop editor to manage your products and orders.
Functionality
Discount coupons, New Products announcements, OnSale module will be handy for those merchants who want to stir up the customers’ interest. Nor should we forget about SEO -URLs , which is a must for a successful store; I can’t but mention a volume discount system. Please also take a look at the layout of AJAX One page checkout – we tried to make it even more user-friendly; notice a very convenient Drop-n-Drop adding to cart. Just like a loving father, I could keep on listing the nice features of our offspring proudly, but as one says, seeing is believing, so come on and try it on our live demo yourself!
The out-of-box functionality contains all the key features the beginning merchant may need, moreover, it’s easily expandable by means of modules from marketplace built in to admin area, which is advantageous for both merchants and developers. The store owner can instantly install an addon just in a few clicks – mere child could do it. The win of a developer is obvious too: the modules are being promoted among the merchants and they’re very easy to access. The ticket to success is that the modules are not by X-Cart team only. We encourage the 3rd party developers to participate in this program: go through simple certification procedure, help us to enrich the software with features in demand and earn with us!
Designers wanted too! We will do offer several design schemes for our customers, but this is definitely not enough as the merchants want to stand out among the mass of other stores with default look-n-feel, and they will be more than happy to find a beautiful custom skin at a reasonable price. Join our partner program (read below), create a custom design theme as a separate module and expose it in our marketplace. For little tweaks we provide the built-in ThemeTweaker addon which allows to rewrite CSS classes and JS code based on default look-n-feel.
Plans and pricing
With the 30-days free trial you can play with the new store as if you ordered a commercial ‘Starter’ plan. You may even start selling right within trial period, and as soon as you realize that you came here to stay, and that the starter plan is getting a bit narrow for your growing business, you’re very welcome to expand the plan to ‘Advanced’ with further prospects of ‘Business’ and ‘Enterprise’. The latter is for those who need not only the powerful e-commerce platform, but also a dedicated server, full access to the source code, personal accounting manager and ability to use either the SimpleCMS module or native Drupal integration.
Partnership program
We’re seeking to build a strong developer community. Therefore we offer very attractive and ‘tasty’ conditions to our existing developers, designers and affiliates.
What is the biggest drawback of the other SaaS platforms in the market? Customization area is very limited. You can partially change look-n-feel, but you cannot change the certain functionality and need to use it as is – as originally provided by vendor who of course could not take into account all the business processes of his clients and therefore had to offer some ‘golden middle’ – which generally suits for most of merchants, but is never exactly what each of them individually needs.
The X-Cart Next is different!
The fundamental difference of what we offer to our partners is the ability to modify anything in the store. We will provide every certified partner (we speak about certification because we need to make sure that custom module meets our standards -being loyal to web developers we still take care of our merchants) with a partner account where custom modules can be uploaded on a certain customer store. Yes, it means that the developer will have the ability to change the default logic by uploading a custom module created by him! And even after the software code is modified the platform is still easily upgradeable!
I think it’s kind of a magic: X-Cart Next is a hosted ecommerce platform where everything can be customized.
Due to the Object-oriented MVC platform architecture all the custom features should be arranged as separated modules and as a result can be easily used in future projects. The development documentation is still growing, but is already rich enough to answer the questions of a starting web-developer.
As already mentioned above, one of great opportunities of the new platform is the built-in marketplace. Any developer or designer can add their extensions to this marketplace and get up to 75% of sales from all those existing customers, who purchase this module for their stores. These developers and designers will have partner accounts where the information about the sales of their modules is available:
We also address to those affiliates who already benefits from partnership with us: please review the affiliate program for the new platform and hurry to join it!
X-Cart version 4.x and future plans
As stated above, we launch X-Cart Next as an alternative cloud solution and at the same time we continue selling X-Cart v4 as a downloadable solution for those who prefer this way of distribution.
We will continue packing v4 up with new features, keeping an eye on the suggestions of our community, applying the corrections and supporting our dear customers.
We don’t plan to sell X-Cart Next as downloadable solution in nearest feature. However, if you definitely want to use X-Cart Next as downloadable for your Enterprise business and projects please contact us and we will discuss possible conditions.
We stop selling X-Shops as SaaS based on v4, from now on we will offer only X-Cart Next to new customers . At the same time the service and support of all the existing X-Shops customers will not be discontinued. But should they be interested in migration to X-Cart Next, we will be more than happy to assist with this transfer. There’s no automatic migration script yet, but our experts are ready to offer their services with the development of a custom solution, please contact us at sales@x-cart.com for details.
Now let’s play with the new platform here and good luck to all of us!
Anastasia has over 8 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. Having been a Customer Care agent in the past, she knows exactly what eCommerce merchants' needs are, and uses her knowledge in Marketing to bring value to the community by sharing her thoughts on relevant topics.
