X-Cart 5.6.0 Beta: Supercharge Your Store with Multi-Warehouse Management, Smarter Shipping, and More

We’ve been hard at work evolving the X-Cart platform to make managing your growing business easier and more profitable. We’re thrilled to announce a major update with the launch of X-Cart 5.6.0 beta, packed with tools to streamline your inventory, optimize your shipping, and improve your store’s performance. Let’s dive in!

Effortless Multi-Location Management

As your business expands, managing inventory across multiple warehouses can get complicated. X-Cart 5.6.0 is built to facilitate the whole process and make it transparent and efficient.

All Your Locations in One Place

Add, edit, and manage all your physical locations right from your X-Cart dashboard (Store > Locations).

Track Inventory Per Location

Know exactly what you have in stock at each specific warehouse.

Bulk Import & Export

Save precious time by adding or updating all your locations and their stock levels at once using a simple CSV file.

Control Shipping by Location

Easily enable or disable shipping from any location with a single click. This will automatically update shipping rates and ensure orders are routed correctly.

Granular Inventory Control at Your Fingertips

We’ve revamped how you manage stock with a brand new, dedicated Inventory section (Catalog > Inventory).

Centralized Stock View

Get a bird’s-eye view of your entire inventory across all locations from a single dashboard. See stock levels for each warehouse, plus a total count, all in one table.

Direct & Bulk Editing

Quickly update stock quantities directly on the new inventory page. Need to make bigger changes? Use our enhanced bulk editing tools to adjust inventory settings, including backorder availability, for multiple products at once.

Powerful Filtering

Easily find the products you’re looking for by filtering by category, stock status (In Stock, Low Stock, etc.), and now, by specific Location.

Smarter Import/Export

Updating stock has never been easier. The new inventory.csv import allows you to add, subtract, or completely overwrite stock quantities for specific locations.

Smarter Shipping & Order Fulfillment

Getting products to your customers efficiently is crucial. These new tools in X-Cart give you unprecedented control over your shipping logic.

Introducing Shipping Profiles

Group products to create custom shipping rules. For example, set up special rates for fragile items or products that ship from a specific warehouse. Each profile connects your locations to customer shipping zones with specific rates.

Intelligent Order Routing

Our new Order Routing system automatically determines the most efficient way to fulfill every order. It uses smart rules like:

• Minimize split shipments: The system will try to ship an entire order from a single location whenever possible to save on costs and complexity.
• Prioritize by rule: You can now prioritize which shipping rule gets applied first, getting more control over fulfillment.

Manually Create & Edit Orders

You now have the power to create draft orders for customers from the admin panel. Add products, select a customer, and even manually adjust shipments if the automatic routing isn’t quite right.

Take Control with Powerful Price Management

Pricing is a challenge, too, especially with fluctuating costs and vendor pricing policies. X-Cart’s new price management features are here to help.

Maintain Profit Margins Automatically

Set a target profit margin for each brand based on Cost, MSRP, or Jobber Price. If prices dip below your set margin, they will automatically adjust to protect your profits.

Simplify MAP Compliance

Manage Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies with flexible options. You can use your vendor’s MAP, automatically select the highest MAP from all suppliers, or turn off enforcement when it isn’t needed.

This means you can avoid underpricing, reduce manual work with automated adjustments, and ensure you’re always competitive and compliant.

Under the Hood: A Faster, More Modern X-Cart Platform in 5.6.0

For our developers and tech-savvy users, this update includes significant platform upgrades to make your store faster, more secure, and ready for the future.

Major Tech Upgrades

We’ve upgraded X-Cart to Symfony 6.4 and API Platform 3, with support for PHP 8.4.

Performance Boost

We’ve made massive improvements to how the system handles data, resulting in up to 10x faster server response times (TTFB) in some cases.

Modern URL Structure

We’ve changed the format for clean URLs to be even more SEO-friendly (e.g., /product/your-product-name).

Required Workers

Long-running tasks like email notifications, image processing, and imports are now handled by background workers, ensuring your store remains fast and responsive at all times.

Bootstrap 5

The customer-facing area of your store now uses the latest Bootstrap 5 for a more modern look and feel.

For a complete list of technical changes and instructions on updating, please see our X-Cart 5.5.1.x to 5.6.0.x Migration Guide.

We are incredibly excited about the release of X-Cart 5.6.0 and can’t wait for you to start using these new features to grow your business. As always, our 24/7 support team is here to help if you have any questions!