X-Cart 5.6 Stable: A Unified Approach to Parts Catalogs, Fulfillment, Pricing, and Storefront Experience

Since launching the X-Cart 5.6 Beta in October, we’ve been steadily refining the platform, tracking industry trends and parts buyers’ expectations to address the day-to-day challenges automotive businesses face when building consistent sales.

Today, we’re excited to introduce X-Cart 5.6 Stable – purpose-built for the automotive aftermarket and packed with even more niche-specific features that come as part of a holistic solution.

What exactly makes the new X-Cart version a step forward?

Much like a vehicle stability control system helps a driver stay in control during sudden or unexpected maneuvers, the new X-Cart 5.6 Stable edition is designed to help auto parts businesses accelerate with confidence, removing hurdles and smoothing the road to sustainable growth.

So, let’s break it down feature by feature.

Built for Stability: X-Cart 5.6 Features that Simplify Operations

We’ve come a long way in ensuring data integrity and building support for multi-source product catalogs, bringing integrations with trusted catalog providers together under one roof, alongside native integrations with warehouse distributors.

Now, we’ve taken it a step further with multi-warehouse sourcing and fulfillment, enabling merchants to sell products and ship orders from multiple locations, whether from their own stock or directly from suppliers.

Tools Ensuring Stock Control and Transparency

1. Multi-Location Fulfillment

Ship from more than one warehouse to speed up delivery, whether from your own facilities or distributor locations. Create fulfillment locations, edit them as needed, and let X-Cart automatically recognize them as stock sources. Inventory can be kept up to date manually, calculated automatically for your own warehouses, or synced via imports from distributor stock feeds.

2. Shipping Profiles

We designed this feature to give store owners control over how different products are shipped, making complex fulfillment predictable. By creating custom shipping profiles for specific product groups, businesses can apply the right shipping logic for fragile items, warehouse-specific inventory, or special fulfillment scenarios.

Products are assigned to profiles that link fulfillment locations to customer zones with specific rates. When an order includes items from multiple profiles, X-Cart automatically calculates separate shipping options at checkout, increasing transparency and building buyer trust. 

With built-in support for warehouse distributors and rule prioritization for smarter order routing, Shipping Profiles help reduce fulfillment complexity and help you scale with confidence.

3. Smart Order Routing

We also thought about how orders are fulfilled when products are available from multiple locations. At checkout, X-Cart considers your customer’s shipping address, eligible zones, available fulfillment locations, and active shipping profiles to determine where each item should ship from.

Behind the scenes, all routing rules work together with built-in priorities. X-Cart tries to ship the entire order from a single location whenever possible. If that’s not an option, it selects the combination of locations that results in the fewest shipments. When multiple locations within the same shipping profile can fulfill an item, your rule priorities decide which one is used. Backorder locations are always considered last, so in-stock inventory goes out first.

For warehouse distributors, X-Cart supports both API-based and flat rates. If a distributor runs short on stock, the system reallocates items when possible or clearly alerts the shopper before checkout if it can’t. 

Tools for Convenience and Growth Confidence

1. CSV Import Mapping

Along with improved inventory management, your catalog is now powered by enhanced imports. The CSV Import Mapping tool streamlines the process by allowing you to create reusable templates from uploaded data files. Map the fields in your file to the corresponding X-Cart store columns, save the template, and reuse it to efficiently manage ongoing imports of stock levels and pricing data.

For added convenience and time savings, large imports now run in the background – without putting your other admin tasks on hold.

2. Facilitated Price Management

We all know how tricky pricing in the automotive aftermarket can be, with costs constantly changing, MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) policies to follow, and the ongoing challenge of maintaining steady profit margins. X-Cart’s price management features are designed to help you handle pricing with less stress.

Maintain Profit Margins Automatically

No more constant manual adjustments – set target profit margins for each brand using Cost Price, MSRP, or Jobber Price as your base. If prices drop below your defined margin, X-Cart automatically adjusts them to meet your safety rules, keeping your margins protected even as market conditions shift. You can also create custom pricing strategies and assign them to specific products or brands.

Oversee MAP Compliance with Precision

Staying compliant with MAP policies becomes manageable:

• Vendor MAP: Follow the MAP set by each vendor.
• Highest MAP: Apply the highest MAP across all suppliers to optimize pricing.
• Disable MAP Enforcement: Temporarily turn it off when needed.

With these tools, pricing becomes less of a headache and more of a strategic advantage, giving you the confidence to protect margins and stay compliant.

Design Tweaks: The Look and Feel of Your Storefront, Your Way

Meet the revamped Storefront Builder, a built-in tool accessible from the admin panel that lets you align your online store’s homepage design with your business vision. Bring your brand to life and drive engagement with X-Cart’s mobile-first, niche-focused auto themes, whether you sell wheels and tires, performance parts, or a wide range of accessories. These themes, coming with built-in support for YMM and VIN lookup, plus the My Garage feature, can now give you even more flexibility.

The new storefront layout editor lets you customize X-Cart automotive templates: adjust text, change colors, rearrange blocks, personalize banners, and add slideshows to your homepage. The result is a visually engaging, highly tailored storefront that not only captures attention but also effectively showcases your products.

Technical Foundation, Upgraded

X-Cart 5.6 introduces a major technical upgrade designed to improve performance, stability, and long-term scalability.

• Core Platform Upgrade
  X-Cart now runs on Symfony 6.4 and API Platform 3, with support for PHP 8.5, providing a future-ready, enterprise-grade foundation.
• Performance Gains
  Optimized data processing delivers up to 10× faster server response times (TTFB) in real-world scenarios, keeping both storefront and admin experiences snappy.
• Smarter, SEO-Friendly URLs
  Clean URL formatting has been refined for improved SEO and clarity (e.g.,/product/your-product-name).
• Background Workers for Heavy Tasks
  Resource-intensive processes—such as imports, image processing, and email notifications—now run in the background, ensuring your store stays fast and responsive at all times.
• Updated Storefront Framework
  The customer-facing storefront is now powered by Bootstrap 5, delivering a cleaner, more modern UI and improved front-end performance.
• Extension Compatibility
  The following integrations have been adapted for X-Cart 5.6.0.x: X-Payments Connector, Square, VAT, ShippingEasy, and Acima

For the full list of technical changes and step-by-step upgrade instructions, see X-Cart 5.5.1.x → 5.6.0.x Migration Guide.

Summing Up

X-Cart 5.6 Stable is built for automotive businesses that have outgrown generic eCommerce. It brings clarity to complexity, replacing manual work with automation, guesswork with control, and fragmented processes with confidence.

From advanced fitments and automated catalog management to smarter fulfillment, controlled pricing, and a faster technical foundation, X-Cart supports real automotive growth today and scales with your business tomorrow.