X-Cart Helps CanadaWheels Achieve Remarkable Growth

When CanadaWheels launched in 2012, its goal was ambitious: create an easy, trusted way for Canadians to buy wheels, tires, and auto parts online. Today, the company leads its market and is one of North America’s fastest-growing companies, with accolades from The Globe and Mail and Deloitte.

This rapid expansion presented a challenge. The company required an eCommerce platform that could tackle the immense complexities of its industry: an engine as powerful as the performance parts it sold. In 2016, CanadaWheels found its solution with X-Cart.

Challenge: Hitting a Technical Redline

By 2016, CanadaWheels was growing fast. Customer demand was surging, but their existing eCommerce solution was struggling to keep pace. The team knew they were approaching a critical turning point.

We knew we needed to rebuild and upgrade our technology stack to keep up with growing demand and the technical complexity of our product offerings.

The challenge was multi-layered and specific to the automotive aftermarket.

Massive & Complex Catalog

The store needed to manage millions of SKUs across hundreds of highly specific categories, from alloy wheels to performance tires and OEM parts.

Data-Heavy Searches

A simple search bar wasn’t enough. Customers needed to find products in multiple ways, by:

• their specific vehicle fitment (year, make, model)
• brand
• part number
• niche attributes like bolt pattern and finish

Need for Scalability

The platform had to be robust enough to handle the current catalog and still flexible enough to scale for future growth and new product lines.

The team, led by the owner’s engineering background, realized they couldn’t be locked into a rigid, one-size-fits-all system. They needed full control to build a truly bespoke customer experience.

Solution: An Open-Source Engine for Limitless Performance

The search for a new platform led them to X-Cart. One feature stood out above all others and became the cornerstone of their decision.

Coming from an engineering background, we were particularly drawn to X-Cart’s open-source nature. Having access to the source code was a major win; it gave us the flexibility to build exactly what we needed.

Partnering with X-Cart, the CanadaWheels team got to work on building their vision. The core of the solution was taking advantage of X-Cart’s adaptable architecture to solve their biggest challenge: search and filtering.

X-Cart provided the architectural flexibility to build an advanced filtering and search system that could meet those expectations and scale with us.

This wasn’t a one-time setup. The partnership evolved over the years. As CanadaWheels continued to innovate, they enhanced their platform with new custom features. When technical challenges arose, they knew who to call.

Your support team was consistently helpful in resolving technical challenges and assisting with development work.

Results: Accelerating to Award-Winning Growth

With the powerful and flexible X-Cart platform as their foundation, the CanadaWheels team solved their technical challenges and unlocked a new era of explosive growth. The robust back-end could handle the data, and the custom-built front-end provided customers with the seamless shopping experience they had envisioned.

The years following the migration to X-Cart have been marked by national and international recognition for their incredible growth trajectory:

6-Time Recognition

For an incredible six consecutive years (2019-2024), CanadaWheels has been recognized on The Globe and Mail’s prestigious list of Canada’s Top Growing Companies.

North American Leader

In 2023, the company was ranked as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™.

Building on this momentum, the CanadaWheels team expanded into the U.S. market with USAWheels.com, offering American drivers a seamless online shopping experience for wheels, tires, and auto parts – powered by the same customer-centric approach that fueled their Canadian growth.

By choosing a platform that offered freedom instead of constraints, CanadaWheels built a system that met the market’s needs and set a new standard for online automotive retail. Their story is a powerful testament to how the right technology partner can fuel a company’s journey from a bold mission to industry leadership.

Having access to the source code was a major win. X-Cart gave us the flexibility to build exactly what we needed to support a dynamic and data-heavy catalog in the automotive aftermarket space.

Your Turn for Success with X-Cart

CanadaWheels’ story shows how the right technology can fuel business success. By choosing X-Cart, they built a powerful, custom platform that met their unique needs. This partnership helped them achieve remarkable growth and become a leader in their industry. 

Ready to write your own success story? Explore how X-Cart can help your business grow.