anyone here use X-Cart?

I just started using X-Cart -- this is going from an ALL HTML web site to X-Cart.

My experience with it -- I have a PR5 web site with about 200 web sites I cross-linked with. Emmedietly, on the first day I went live with X-Cart, the search engines picked me up and about 80% of my pages got cashed. Of course, I implemented a site map and the site utilizes breadcrumbs so things were easy to find.

WHat are some of your thoughts?

PS: this shopping cart has TONS of mods you can buy.. its awesome!

I installed the demo and got a problem - wish it worked cause I hear it's a reat seo cart....

I'm now using CubeCart..com


Looks good - anyone have any feedback on cubecart - it's highly recommended by 2checkout...

feedback please..

I vote for X-Cart. I will look at CubeCart as well. X-cart is real good. I like it and 3 of my clients are using it and they are all very happy. 2 of them have over 100,000 in sales from Xcart powered websites and all is going well so far with a few customizations though!! Pretty stable for me.

I've been an active X-Cart user for the past 3 years. Actually our hosting company was one of the first hosting companies on their referral list. Currently hosting more than 200 X-Cart Gold stores.

X-Cart is a great product. Be sure to use the Catalog featuers, and edit your robots.txt file so that your search engines are pulling static pages rather than your php pages etc. Also, make use of that MetaTags etc in X-Cart.

Overall, a great tool. Never had a problem that couldn't be fixed, and the source is viewable (not encoded) so if there's something you want extra in the cart, and have the knowledge, a few php codes, a little bit of tweaking on the Smarty Templates and you're all set.

A little expensive these days at $185 (compared to so many other free carts), but the features are great, and it's stable! Well worth the money.

Conor

I personally have no experience with x-cart, and have been asked to look at a site (for SEO) that uses this cart.

I am wondering if you still use this cart and if i should apply any mods (seems to be many) that will help.

TIA Ben

At WebsiteCM.com we've created an x-cart seo mod called Custom Dynamic Search Engine Optimization (CDSEO) for X-Cart.

With CDSEO Pro you have custom control over:

* X-Cart Urls
* X-Cart Page Titles
* X-Cart Link Anchors
* X-Cart Meta Keywords
* X-Cart Meta Descriptions
* X-Cart Index Page Title

The mod provides an integrated administration control panel including export/import of SEO data.

I have recently been helping a customer with X-Cart - to integrate some non-X-cart modules into her pages. It has been pretty difficult. Interface somewhat clumsy IMHO. It seems to have functional bases covered ok though.

I am not an expert in it - but my initial impression of X-Cart has been that it is OK - but could certainly use some polish.

I used Cubecart for a short time and it was ok but I dropped it due to the limited layout options.

I then tried Squirrel cart. This cart has a nice admin side but again the layout options are a down fall as you can not have the items that are on the side bars moved to the content area "you can only move them from sidebar to sidebar" the click to view larger images opens in a new window and not a pop-up window. Also you can not change the folder name Squirrelcart meaning that it appears in every URL of the products. once you buy it "no demo" you only have 14 days to return it if it does not work out.
The upside is if you return it they do not have a issue refunding your money.

I then went to X-cart... It rocks but you must make sure your host supports it as not all do. I had to change host due to X-cart needed ionCube and it was not installed on the server.

I still run X-cart and love it..

Jon.....we seldom like it when people do self promoting however in this case I'm glad you did. My client was really struggling with his developer and support. I sent him to you and your team got him up and running on the SEO module in less than 48 hours and the price was fantastic. Thanks for the great modules, suggestion and job well done!

My site has recently been rebuilt using x-cart. I use CDSEO Pro.

Does anyone have experience with the automatic robots.txt file that it creates? I used it but google is finding many (59) not found URL's as web crawl errors. Surely the robots.txt should block these?

Also google is saying that there are 23 urls restricted by the robots.txt - why is this classed as a web crawl error when the whole point of a robots is to restrict some of the urls?

Thanks guys.

It's not normally the job of robots.txt to block 404 pages. I doubt even an automatically generated robots.txt file would take these into account and list them. You need to go through the site and find out where these links to non existent pages are.

As for URLs being classed as web crawl errors, it's just Google's way of letting you know that a URL is blocked in case it was done in error. If it isn't an error, and you do want them blocked, then you can simply ignore it. It won't have any negative impact on your site.

yeah, x-cart is great. the fact that it's visible source is a great help so you can customize it to your needs. also, it has a very active (and helpful) community, and the open-source mods (like the Dynamic Images module) that are available provide great stopgaps for anyone that doesn't want to have to pay for the commercial addons that are being sold by the 3rd party dev community.


EDIT: here's a great run-down of the SEO modules available for X-Cart (at Wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Cart_SEO

As a satisfied x-cart user and active x-cart forum participant I need to let you know that on the wikipedia page referenced in the above post, it may appear that XCSEO Pro is the best choice but please be advised that as of this date there are a couple of bugs in XCSEO Pro and PHP Site Solutions seems to have abandoned his x-cart users. Some of them have been waiting 7 weeks for help. The developer has posted on another forum but has ignored the official x-cart forum. I'd post the url but as a new user it's not permitted.

Go to Kohana Forums and search for 'xcseo' under 'comments' (not topics) and you can read his post as user Intel352. Near the bottom you will see where some x-cart users found his post.

I see that Jon Peters has posted above. He and all his mods are very well respected in the x-cart community.

I paid for a custom xcart build but could never get it to work. Responses from the company took forever so I usually forgot what the problem was by the time they actually got back to me.

It DOES look great for SEO and the poster above has excellent suggestions and common gotchas.

I personally just opted to write my own, even if it's simpler. I didn't want to mess with trying to figure out why theirs didn't work.

Perhaps I'll try it again, just with the standard version, as I wanted to do a drop shipping site.

My code is almost done though, so I'll try mine first simply because I'm stubborn.

Guess that's why I'm not hitting the 40k a month mark eh?

Someone mentioned Squirrelcart in an earlier post, just to clear things up you can simply move the store.php file outside the squirrelcart folder then that directory is not in the url anymore, also you can move anything anywhere you just have to know how.

example:
<?php include $cart_isp_root.'/your_file.php' ?>

I like Squirrelcart, however if you have no experience at css/html/php then you should hire someone who does to get the look you want.

Cart Developer 4adesign(dot)com