An alert client of my recently suggested that I investigate CS Cart for his ecommerce website upgrade. For five years, he has been using X-Cart, but while searching for alternatives, he found CS Cart. I was skeptical at first, but when he pointed out that former X-Cart employees created it, I decided to investigate. And I’m glad I did!
For several years, X-Cart, a premier, full-featured shopping cart has been promising X-Cart 5, the next generation X-Cart shopping cart, but X-Cart 5 seems like vaporware at this point. While there have been small improvements to X-Cart in Version 4, X-Cart still behind the curve in modern shopping cart software.
Enter CS Cart. I’m not sure exactly what was planned for X-Cart 5, but CS Cart 3 provides what I expect from a modern shopping cart:
- Flexible, easy to use template system – You’ll probably want your customize the design of your shopping cart. That means you need a sytem that allows you to change the design and look of your site while still allowing you to install shopping cart upgrades. CS Cart is built similar to WordPress and Genesis Framework: it allows you to modify the shopping cart functionality by using overrides instead of modifications to the shopping cart software. Theoretically, this should make it easy to install upgrades to the software without breaking your shopping cart. Of course, you have to stick to CS Cart programming methods for this to work.
- 960 Grid Layout – CS Cart comes with 960 Grid layout with 12 columns or 16 columns. You can set up your template as a 12 or 16 column grid. The 960 Grid Layout makes is very easy to set up complex layouts.
- Drag and Drop Design – CS Cart uses a Block Manager that allows you to drag and drop Blocks on the page. What is a block? A block can be custom HTML that you create, it can be the user login, the shopping cart indicator, breadcrumbs, FaceBook or Twitter feeds, Newsletter sign-up, menus, header and footer areas, or a product, to name a few. CS Cart comes with all the Blocks you will need, but most businesses will probably find they want to create a few of their own. Creating your own block will take some familiarity with php programming, SMARTY templates, Javascript, CSS, and HTML, but if you’re a web designer, you should find it pretty easy.
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Alex says
> CS Cart is PCI compliant as long as your web server is PCI compliant.
Nope, software must be compliant, too.
Check PCI requirements.
> X-Cart 5 seems like vaporware at this point.
It is called X-Cart Next now.
http://next.x-cart.com
Pat Fortino says
This is great news. X-Cart is finally bringing out the new software. Regarding PCI compliance: I have two differenet clients using X-Cart without X-Payments, and both passed PCI compliance review on Hostgator shared servers. Hostgator had to make a couple adjustments to the server config and the sites passed their PCI compliance review. Neither of these sites store credit card info, but both use Authorize.net AIM to process credit cards on their site. Also, I have one client using CS-Cart and it too passed PCI compliance on Hostgator shared hosting.
Oscar says
Thanks for a review.
Actually both carts are great. X-Cart did some rebranding and offered new opportunities. However, CS-Cart 3 also came with some upgrades.
It was a curious thing to find out that both platforms are designed in Russia.
Pat Fortino says
Some guys from x-cart, which is in Russia, created CS-Cart. It’s pretty easy to see the similarities, but cs cart is so much better due to the ease of upgrading.
GalinaJ says
CS-Cart is also better because it supports multi store features and this helps it compete with such powerful free platforms as Magento and PrestaShop.
June Fray says
I’m pretty salty about cs-cart folks charging a monthly fee for the mobile version. We were thinking about switching over from the last good copy of Interspire shopping cart but even that abandoned product had mobile templates included a long time ago and pretty much all the bells and whistles cs-cart plugin developers are charging an arm and a long to add… like the “like this” feature, etc. I always get salty when software companies want to people to “rent” their software. Sometimes it makes sense but most of the time it doesn’t. We’ll stick with our current cart.
Pat Fortino says
I agree. I think cs-cart should include a mobile responsive template with the default install. Instead they use an add-on that is not responsive, but a different template entirely. But since the carts I’ve done with cs-cart are under the product limit, the mobile version is free. Plus I love the ease of use of cs-cart, both for me and for client.