In an exclusive interview with
Website Planet, Brandon Checketts highlights how X-Cart distinguishes itself by catering specifically to the automotive industry, offering advanced product data management, seamless automotive integrations, and unparalleled customer support.
Unlike general-purpose platforms like Magento and Shopify, X-Cart excels with features such as automated product data updates, robust API-driven customization, and 24/7 personalized customer support tailored for complex automotive needs. The platform’s open-source architecture and extensive app store enable businesses to create a highly customized shopping experience while maintaining efficient backend operations.
With upcoming features focused on expanding distributor integrations and reducing transaction costs, X-Cart continues to innovate and provide exceptional value to its automotive eCommerce clients.
How does X-Cart differentiate itself from other eCommerce platforms like Magento or Shopify?
X-Cart’s main focus is the automotive industry. Magento and Shopify are multi-purpose solutions and don’t have a lot of automotive-specific features that customers expect in a modern e-commerce site. Our biggest strength is our advanced product data management of complex catalogs, which includes easy imports, category mapping, smart fitments and Make/Model/Year automated product data updates. We also have full-featured automotive integrations with leading data providers like SEMA Data, ASAP Network, and AutoSync for wheels and tires.
Automotive eCommerce is complex and requires personalized customer support that we offer 24/7 with an eCommerce manager and technical engineer, and an onboarding process where we work with the seller to get their store ready to accept orders.
X-Cart is a flexible, easy-to-customize solution. We also have an in-house team that can develop custom features for more specialized front-end features and back-end business logic.
Can you explain the benefits of X-Cart’s API-driven, open-source architecture for eCommerce businesses?
An API is simply a method for one computer system to talk with another system. Modern E-Commerce systems integrate with literally dozens of external systems, from inventory and catalog management systems, to email providers, to payment processors.
Our open, modern API means that on the customer-facing website, the entire browsing and shopping experience can be customized. We offer an app store where many popular customizations are available that make use of the frontend API. Additionally, a seller with their own technical team could customize the experience, or hire our development team to make something just for them.
From the store administration side, our API means that we can integrate with just about any other system. Again, we have many pre-built plugins in our app store for things like Quickbooks for accounting, MailChimp for email automation, or Avalara for Sales Tax reporting. Third parties, our customers’ own teams, and our development team can build custom business logic where needed.
What specific features does X-Cart offer to support high-volume eCommerce operations?
X-Cart offers a number of features specifically designed to support high-volume e-commerce operations. These features provide scalability, reliability, and efficiency, which is critical for managing large transaction volumes and extensive product catalogs.
Here are some key features:
- Rich Integrations with the most popular Automotive Warehouse Distributors.
- Product information, pricing, and availability information can be automatically imported. And orders placed in the X-Cart store can be sent to a distributor with minimal effort.
- Backend processes are made to process imports and updates in bulk
- Store infrastructure that can support hundreds of thousands of products
- Front-end, customer-facing interfaces that allow shoppers to quickly find parts that fit their vehicles, and search features that surface what they want quickly.
How does X-Cart ensure security and PCI compliance for online stores?
We have a whole host of features related to security in general, and PCI Compliance specifically. Everything you’d expect from a modern E-Commerce store like SSL Certificates and protection against XSS and CSRF attacks are provided with every site. We include anti-fraud solutions like Address Verification and each Payment-processor has their own anti-fraud scanning as well.
We’ve put together a security guide with a lot of the best practices. We recommend clients do regular security updates to stay ahead of potential security threats.
For PCI compliance, we run a PCI Level 1(the highest level) payment platform called X-Payments (
x-payments.com) which is the default payment orchestration platform and can connect to almost any payment provider. All customer payment information is “tokenized”, which means that even the website administrators or technical teams can see customer payment information.
Could you discuss the role of X-Cart’s custom design capabilities in enhancing brand identity for clients?
In the highly competitive eCommerce landscape, a strong and distinct brand identity can set a business apart and create a lasting impression on customers. Using simple configuration controls, clients can customize the look and feel, images, logos, and general look throughout their store. This is sufficient for 80% of our customers.
For those who want to go above that, I’ll reiterate what I mentioned above about our storefront API. Anything can be customized down to the pixel to get the exact look and functionality that a client wishes to build.
For custom development, our in-house team has over 20 years of experience in e-commerce and offers Professional Custom Design Services to customize any client X-Cart store. We have a process to do discovery, provide a quote, build, test, and deliver customized solutions at affordable rates.
What are some upcoming features or enhancements that X-Cart users can look forward to?
Our product team has an aggressive roadmap to continue to increase the value that our software provides to our automotive customers. We built integrations with three great distributors last year, and our next major release will allow having multiple warehouse distributors and catalog providers active at once. Then we’ll continue adding additional distributors, likely with a focus on wheels and tires in the short term.
We’re working on some longer-term features as well to reduce payment transaction costs, further connect manufactures, resellers, and installers, and some other exciting things that are too early to mention, so stay tuned for those announcements!
Find out more at:
www.x-cart.com
