FLYING START - THE BEST MODS TO BUY
 

Hi there,

I put this together because it's difficult to know which mods to buy and very expensive to try them all (trust me, i learned the hard way :))

This is for newbies really but if you're not new to x-cart and you haven't got these mods then your store is working against you and you should consider upgrading now.

Firstly I'll deal with Admin Back-end stuff.

Admin/Customer Login
Not the most obvious of must-haves but a very handy feature if you do a lot of talking on the phone with customers and need to login quick and sell stuff to them:
This mod places a login button beside your customers name in your admin user listings. Clicking the link will allow you to login as that customer and browse your store as if you were them. A link is placed in the top right corner of your store allowing you to easily log back into your administration panel.

Marketing Manager Pro 3
The MOST IMPORTANT mod of any you can buy - all the tools you need to maximise your modified x-cart store and convert live visitors and new customers into cold hard cash - simply essential.
High initial outlay but if I can sum it up in words that describe how important it is, imagine trying to run an internet store without a web connection - it's simply that important an add-on to have.

Selling & Conversion Tools:

WebsiteCM Customer Conversion Package
A cocktail of the best upselling and conversion tools available. If you want to add value to your brand and increase the profits in your store then this mod will take care of it for you.
Consists of EZ Upsell, EZ Recommends & EZ Checkout, this package takes a sale and builds in extra products and options for your customers to buy relevant items which compliment their purchase and ensures that when they begin checkout, they're more focussed on seeing it through - VITAL.

Advanced Mini-Cart
I can't believe this mod was needed in the first place as an add-on but it is, so buy it and give your customers a more relaxing journey through your store. Advanced Mini-Cart displays better info than the standard mini-cart and allows for removal of products which is important in creating the feeling that your customer is in control of their purchases - so often overlooked because of fear of losing the sale but it actually works in your favour - empower your buyer and you increase sales.

Visibility & SEO

CDSEO Mod - Custom Dynamic Search Engine Optimised Links for X-Cart
Of all the SEO mods out there, this one makes the most valuable difference in terms of achieving real worl improvements in your search engine rankings through making your links not only appear as html links but making the URLs for products and categories more relevant to your store keywords ensuring the search engines reward you for supplying content correctly. It works, others do too, just not as well. Simply brilliant.

Google Base - Use it - it offers an extra 20% of visitors from Google and that can't be a bad thing for a free shopping engine can it! - the tools within MMPro 3 give you the best froogle (google base) feeds.

Now there are loads of other mods which I and many other developers and store owners use and have used and there are more which I view as important so if I get chance I will update this post but these mods will give your store the flying start it deserves and ensure that every visitor is maximised and that your store gains ground on the search engines quickly in order to help you get going.

If you have a mod in mind that you want advice or opinions on please reply to this post and I will do my best to assist.

Going to move this to Third Party mods

so you did, well it's in its proper place, thanks balinor.

Hope this helps and good luck with your X-Cart stores.

Nice list. I'd add TelaFirma's Dynamic Image Mod (makes dealing with images a breeze). I'm rather partial to SafetyNetWeb's DSEFU mod over the CDSEO mod, but one or the other is a must.

Firetank's Sitemap generator is also a great one, as it covers the products, categories, static pages and help pages.

Thanks, it's something that's always been needed IMHO as it's difficult to decipher where to place your budget when buying mods to ensure your store is setup to perform.

I have SafetyNetWebs DSEFU mod and the reason I recommend CDSEO over it is because the results are better. An SEO campaign conducted by Le Verger using CDSEO offered a 69% leap in the global visibility of leverger.co.uk's myriad of product pages thanks to the fact that you can assign a keyword matching url to both category and product to make seo keyword density (a key component in any seo campaign) more effective. DSEFU does not offer this and supplies urls which are not content relevant so therefore cannot be as effective (despite what they tell you, although it is a nice and well thought out mod).

Now before anyone opinionates on this matter - I am not an SEO 'guru' but I know that when my rankings and referrals from google and other engines increase because of utilising one mod over another, I'm going to keep on using that mod.

I can gauge this thanks to firetanks Marketing Manager Pro 3 software I mentioned which gives it to me straight - where my users come from, what searches they use to find me and what referrers are offering me traffic - without it I would just be guessing.

Just my thoughts on all these "Dynamic" SEO friendly mods I keep seeing... :wink:

:arrow: http://cart-lab.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-dynamic-rewrites-are-bad-idea.html

It's a good point - although what the CDSEO rewrite gives store owners is the chance to get in front of the 10k users more quickly without huuuuge financial outlay.

Its fine and dandy for any small to mayber low end mid size companies, but I highly doubt the fellows at Yahoo/Google don't make use of some kind of "caching" ability instead of having the server spend valuable server resources generating one page per request. I can only imagine the nightmare the guys at myspace go through.

I'm not totally against It I just think there is a balance especially, when it comes to high traffic sites vs lower end more specific niche stores.

Good suggestion of links, btw!

I'm with you for sure - like I say, it's a good point. BUT - this post is aimed at those smaller startups and medium to semi large companies that are using these forums to help launch themselves into the more visible territories of national and international larger scale retailers/distributors.

I simply offer the tools which I have found massively helpful in gaining my own national/international foothold in the internet marketplace which, let's be honest, is becoming more and more expensive by the day to make a viable return on investment (albeit with larger rewards via an expanded audience).

The science behind it is to have maximum users for minimal server load - we're all behind that but to get myself into the postion of being visible enough to make changes, I have to first get in front of a wider audience and the above (remember the reason you looked at this thread in the first place? the best mods) are what I have used and therefore I can vouch for their abilities in assisting the small to medium sized company in reaching their goals.

X-Cart is a solution for small to mid-size business. I would not recommend x-cart to any large sized business who could afford an enterprise or custom solution.

Anyone who has to deal with the kind of traffic google, yahoo or myspace use won't be utilizing x-cart with or without an html catalog. I went to a PHP conference and attended a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP) who is employed in part by Yahoo, and he talked about the efforts that go into caching and speed. He said most of their processing is handled in C below the web server level.

Additionally, could you imagine google trying to run a 4 billion page html catalog, lol - that's why they cache their dynamic pages.

I've seen X-Cart pre 4.1.x take down Quad CPU servers with massive amount of data crunching power with a low number of concurrent users. This is the main reason 4.1.x was written the way it was, to consume as little server resources as possible and be more efficient. A Fortune 5 isn't going to plug-n-pray a commercial Cart but rather write their own. :D

Google does do something very similar, the html catalog is a semi-spider, so in essence X-Cart is doing the same. Collect data, store it on a file system. Granted Google is in a much much LARGER scale, and they surely are not doing it in a interpreted language like PHP or even low level C. I would almost believe they are using Assembly mixed with C or Python to squeeze as much as they can out of low end machines in their data centers that do nothing BUT parse data all day long.

Proof is in the pudding: :lol:
:arrow: http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=2459

Anyhow not to get off topic, just my 2cents.

large scale websites architecture
 

Here's one way to design a large-scale network - and this comes from my experience being the designer and network admin of a top 50 website property that generated millions of hits day:

We used F5's Big-IP's (basically an advanced load balancer) in front of a bunch of web servers that were all tied into a SAN that was RAID-5 and we had dedicated database servers that were replicated.

when its time to grow there is a way to do it w/ dynamically created URLs , its just you need more machines than serving static html pages. Be aware that these solutions are not cheap by any means....but if you are generated that much traffic its time to find an investor.

Best,

-John

Re: large scale websites architecture
 

Thanks for that valuable insight - we're getting off topic now however and this post is for the purpose of helping x-cart users find the right tools to grow traffic and sales with, not for anything else, please keep your posts relevant to the thread from now on for their benefit. Thanks

Re: FLYING START - THE BEST MODS TO BUY
 

In my opinion you also have to add all of the BCS Meta Tag mods, The Altered Cart On Page Check Out for one of the most seamless checkout processes, Mult Upsell Links If you are serious about upselling ( a must have if you use ez upsell and ez recommend). Also some fantasic free mods Phils Reciprocal Link Manager and Phils Direct product Enquiry form.

Re: FLYING START - THE BEST MODS TO BUY
 

Anyone have opinions on T-Hub or Stone Edge order managers?