X-Cart: shopping cart software

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-   -   v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5 (https://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=76871)

xim 03-13-2019 04:26 AM

v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Hi folks,

Since we launched X-Cart 5, our clients keep asking if we are discontinuing X-Cart 4. We always knew your business relies on X-Cart and we cannot leave you behind. In all our meetings, we promised we are not going to stop supporting X-Cart 4 users.

We’re as good as our word and we keep releasing new X-Cart 4 versions, adding new features, fixing bugs. The next version (v4.7.11) will be out in April, 2019.

However, according to our records, 100% of our new clients now choose X-Cart 5 for their eCommerce business. 60% of all our customers are now on X-Cart 5.

We decided on closing sales of X-Cart 4 a.k.a Classic editions (Gold, GoldPlus, and Platinum) from our official website x-cart.com. Our resellers and industry partners can still buy the legacy software license for X-Cart GoldPlus or Platinum on demand: sales@x-cart.com

Again, we are still supporting X-Cart 4 stores and will not discontinue such support until there are live stores on this platform. You will never walk alone, guys.

Moreover, all the customers on Gold edition can upgrade their license to GoldPlus for free – please contact us to claim the offer. The upgrade packs for v.4.5 to 4.7 will be available in the File Area section of your HelpDesk account after the license exchange. Our team of experts is ready to take the burden of upgrade procedures off your shoulders. Just contact them and ask for help.

-------------

What’s next?

If you are happy with your current store and do not want to change anything, just keep using X-Cart 4. If you need new features, you may want to upgrade to the latest X-Cart 4 version (4.7.10, 4.7.11) and/or X-Cart GoldPlus (if you are on X-Cart Gold).

If you decide to switch from X-Cart Gold or Gold Plus to X-Cart Business and are ready to transfer the site yourself, we have a ready solution – the Data Migration Wizard - https://market.x-cart.com/addons/migration-wizard.html. With this migration tool, you can transfer the following data types:

- Configuration settings (company info, general settings, contact us, SEO-friendly URLs)
- Content (static pages, speed bar)
- Products (general info, images, SEO-friendly URLs, bestsellers, market price, product options and variants, wholesale prices, etc.)
- Categories (general info, images, SEO-friendly URLs)
- Users (as is)
- Memberships (as is)
- Zones (as is)
- Payment settings (for the popular payment methods)
- Shipping settings (user defined and real time)
- Orders (as is)

The migration process is described in detail with tips and step by step instructions in the knowledge base. All you need is to upgrade your v4 license to the v5 Business package for $49.50 only. You save 90% of the initial cost of the license.

If you’d rather we made the transfer, you should opt for the Migration Service pack. Please find more information from this page:
https://www.x-cart.com/x-cart-migration.html

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How X-Cart 5 can help you grow your eCommerce business

Launched 5+ years ago, X-Cart 5 has by now developed into a fast, modern, flexible and easy-going eCommerce solution. It helps online business owners improve their positions in the ever-growing eCommerce market and survive the tough competition.

Why people choose X-Cart 5:

- It’s fully-functional. 99,99% of the built-in features match those of X-Cart 4. Plus 300% extra features for even better admin and customer experience.
- It’s extendable. 1000+ ready add-ons and integrations in the built-in App Store – installed with one link, just like adding an app on your smartphone.
- It’s customizable. You’ll have a whole mighty Webmaster mode to tweak any part of your storefront.
- It’s upgradeable. And the brand new upgrade system runs autonomic upgrades to allow pain-free upgrade process within a few clicks. This is the reason why 65% оf X-Cart 5 users upgrade to the new versions. Just compare with the 4% users of legacy platform upgrades.
- It’s stable. Yes. It’s customizable AND upgradeable AND stable. Unlike all other eCommerce solutions where it’s two of the three, X-Cart 5 is a blend.
- It’s secure. 100% PCI-DSS compliant by default.
- It’s mobile and SEO optimized by default. No comments here, it’s just awesome.
- It’s cost-efficient. eCommerce software license at a cost of an iPad – that sounds very affordable.

It has better conversion than the v4 branch (based on the statistics of the merchants who migrated from X-Cart 4).

Check the reviews of the merchants who already migrated to v5.



Review the full article about why people chose to switch to X-Cart 5: https://www.x-cart.com/blog/reviews-about-migration-to-xcart-5.html

However, if you’re satisfied with your current X-Cart Classic store, great! Keep developing your business, grow your sales, we’ll never abandon you. Our customer care, support and hosting teams along with the developers will work their best to help you grow your business just as they always did. Stay tuned for the release of new X-Cart 4.7.11 this April.

Remember, we always have your back – we consider it our main priority.

--------

Summary

- No sales of new licenses of Gold/GoldPlus/Platinum licenses for new customers. Only for the partners and existing merchants who need to clone the existing stores.
- Continue support v4 branch. The release is scheduled to April 2019
- All Gold licenses could be upgraded to GoldPlus for free. Contact our team to do it.
- You can upgrade your v4 store to the newest 4.7.10 version in the v4 branch or consider upgrading to v5 to increase your conversion and boost your sales.

elmirage001 03-13-2019 06:54 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Thank you so much for again confirming that we XC4 users will not be abandoned!

April will mark 12 years using X-Cart and we depend on it everyday. Our business niche has some pretty unique challenges and XC4 solves them perfectly. Our store is heavily modified and XC4 allows us to quickly make changes in house which keeps costs down. XC5 would make things easier for us but we would lose the huge advantage we have over the other stores in our niche.

Thank you all again!

Paul

ITVV 03-13-2019 09:09 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
@elmirage001 - Hi Paul, we are exactly like you, 12 years with x-cart 4, heavily modified and using PhilJ's excellent reBoot skin :D/ :D/ :D/

It's a great platform and should never be allowed to disappear. It's great that support for x-cart 4 will continue.

Like you a move to x-cart 5 would mean losing the ability to "tweak" stuff when we want to do something quick and dirty!

I am just a little surprised that x-cart licenses can no longer be purchased 8O 8O If support is continuing then why not carry on selling the platform :roll: :roll:

I have a couple of new projects later in the year that I want to use x-cart 4 on. Just seems a bit of an odd business decision to me :? :? :?

Kind regards to all

ITVV

elmirage001 03-13-2019 09:26 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by ITVV
@elmirage001 - Hi Paul, we are exactly like you, 12 years with x-cart 4, heavily modified and using PhilJ's excellent reBoot skin :D/ :D/ :D/

It's a great platform and should never be allowed to disappear. It's great that support for x-cart 4 will continue.

Like you a move to x-cart 5 would mean losing the ability to "tweak" stuff when we want to do something quick and dirty!

I am just a little surprised that x-cart licenses can no longer be purchased 8O 8O If support is continuing then why not carry on selling the platform :roll: :roll:

I have a couple of new projects later in the year that I want to use x-cart 4 on. Just seems a bit of an odd business decision to me :? :?

Kind regards to all

ITVV

Hi ITVV!

You bring up an excellent point. Maybe they can make an exception for Old Timers like us :-)

ITVV 03-13-2019 09:28 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by elmirage001
Hi ITVV!

You bring up an excellent point. Maybe they can make an exception for Old Timers like us :-)


Definitely an "Old Timer" here :lol: :lol: :lol:

All the best

ITVV

cflsystems 03-13-2019 09:49 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by xim
If you decide to switch from X-Cart Gold or Gold Plus to X-Cart Business and are ready to transfer the site yourself, we have a ready solution – the Data Migration Wizard - https://market.x-cart.com/addons/migration-wizard.html. With this migration tool, you can transfer the following data types:

- Configuration settings (company info, general settings, contact us, SEO-friendly URLs)
- Content (static pages, speed bar)
- Products (general info, images, SEO-friendly URLs, bestsellers, market price, product options and variants, wholesale prices, etc.)
- Categories (general info, images, SEO-friendly URLs)
- Users (as is)
- Memberships (as is)
- Zones (as is)
- Payment settings (for the popular payment methods)
- Shipping settings (user defined and real time)
- Orders (as is)





You should clarify - stock XC4. The migration will not touch anything custom, CDSEO urls, 3rd party modules. Only whatever comes stock with XC4 and some of the XC own modules.




@elmirage001 / @ITVV
Unfortunately XC4 is dead. The process started with the release of XC5. QT needs to focus on one product only if they want that product to succeed. And this is XC5. And they want every new sale to be on XC5 so the platform can grow.

There is no surprise here.


It's like everyone was so sad MS "abandoned" Window XP and then 7 since no one seemed to like Win 10... But they need to do what needs to be done to bring the new platform mainstream.


And honestly with so much push for XC5 and aslmost every dev walked out of XC like years ago there is just no room for further development on XC4

xim 03-14-2019 06:05 PM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
I do not agree that xc4 is dead. Stock xc4 is outdated, right, but most of our xc4 based customers have highly customized stores, it is not stock v4 anymore, it is business specific ecommerce platforms which are very effective for certain business processes. We record a very good transaction of sales on the existing v4 customer base, that's why we continue to support this platform.

However, starting a new business with stock v4 is not a good idea at all, with v5 you can grow faster and more effectively. That's why we push all the new business to the new platform.
The only exclusion is to clone the existing v4 store to the new business (you will use all your custom works and can copy your business process as well) - it might work for the merchants. We see such result within our projects.

thebluedoorboutique 03-17-2019 05:24 PM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
I've been struggling with the thought of moving to XC5. I think if we're going to stay on the platform, we have to make the move to XC5, but it will most likely cost us $10-15k to re-create our customization and our OMS doesn't support XC5, meaning moving to a SaaS Order Management Software-- even more $$

What does ITVV mean in the quote below, can you not directly edit the files like you can is XC4?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ITVV
Like you a move to x-cart 5 would mean losing the ability to "tweak" stuff when we want to do something quick and dirty!


cflsystems 03-17-2019 05:54 PM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
You can edit templates but not php files. However editing templates while allowed is not a good thing to do unless it is done via custom module.

To put it simple - any change you want to make to the cart has to be done via module. This ensures whatever you are changing stays even when you upgrade cart or modules you are modifying. Also when you have it as a module you can turn it on/off simply by enable/disable the module.

Any other way of making changes to XC5 should be consider temporary and unsafe. Even the built-in template modifier won't do you much good if you need to edit template multiple times or replace a template...

Directly editing files is completely out of the questions since next upgrade of cart/modules downloads and replaces the whole not just applying changes like the XC4 upgrades do.

PhilJ 03-17-2019 08:21 PM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
v4 is alive and kicking, at least where I'm standing anyway :)

Triple A Racing 03-18-2019 07:07 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Our opinion FWIW is this:

If you're perfectly happy using your XC4 store, then don't change anything! It's still going to be very well supported by lots of good, Non X-Cart companies as well as X-Cart themselves. Quite simple really.

If you feel the need for change :D/ and you do want to change from XC4 to XC5 then do it (as we did a long time ago as an early XC5 adopter). However.... we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch (see below)

THIS post, in another thread on the XC4 / XC5 subject, is possibly a good explanation as to why and we agree wholeheartedly with the "start from scratch" comment that's made in that post. You'll need time and resources to do this though, don't forget.

Meaning, build your XC5 store (and a mimic dev store we'd say) on a separate server / host whilst you continue to trade with your XC4 store. This gives you time to test / check and then re-test and re-check everything 8O but with no loss of online trading at all. Once you've checked the checker :lol: and your XC5 store is 100% good to go, make your DNS changes and switch over from XC4 to XC5. Afterwards, archive everything in detail from your XC4 store for future reference and then extract all records that you might need, in a format that you can easy access locally. That's worked quite well for us.

The last paragraph is what we did (and at a time suitable for annual accounts too) We had an FAQ section explaining the changes and why XC4 accounts / profiles etc were no longer valid and advising customers who wanted an XC5 account / profile to create a new one etc (although quite often, customers order anonymously anyway and then they repeat order anonymously 8O which is easy to do in XC5, so it wasn't a big issue at all in the end. Your experience might vary obviously but...

Finally, if you're totally new to X-Cart, than it makes common and commercial sense to opt for XC5 because a) you cannot buy an XC4 licence now anyway :mrgreen: but seriously b) Once your'e past the steep learning curve and feeling comfortable with creating your XC5 own modules (or buying very well developed third party XC5 modules, of which, there are quite a few) then XC5 can be very heavily customised to your satisfaction, but in a way that dispenses with "patches" and "reworking core coding" etc when it comes to installing the latest XC5 upgrades.

XC5 is far from perfect, but it's 1000% better than it was, when it was first launched. We're really quite happy with it (most of the time) these days.

cflsystems 03-18-2019 07:27 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Triple A Racing
However.... we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch (see below)


I don't really agree with this.

If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now.

If you have customized store - getting the data transferred with custom scripts is the way to go. And it is possible. I have done it on few stores so far and there is no problem with this approach.

Starting from scratch is acceptable if you are willing to lose all data you have in the store but usually this is not the case.

It does cost to do custom scripts but there is also the factor of pissed off customers who will go to your competition if you choose to start from scratch. Weight the risk vs cost in a long run. There is always a solution or should we call it "the lesser evil"...

Triple A Racing 03-18-2019 07:50 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
I don't really agree with this

Well that's good! :D We did say it was our opinion FWIW and that "Your experience might vary..."
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now

Yep we still wouldn't, but it maybe as you say "the lesser evil" in this specific case.
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
If you have customized store - getting the data transferred with custom scripts is the way to go. And it is possible. I have done it on few stores so far and there is no problem with this approach

We know YOU definitely could provide such scripts :wink: but we mentioned scripts (and tricks) because many people "think" they can simply write their own script (having never written one before) run it and boom! Job done. That's not reality unfortunately.
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
Starting from scratch is acceptable if you are willing to lose all data you have in the store but usually this is not the case

There's no need to lose all data. You can (and we did) transfer i.e. copy, edit and upload XC4 product data to XC5. It's a slow process sure, but you're not losing any trading as your XC4 store is still live whilst this is going on.
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
It does cost to do custom scripts but there is also the factor of pissed off customers who will go to your competition if you choose to start from scratch. Weight the risk vs cost in a long run. There is always a solution or should we call it "the lesser evil"...

If you don't do it correctly and have downtime, yes agreed, but that wasn't our experience to be fair. Our XC4 stored traded until day XX and then our XC5 store took over. A seamless change at 2:00am on day XX. From memory, we didn't have any "pissed off" customers go elsewhere because they had to create a fresh XC5 profile, but they could have just voted silently of course :mrgreen:

Triple A Racing 03-20-2019 10:13 PM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
If you have stock (or almost stock) store it is ok to use the migration wizard. It has been improved lately and apart from few hiccups works very good now...

Quite possibly, just pure coincidence and/or the store owner's (or their service provider's) error, but the first item on the list in THIS POST yesterday...

tony_sologubov 03-25-2019 02:36 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Hi guys!

Thank you so much for your feedback! It is truly appreciated.

I would want to address several points mentioned in the discussion:
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
Any other way of making changes to XC5 should be consider temporary and unsafe. Even the built-in template modifier won't do you much good if you need to edit template multiple times or replace a template...


You can pretty safely apply changes to templates via Webmaster Mode. If there are cases in which it does not work, please give me an example as we would want to address that.

Besides that, X-Cart 5.4 will have more tools to edit templates out of the box, including adding new templates.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Triple A Racing
we'd say don't bother trying to migrate either via the official X-Cart method or your own scripts or tricks etc especially if you have a heavily modified XC4 store. Create a new XC5 store from scratch


I would agree with you a couple of years ago, but since then we heavily improved our Migration Wizard module. I work on migration data pretty much every day and if you have a small to medium size store, you can migrate your data within 15-30 minutes. And the store will work perfectly fine after that.
https://market.x-cart.com/addons/migration-wizard.html

However, I do agree that if you have custom functionality or just a specific store's config, it will require you to test quite a bit to make sure that X-Cart 5 works exactly as you need. We have piled up a checklist to help you with this task:
https://kb.x-cart.com/modules/xc4_to_xc5_migration_wizard/using_the_xc4_to_xc5_migration_wizard.html#check...ore-going-live

tony_sologubov 03-25-2019 02:37 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
If you have any questions/comments about the upgrade process from X-Cart 4 to X-Cart 5, I will be happy to address them.

Just let me know!

Tony

cflsystems 03-25-2019 08:08 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by tony_sologubov
I would agree with you a couple of years ago, but since then we heavily improved our Migration Wizard module. I work on migration data pretty much every day and if you have a small to medium size store, you can migrate your data within 15-30 minutes. And the store will work perfectly fine after that.



Please define "small to medium size store".
I have done it with stores with about:
- 2599 customers
- 50-200 categories

- 1000 - 1500 products
- 5000-10000 orders
- not counting the rest - like settings, pages, reviews, options, variants, etc


It takes couple hours. Which is still pretty fast compared to what it was before. And I consider this somewhere between small and medium size store more towards the small store size. So it is not 15-20 minutes.

tony_sologubov 03-25-2019 11:32 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
Please define "small to medium size store".
I have done it with stores with about:
- 2599 customers
- 50-200 categories

- 1000 - 1500 products
- 5000-10000 orders
- not counting the rest - like settings, pages, reviews, options, variants, etc


It takes couple hours. Which is still pretty fast compared to what it was before. And I consider this somewhere between small and medium size store more towards the small store size. So it is not 15-20 minutes.


I would say this is a medium size store.
Just recently I migrated a store with kind of the same numbers and it took me about 30 minutes.
I used X-Cart hosting as a server environment for that.

cflsystems 03-25-2019 03:45 PM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
To give you complete picture I don't actually stay and look at the screen waiting for it to finish :) I turn it on, it says 1 hour left or 2 hours left and I go to lunch. It runs pretty consistently so my guess is the time shown is somewhat accurate.


Anyway - whether it is 30 min or 1 hour - the point is the migration wizard is running pretty good now for stock stores. Still few hiccups to take care of - as outlined by me earlier - but in general it works ok.

tony_sologubov 03-26-2019 12:39 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by cflsystems
Anyway - whether it is 30 min or 1 hour - the point is the migration wizard is running pretty good now for stock stores. Still few hiccups to take care of - as outlined by me earlier - but in general it works ok.


Thanks for the kind words, Steve! I appreciate it!

Tony

BCSE 03-27-2019 10:20 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
It is no surprise that all new X-cart's are X-cart 5 sales since that is how the site became focused and you could hardly find X-cart "Classic" on the website for a while there. X-cart 5 is now the only choice for the every day person browsing the site.

We are here to support X-cart 4 as long as we have customers on X-cart 4. It is a solid platform that is easy to customize and get things done!

We have clients on XC5 as well and support both but we still enjoy working on X-cart 4 and honestly still prefer it.


Carrie

cflsystems 06-18-2019 09:50 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Tony the Migration Wizard still insist of installing unused shipping carriers in order to work. Brand new installation.
It makes absolutely no sense to ask for Australia Post for US store.
And for FedEx when there is no FedEx setup in the source store.


Which makes me to believe the Wizard simply checks if these modules are installed without making any connection to the source store.


Please fix. This is a bug.


Further to this - UPS setup was not transferred even though the UPS module was installed and active.

tony_sologubov 06-19-2019 12:42 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
Hi Steve,

Thank you for the report.
Both problems are already in our bug tracker and they are going to be fixed.
The team is focused on 5.4 release at the moment, so it may take some time for these problems to be addressed.

Thanks for the report anyway!

Tony

cflsystems 06-19-2019 06:14 AM

Re: v4 roadmap and upgrade to v5
 
I thought since XC4 has been discontinued and you encourage everyone to move to XC5 the Migration Wizard is also priority...
And to add to this bugs - looks like when running it on localhost images do not get transferred.
I know last time I ran it like a month ago it did transfer images but it was not on localhost


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