X-Cart forums

[mcinque]

I am migrating some of my clients from XC4 to XC5 and I am getting complaints about products sorting, and I don't know how to justify myself.

Premise:
XC4 allows to view the products in categories in different ways, choosing a "default view" in administration.

Just set the predefined sorting in settings, choosing from default, price, alphabetical, best sellers or rating.

The "default" sorting orders the products as they are sorted in administration through a numeric value.
If they are all set to zero, the alphabetical order will be used, if they have different values set, they will be ordered in increasing or decreasing order.

The potential customer, once on the site, view the products with the "default" order and he still can manually choose to order them with the remaining methods (by price, alphabetically, best sellers or judgment).

By assigning numerical values to his products, the seller he can decide in which order the products will be shown in frontend.

This has always been such an essential feature from a marketing point of view, that it felt like a standard to me.

A seller MUST be able to show products in the order he desire, grouping them by genre or preference.

Problem:
In XC5, the "default" sorting no longer exists.

There is only by price, name, rating, new products.

The seller can choose the sorting in administration by assigning a number to the product (or by drag and drop when there are few products), but in the frontend this sorting does not happen as established.

In fact, since in the frontend there is only sort by price, name, rating or new product, these settings practically always prevail over the order imposed in administration.

If I have 3 products A, B and C with a price of $ 1, $ 10, $ 100 and I want to have them displayed on the site in the C, A, B order I cannot do it because:

-sorting by price will always sort them with CBA or ABC
-alphabetical sorting will always sort them with ABC or CBA
-the order by rating will sort them by rating
-the sorting by date will sort them by date

The ordering set in administration works correctly only with the featured products, where there are no other sorting methods.

Qs:
1. Whoever designed XC5 is a completely different team? Why a so useful marketing feature has been dropped or ignored?

2. How can I justify to my customers that by upgrading to XC5 they have LOST features?

3. Is this feature in the upcoming changes?

Let me know your opinions.

[cflsystems]

There is default sort in XC5 - https://demostore.x-cart.com/admin/admin.php?target=general_settings - "Default order to sort products within a category" and "Default order to sort products within a search result"

However keep in mind XC5 uses lots of cached and cookies values for various elements so it is possible once you visit site as customer and change sorting order any sub-sequential visit (or page load) will use that same order - as it is now set as preferred order for you. XC4 will reset the order with every session.

Moving from XC4 to XC5 will result in lost of some features, others have been moved to modules (some paid), but will also get some new features.

There's always a trade off. How you can justify it? XC4 is dead, has been for the last 4-5 years. It is unfortunate but it's the reality. For good or bad XC5 is the cart in active development now.

[mcinque]

There is default sort in XC5

But there isn't a different ordering than price, name, rating or date.

So why Qualiteam put product sorting in admin but this ordering doesn't work in the frontend since there is no sorting by position? It's creepy: it looks like a feature left unfinished. It works, but only in featured product. It's unlogical for me.

Those who conceived XC4 obviously had huge IT and online sales skills (given the amount of options that XC4 offers), while those who designed and are following XC5 seem to be more specialized in the IT branch rather than online sales: it seems that more importance has been given to the ease of updating and ease of assistance (important factors of course), but without considering implementing all the excellent sales and maintenance features that were in XC4 (and not sell them as modules or assistance services).

I mean: when it came time to say "we have to rewrite X-Cart", I guess they took all the positive and functional aspects of XC4 and redesigned it to eliminate as much as possible the negative ones.

Instead they seem to have started from scratch, with new people, new ways of thinking, all new, not taking with them all the of characteristics that made them successful.

For example: product thumbnail, product image and detailed image = in XC5 there is no product image (only thumbnail and detailed images) and the 1st variant image keeps the place of the product image in the category list.

Why? Variant picture won't necessarly meet the product thumbnail, it may show only a detail...

Product sorting (this topic): removed.

Just examples...

However keep in mind XC5 uses lots of cached and cookies values for various elements so it is possible once you visit site as customer and change sorting order any sub-sequential visit (or page load) will use that same order - as it is now set as preferred order for you.

This is perfectly fine. I see no problems with that. If a customer prefers that way, it should be able to select and to mantain that.

XC4 is dead

I won't say is dead. There is a huge clientbase in the world that is still using XC4, that is still working fine and fast. I appreciate Qualiteam that is producing patches and bugfixes for all this clients.

XC5 is the cart in active development now.

This is absolutely true. And for this very reason I wonder why there is STILL a lack of small features and functionalities.

I could tell if we were just starting out, but now XC5 is mature. For example, there is no way to recreate clean URLs if there is an error with a migration or an import (we discussed about this in another topic and no, there is no way to make the shop recreate the URLs without three different scripts. Deactivating clean urls, dropping clean_urls table and reactivating clean urls doesn't work).