X-Cart forums

[tony_sologubov]

Hi, everyone!

I am Tony and I am managing X-Cart Next community.

Today is a big day for us and we are excited to say we’ve finally launched X-Cart Next. X-Cart Next is a hosted e-commerce solution that allows customization. I will explain the whole system a little bit later.

New X-Cart Next website is available at http://next.x-cart.com/ and you are welcome to create 30-day free trial store. In addition to that we created a new forum fully dedicated to X-Cart Next questions, new Help center with Knowledge base, Suggest an idea service and Bug tracker. Finally, developers will enjoy our developer documentation.


Why X-Cart Next?

As you may know, X-Cart 4 is a great product that can be easily customized, but it has two main drawbacks:

• a merchant has to be a little tech-savvy to be able to manage it (installation, adding modules etc)
• upgrade problems after custom modifications

X-Cart Next solves these problems:

• X-Cart Next is hosted solution, so a merchant will not need to worry about tech problems: the environment fits perfectly, store installation goes within less than 30 seconds in two clicks, marketplace installs modules in one click.
• All customizations are made by modules, so they do not alter the core and the core can be safely upgraded.

Besides that we have thought about partners and here is what we can offer:

• Developers and designers can upload modules and themes to our single marketplace. It means that your work will be available to all merchants right in their admin area.
• Our partner program allows to get recurring commissions, so if you lead a merchant to us, you will get money each month with no extra work.
• Free partner support for all types of partners (watch our partner program for details)
• Great and growing developer documentation

Sounds good? Then try X-Cart Next out right now! Your feedback is extremely important for us, so leave it in comments here.

[cflsystems]

Hi Tony

Congrats on the new SaaS solution release. Time will tell if this was a good or bad move for QT...

Personally I am not happy with the sudden move as we were waiting for over 4 years to get a replacement of XC4 and XCN (XC5) was promised as such replacement... but it is not now...

[BCSE]

Tony,

Who supports the 3rd party mods then that are created if you auto take 25% cut? Do you do the initial support? Or do you take full responsibility for the support? Or is the developer responsible for full support and how is that communicated to the end user?

Carrie

[shawny]

I have to say congrats to the Qualiteam folks - your marketing communications, presentation of the site, even the presentation of x-cart 4 has really come together over the last year.

I look forward to Next evolving to and thank you folks for all the continued support of X-Cart 4. I am one happy customer.

[davidsaldana]

it's not "good news" to everyone, see here: http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=66314%27

[ADDISON]

I stepped forward to see what your solution offers. Here are my comments:

- 100 USD/month is not a big amount when you want getting a shopping cart plus hosting out of the box.

- a bad thing is related to bandwidth. For 5000 products, 8GB is very, very small. Imagine how easy is achieving this bandwidth value.

- as software engineer I am interested to get access to the core customizing without paying more money in support (I know SaaS is a Golden Cave for those who offer it). I read it is allowed for certified developers. how can I be one? do I have to pay for this?

- XCN has a big gap in features comparing with XC4. for a while XC4 will be the best choice for those who want taking the benefits of 3rd party developers. in time, when QT will fill the gap, actual/potential customers can make a real choice. For the moment XCN is promising but not in a competitive shape.

- you should encouraging more and more XC4 developers to join your platform - just for testing. this action will shorten the time to get nice features in XCN. you should spend time to teach Community that this new way has benefits.

- if Qualiteam took the decision to close XC4 project after a while believe me it is a bad one. even XCN could have all XC4 features.

An honest information about what is going on in the next 1 year is necessary.

[tony_sologubov]

@Carrie

Who supports the 3rd party mods then that are created if you auto take 25% cut? Do you do the initial support? Or do you take full responsibility for the support? Or is the developer responsible for full support and how is that communicated to the end user?

Module support is developer's responsibility. If you want to outsource customer support of the module to X-Cart Next team, contact us at developers@x-cart.com and we will discuss the details.

@addison

- a bad thing is related to bandwidth. For 5000 products, 8GB is very, very small. Imagine how easy is achieving this bandwidth value.

Thanks for spotting it out! We can always tweak the bandwidth values, so don't worry about that. If we see that it is really small, we will know what is OK value and adjust the settings.

- as software engineer I am interested to get access to the core customizing without paying more money in support (I know SaaS is a Golden Cave for those who offer it). I read it is allowed for certified developers. how can I be one? do I have to pay for this?

If you want to become a certified developer and upload modules to marketplace, write us an email at developers@x-cart.com. Now becoming a certified developer is absolutely free, all you need to do is to write 5 modules.

Besides that, to all early adopters we are offering developer support with no charge, developer documentation at https://x-cart.atlassian.net/ and distribution pack for local development.

- you should encouraging more and more XC4 developers to join your platform - just for testing. this action will shorten the time to get nice features in XCN. you should spend time to teach Community that this new way has benefits.

Thanks for the suggestion! We are already doing it, but still thank you for the advice.

- if Qualiteam took the decision to close XC4 project after a while believe me it is a bad one. even XCN could have all XC4 features.

Honestly, I do not see X-Cart Next as a competitor to X-Cart 4 and we do not want to close it.

X-Cart Next is for merchants who don't want to care about tech stuff + for developers who want to help such merchants.

X-Cart 4 is for developers who do always want to have an access to the entire code. We know that the most part of XC developer community loves this approach and we are happy about that. We are very thankful to all of you that you are using X-Cart 4 and we will not take it away from you as long as you need it.

As you can see two products solve two different problems, so why would we want to close XC4? I don't see any reason.

[BCSE]

Originally Posted by tony_sologubov

@Carrie



Module support is developer's responsibility. If you want to outsource customer support of the module to X-Cart Next team, contact us at developers@x-cart.com and we will discuss the details.

25% is pretty high for not providing anything but advertising (unless I'm missing something else you help with for 3rd party developers). When we resell for other companies and they resell for us using the X-cart version 4, the company that sells the software provides the initial support and questions and defers to the maker of the module only if they cannot answer the customer's questions. Would you be at least providing a ticketing system or something to track the questions? A centralized system only makes sense for issue tracking as it would be very confusing for someone using XCN to try to figure out who to contact for support for module X, Y or Z.

Carrie

[tony_sologubov]

Originally Posted by BCSE

25% is pretty high for not providing anything but advertising (unless I'm missing something else you help with for 3rd party developers)

Why do you think 25% is high for promoting your module to every XCN merchant?

When we resell for other companies and they resell for us using the X-cart version 4, the company that sells the software provides the initial support and questions and defers to the maker of the module only if they cannot answer the customer's questions. Would you be at least providing a ticketing system or something to track the questions? A centralized system only makes sense for issue tracking as it would be very confusing for someone using XCN to try to figure out who to contact for support for module X, Y or Z.

Let me explain how we expect to support merchants. If merchants have a problem, they will go to our Support team and we will find out what is the problem exactly (whether it is caused by default XCN functionality or the 3rd party module). Once we find out that the problem is caused by the 3rd party code, we can refer this client to the developer for proper support and this developer has to be ready to support this client.

Of course, we do not want to bother clients, if we can help them straight away, but if we cannot help, it is responsibility of the developer to provide proper support. And the developer excuses like "this question is really easy, you could've supported this client yourself" will not be taken into account. This is what I mean about "developer responsibility of client support".

As for centralized support system, that's a great idea, thank you, but at this point we do not need it. Once we feel there is a need in such system, we will consider implementing it.

[BCSE]

25% may not be high for developers who are a 'one man' operation. 25% for a company like ours that has over 10 employees, office space, etc is a high cost. Most affiliate or advertising areas ask 10% at most for referring sales.

I'm just not sure it's a price point we'd want to entertain otherwise we'd have to up the cost of the product to cover this.

If you do 25% then I think there needs to be some sort of support structure where most small technical questions, and questions on how to use the product are fielded to you, anything beyond Level 1 support would then be escalated to the company that made it. That would make 25% more feasible for us. A support system would be the easiest way for you to make this model work efficiently and not have the client lost on who to ask for help.

Carrie