Talking with Qualiteam (X-Cart, LiteCommerce)

I was able to talk with the folks at Qualiteam, an Eastern European ecommerce vendor. They have two shopping cart products, X-Cart and LiteCommerce.

Thanks for talking with TheCartBlog.com, guys. Where are you located?

Our company is headquartered in Cyprus, with partner company offices in the Russian Federation.

How many people does your firm have?

At this time, we have more than 150 people working in our company.

Tell me about the products. In particular, I’m having trouble understanding why you have two apparently competing products. I read the comparison chart, and it seems to suggest that X-Cart is more mature and fully featured. Why didn’t you create an X-Cart lite? As a customer, how do I decide which is right for me?

The concepts behind these two products are quite different.

Both solutions are stable and mature, and both of them provide a rich feature set and can be used as ready-made shopping cart solutions or e-commerce platforms/engines for custom online store solutions. They are widely integrated with numerous payment and shipping services and other third-party solutions. Moreover, our company provides the whole range of accompanying services including software installation, custom development, web design and shopping cart hosting.

However, there are some significant differences: X-Cart is equipped with a wider range of built-in features (at a higher price), while LiteCommerce is a very modular architecture which provides convenient mechanisms for customization, such as an API for third-party add-ons. Designers also like LiteCommerce’s WYSIWYG editors. LiteCommerce is also easier to maintain for store owners and administrators, thanks to the built-in QuickStart wizard along with a Control Panel and installer for Windows.

So in a nutshell,

  • X-Cart is a powerful, ready-made, fully-featured solution with a wide range of ready-made add-ons and third-party solutions
  • LiteCommerce is a more flexible, easy to use and customizable solution.

And of course, our sales representatives are always happy make recommendations based on client needs.

Is X-Cart considered a legacy product? Are you actively in development?

X-Cart is under active development, with releases containing new features, enhancements and bugfixes being provided on a regular basis. By no means is it a legacy product.

How many people are using the products? Any segments in particular that
prefer your software?

Our products power more than 20,000 live online stores worldwide. Since both products are highly customizable, they can be tailored to almost any industry, and that is why the range of segments greatly varies. Among the most popular are: books, videos, clothing, electronics, toys, and e-goods.

Your add ons for the LiteCommerce product are very modestly priced. How did you
decide on this strategy? Why have you kept X-Cart add on prices high?

The main idea behind this approach is to allow a client to combine a desired feature set himself and expand it when there’s a need for extended functionality. For example, a client can buy a basic version of LiteCommerce and extend it with additional components at a later date without having to spend too much extra money up front.

With X-Cart, the approach is different since many advanced features are already present in the stock version. Add-ons provide some complex, powerful features, that is why they are priced higher.

What’s your support plan? How do you deal with the time difference?

Our support system is based on support points. Each incident (an issue, problem or question related to our software) is classified by category and rated in points depending on its complexity. Points can be bought at any time, they are simply added to your account and can be spent later. However, we advise our customers to maintain a positive account balance in order to cover the work, and most of our customers buy points in advance.

The point system means that a customer can buy as much support as needed and avoid unnecessary spending. Also, each of our products comes with a free support package so that clients can receive assistance on the basics.

As for the time difference, it’s not an issue for our customers since the support service is provided 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Are you primarily marketing to developers or to storeowners?

We think of both groups as our target audience, since it’s possible either to use our software as-is, customize it yourself or hire our developers to customize it for you.

Why did you make your forum members only?

In our experience, a forum open to the public attracts those who simply wish to promote their products and are not interested in providing assistance for our solutions at all. That is why we have limited access, so that people could actually receive assistance and participate in relevant discussions. In addition, there is a great deal of code available on our forum which we also want to protect for security and licensing reasons.

How many commercial 3rd party developers do you have in your community?

It’s hard to tell the exact number, however, we can definitely say that there are a number of individuals and studios who are very active in providing custom solutions and add-on modules and whose services are based solely on our products.

What are the differentiators between your solution and Zen Cart, OSCommerce or Magento?

ZenCart/OSCommerce are surely among the best picks from free e-commerce products, however, they mostly succeed in skilled hands since they’re quite difficult to customize. Store owners may still have to pay a lot for the extra work which in our case is built into the product.

As for Magento, it is surely an attractive product and it deserves a lot of attention, but the code quality and maturity is still uncertain, whereas X-Cart has a long development history and most of glitches are fixed by now. It’s also not clear what level of service Varien will provide (i.e. will they do custom programming themselves?) and this is a very important consideration for many clients.

How do you do upgrades? What’s the cost?

As soon as the new version is released, we provide upgrade packs at no additional cost so customers can perform the upgrade themselves. If code changes are minor, X-Cart can be upgraded using the automated script. An upgrade between versions involves automatic database upgrade and manual re-implementation of modifications.

Still, if necessary, clients are always welcome to order a custom upgrade to be done by our engineers.

What percentage of your revenue is derived from professional services vs. selling software licenses?

In general, the largest part of our revenue is generated by software sales.

Great! Well thanks for your time guys, and we’ll see you on the web.
Qualiteam’s e-commerce offerings are X-Cart and LiteCommerce. Check them out.

Talking to FoxyCart (Part I)

I chatted with Brett Florio and Luke Stokes of FoxyCart earlier this week. Here’s the transcript:

TheCartBlog: Tell me about FoxyCart.

FoxyCart: FoxyCart is a hosted service that provides shopping cart functionality to developers and designers in a unique way: we only provide the cart and the checkout. That’s it. You bring your content management solution – or even static HTML pages – add a little Javascript, and boom! you have e-commerce.

TheCartBlog: Just the cart and the checkout?

FoxyCart: That’s it. We look at it this way: rather than doing a half-baked job at, say, newsletter production or inventory management, we encourage you to use your existing tools which are purpose built for those tasks, and simply integrate FoxyCart. Rather than forcing you to use a content management system that we created, we tell you to use your own, and just add FoxyCart in. FoxyCart is platform as a service.

TheCartBlog: Well, to the best of my knowledge that is unique.

FoxyCart: And because we don’t provide those facilities, the amount of data duplication you now have to deal with is really minimal. We give you data in XML or as a JSON object, and you deal with it in whatever way works best for you.

TheCartBlog: What do you mean when you say, “designers or developers?”

FoxyCart: Designers have deep expertise in layout, css, and the user experience, but they’re not computer programmers. So for them, we have pre-integrated offerings like MODx that don’t require any programming.  But for developers who want to get under the hood, do complex integrations and make adjustments to how things work, we say, “here’s the data; do what you want.”

TheCartBlog: Now what about merchants?

FoxyCart: We really don’t target merchants or sellers. We assume that if you’re a seller, you’re working with a professional to develop your web presence.

TheCartBlog: If you’re serious, you want to build business, not your website.

FoxyCart: Exactly.

TheCartBlog: OK, so the cart and checkout. What does that encompass?

FoxyCart: adding and removing things from the cart, taxes, shipping, and payment gateways.

TheCartBlog: … and for everything else, you bring your favorite solution and do the required integration.

FoxyCart: Exactly.

TheCartBlog: And how is the pricing structured?

FoxyCart: Basic service is $15/month. Billing begins when you migrate from a test gateway to a production gateway. You can test for as long as you like and not get billed (but you also won’t get paid).

TheCartBlog: That’s it? No percentage of sales?

FoxyCart: Nope. Flat fee. Now there are a couple of other optional fees: if you want to offer multi-ship (multiple ship to addresses in one checkout session), you pay an extra monthly fee. And if you want your own domain name, you pay a small yearly surcharge.

TheCartBlog: I’m impressed that you offer multi-ship.

FoxyCart: To the best of our knowledge, it’s just us and Magento.

TheCartBlog: Let’s talk discounting.

FoxyCart: We have lots of flavors of Quantity Discounting, including BOGOF and related discounts.

TheCartBlog: Coupons?

FoxyCart: Coming up in the next release.

TheCartBlog: And how do releases work?

FoxyCart: Well, it’s really feature driven, and we try to do something every month or so. But one thing that we do that’s also unique with respect to releases is that each cart has its own version, and we allow customers to time their own upgrades. It’s a pushbutton upgrade, but you schedule it so there’s no risk of things breaking while you’re on vacation.

TheCartBlog: OK, what’s an implementation going to run me?

FoxyCart: Once you learn how the system works, you can do a simple implementation in a few hours. We have a wiki and a forum so that people can learn about how our system works.

TheCartBlog: What about support?

FoxyCart: Support is done through our forum, but we’re pretty active participants.

TheCartBlog: Can I hire a pro?

FoxyCart: We have preferred providers for design, programming, etc.

TheCartBlog: Let’s talk competition. Magento and Shopify – your take?

FoxyCart: Magento is a fabulous product – as is Shopify. We admire them both. And for some people, they will be more appropriate solutions than FoxyCart. But both of them have downsides. With Shopify, you’re paying fees on every sale. With Magento, you have the headache of maintaining your cart. And neither of these systems let you bring your own CMS to the party.

TheCartBlog: Well guys, I think you’ve built something really special. What I’m going to do is sign up for FoxyCart and build a cart out of an existing website (and time the process) so that people can get a sense of how it all works. I’ll keep you posted.