X-Cart Gold is good shopping cart software that is browser–based. You only need a browser and you can have access to your eCommerce site account from anywhere. Some of the features of X-Cart Gold that stood out to us are the ease of set up of the store, the variations of templates they provided and the amount of support that they give their clients.

X-Cart Gold has a few limitations. They have some great add-on modules, which is an additional cost to get. Many of the other packages just come with this as part of their package deal. X-Cart Gold is configurable but it does take some knowledge to edit the templates. If you are a beginner, customization will not be easy.

X-Cart Gold is a package deal. You buy it one time and it’s yours to host wherever you want it. You will need to find a hosting service to run your shopping cart and they have a list of hosting partners that they recommend.

Once set up is complete, the administration, maintenance and store are so very easy to navigate and use. The dashboard interface in the administration area is very comprehensive and allows quick access to all features of your site.

X-Cart Gold has many great features. The Category Manager is really simple to use and you can add as many categories as you wish. To add a subcategory all you have to do is add a "/" with your category name. For example, books is the category. To create a subcategory in books, all you would have to do is type: Books/Fantasy or Books/Mystery, which would create a new subcategory.

The traffic reports for X-Cart Gold are great. The shopping cart conversion funnel report shows at what point potential customers bailed out of the buy process. It begins tracking which customers looked at a product, which added it to their cart, and each step in the checkout process. With this information, you can know exactly where the breakdown is in your shopping cart.

The back-end interface is set up in different sections; Management, Administration, Affiliates, Your Profile, Help and Authentication. It’s all browser-based so it's very easy to handle and understand.

After setup, marketing is pretty easy. This product is designed for multi-vendor marketing. You can manage your customers' accounts, wishlists and order history very easily.

This software does have all the security features we reviewed in shopping cart software. It requires an SSL certificate for checkout. It has cookies to track IP addresses. And because this product is browser-based all the information is kept on the host's server eliminating the risk for loss of information.

To access the software help, you need to use their website. There are forums, FAQs, and an online reference manual. They do not have context-sensitive help, which means wherever you are in the program, the help is specific to what you are working on. This is would be a nice feature, but X-Cart does not have it.