The latest branch of X-Cart shopping cart software includes new features and tools making it even more feature-rich and flexible

December 17, 2008 – Qualiteam Software announces the long-awaited release of X-Cart shopping cart software version 4.2. The new release is a result of long-time efforts to research and analyze the requirements from both new and existing store owners in order to deliver all of the most demanded features.

X-Cart’s new features include search-engine friendly CSS-based skin layout and product/category URLs, customizable META tags, support for dimensional shipping, automated thumbnails generation, export of newsletter subscribers, compatibility with all major web browsers (including Microsoft Internet Explorer v6-8, Mozilla Firefox v1.5-3, Opera v9, Safari v2-3 and Google Chrome) and many others.

Major improvements:

• X-Cart’s layout is CSS-based

  CSS-based technologies make HTML code more compact (much lesser in size than table-based code). As a result, the page content is indexed by search engines most easily and the code responsible for page style/presentation is cached in order to achieve higher performance.

• Enhanced SEO tools

  Search engine friendliness is a crucial factor for today’s highly competitive market where a maximum coverage of potential customers is needed to maximize the profit. That is why Qualiteam has made all possible efforts to maximize X-Cart’s friendliness for search engines and provide flexible tools for online merchants to control all major factors important for successful indexing by search engines.

  X-Cart 4.2 makes it possible for merchants to define META tags for individual storefront pages and automatically generate clear, memorable URL addresses (which can also be customized for any page). This allows performing search engine optimization for individual product and category pages (by defining keyword-rich attributes for each item).

  Together with CSS-based skin layout, X-Cart becomes a platform for an online store which is completely ready to catch search spiders’ attention and receive targeted traffic.

• Support for dimensional and per-provider shipping

  From or experience, store owners are often concerned about the proper calculation of shipping costs. In response to these needs, version 4.2 includes support for dimensional shipping which allows providing more accurate real-time shipping rates by splitting orders into separate packages (taking product dimensions into account).

  In addition, X-Cart Pro now supports per-provider shipping cost calculation by defining location addresses on a provider level for even more accurate shipping quotes.

• Automatic thumbnails generation and sharpening

  Almost all store owners spend significant time trying to produce attractive product images. In order to increase the convenience of working with thumbnails, X-Cart 4.2 not only allows automated generation of product thumbnails, but also automatically increases the sharpness of resulting images using “unsharp mask” filter. Such a feature allows to save time by producing high-quality, clear thumbnails without extra efforts.

• Authorize/capture support for payment gateways

  Speaking of improvements related to integration with external systems, it is worth mentioning that X-Cart’s payment features were enhanced by introducing authorize/capture support for many popular payment gateways: Website Payments Standard, Website Payments Pro and Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition (UK), LinkPoint, Authorize.Net Advanced and Server Integration Methods, NetRegistry e-commerce, Protx VSP Direct and Virtual Merchant.

• Export of newsletter subscribers

  Now it’s possible to synchronize X-Cart’s data with third-party newsletter services by exporting email subscribers from X-Cart for importing into external databases.

For further details regarding features of X-Cart, please, refer to the complete feature list or try out the demo to see the latest X-Cart release in action.