Add X-Cart’s Powerful eCommerce Engine to WordPress

WordPress is a powerful blogging and content management platform that drives almost 24% of the internet’s top 10 million websites. Every month, an estimated 53.6 million new posts appear on WordPress-based sites. Many Wordpress users are looking for an efficient tool to make money from their websites. Several options exist: joining affiliate programs, embedding ads, opening an online store to sell physical goods or distribute the digital contents they produce.

There are plenty of tools to add an online store feature to your existing website that vary in simplicity of use, ease of setup, and price. But the abundance of existing tools is not an obstacle for developers of new ones, who frequently roll out even more convenient, powerful, and easy-to-use tools with which they hope to carve out their own piece of the pie.

The creators of X-Cart, one of the leading ecommerce platforms in the world, have introduced an exciting new opportunity for operators of the millions of Wordpress websites worldwide. Just like Wordpress, X-Cart works on a powerful bundle of MySQL and PHP, is very flexible, can be easily edited, and loves customization. All these similarities make these two engines a great combination for integration together, and X-Cart’s engineers have made it easy to do just that.

X-Cart widgets inside your existing website 

X-Cart’s new integration module helps you build ecommerce blocks into your existing WordPress-based website. In other words, you can show either a category with a list of products or a detailed product page, and a minicart widget. Your visitors can not only browse the goods, but also add them to cart and place the order.

In addition to showing the blocks inside the blog entries themselves, you may display a side menu with categories and with search by products in your X-Cart store.

User-friendly management

Adding X-Cart blocks does not require any programming skills. You just create a new post, as usual, and insert a string like this:

[xcart widget='categorymenu'][xcart widget='productgrid' category_id='2' grid_size='5']

You do not even need to think of a correct string format: it’s copied from the corresponding page in X-Cart (category or product management in X-Cart admin back end).

At the same time, the X-Cart store itself may be available at an independent URL with its’ own independent traffic.

What you need to start:

• WordPress of version 4.2.2 or higher 
• “X-Cart Integration” plugin for WordPress 
• X-Cart of version 5.2 or higher with free module REST API enabled 
• “WordPress Integration” module for X-Cart

We have easy-to-install Bitnami stacks for both X-Cart and Wordpress, and all you need is to mutually connect them. By the way, downloading and installing X-Cart in September, you automatically participate in Apple Watch prize drawing!