X-Cart & high-risk payment gateways: a software spotlight –
Our merchants are in the “high-risk” payment gateway category, and they know that a fast, sturdy e-commerce platform is a big part of the struggle towards a successful web-store.
Unfortunately, as we all learned from the Goldilocks fairy tale, everybody has their preference for function and form, what works for one, might not work for some. For this reason, we like to feature what we consider good choices for “high-risk” e-commerce merchants, from there you can determine which platform fits you best.
All our software spotlights focus on solutions that have solid high-risk payment gateway options.
Recently we came across X-Cart again after not seeing it pop up for a short while. It still appears to be a reliable shopping cart for our high-risk clients who sell online. X-Cart is an open sourced platform designed to be added onto an existing website or hosted as it’s own, additionally, you can choose to host your web-store privately, or host it on X-Cart’s servers.
X-Cart lends itself well to “high-risk” merchants of various industries in part because of its compatibility with payment gateways like Authorize.Net (when Authnet is set up correctly, read more here) and NMI (through a gateway emulator), but it also has a list of features that would be of importance to certain markets in the “high-risk” sector.
X-Cart features for high-risk merchants
While every website needs to think about hosting, X-Cart makes it easy for those who choose to host on X-Cart or their partner’s servers. Using solid-state drives for data storage, two dedicated CPU’s and a VPS for each website they host, your information is secure and quickly accessible.
The faster your site’s visitors can find things they want to buy, the better. These days customers want information delivered to them yesterday, so having a fast website not only makes it faster to check out but satisfies the customer more. Additionally, page load time is a huge SEO factor. You can read more about SEO and high-risk by visiting our SEO blog pages, here.
Speaking of SEO, X-Cart gives high-risk site owners great marketing and SEO options. While you should expect some form of support from your e-commerce platform, X-Cart gives you pretty powerful tools, including multiple ways to market and sell your products. Auctions, for example, could be useful for an FFL dealer who is selling used gear and wants to get the best possible buck for each piece.
Many FFL dealer sites also like to have national distributor list products on their website, X-Cart has dropship and multi-vendor functionality to help you make money on products you don’t store or ship in-house.
Loyalty
Another great marketing tool is the Loyalty Program, which not every platform has. Our vape and cigar site payment gateway clients utilize this tool to give their customers more from their overall experience, making customers more likely to share with their friends.
Taxes
It’s great to have an automatic tax calculator based on the location of the customer’s billing address to tally the tax for your website, making things easier for your business. X-Cart provides this essential service.
Mobile optimized
We have a lot of clients that sell glass pipes and smoking paraphernalia. Pipes and glassware break easily, which is why it’s essential to have a mobile-ready platform – when the pipe breaks folks can pull out their phone and order a new one, maybe even an unbreakable silicone one, from their trusted online pipe and glassware shop.
Customizable
Customization is an important feature, especially for high-risk merchants who might want to have multiple product lines or even e-commerce “storefronts.” A tactical gear and knife merchant might want to have some variation in page color or font based on the product highlighted, and it’s general purpose. Maybe kitchen knives and utensils have a light blue background, and hunting knives and bows have a deep green background. You could also use the multi-vendor function X-Cart features to provide the best showcase for your products.
Because X-Cart is open source, you can add pretty much any feature you can think of if you know how to code – if you don’t know how to code you are still in luck because X-Cart offers services including feature building for individual websites. They will code and test virtually any add-on you might need that doesn’t already exist.
X-Cart has a significant number of powerful features – if you like what you have read so far, feel free to learn more on their website. If you need a high-risk payment gateway for X-Cart, please keep reading below.
Payment gateways and merchant account suggestions for X-Cart
We can set up a high-risk friendly Authorize.Net or NMI payment gateway on your X-Cart platform. Authorize.Net can connect to X-Cart natively, and is a relatively simple process when done correctly.
NMI works when we plug in a gateway emulator (which essentially means you change a simple line of code to redirect the payment gateway to a specific address which connects it to NMI instead of Authorize.Net). This easy-to-do procedure allows a merchant the benefits of NMI, which vary some from what you get from AuthNet. The most significant advantage NMI provides is their multi-vendor user interface, which allows you access to all of your NMI controlled revenue streams, giving you more analytical power and control over your accounts.
Both AuthNet and NMI are excellent choices for high-risk e-commerce merchants, if you need help choosing which one is right for you, contact us using the form below, and we will give you a fast, friendly recommendation.
When it comes to merchant accounts, we can make things simple and connect you to a merchant account that suits the needs of your specific business. Many merchants have a hard time finding a good merchant account, and some “high-risk” merchants mistakenly think they can sign up for any old service like Stripe, Paypal, and sell cigars, vape pens, or some other “high-risk” product category. These web site owners often end up with a frozen merchant account when the underwriting is finished, or the account is checked on.
X-Cart is an excellent choice for e-commerce merchants of both “low” and “high-risk” categories. With a well balanced one-time price point for various levels of service for the platform and a long list of useful features, any high-risk e-commerce merchant would do well on a simple and powerful platform like X-Cart.