This article is designed to evaluate the features of and differences (good and bad) between CRE Loaded 6.4 and X-Cart 4.3 in terms of finding products in their respective admin back-ends. The specific versions tested were CRE Loaded 6.4.1 and X-Cart 4.3.2.
There are many things that are of importance when choosing your preferred shopping cart solution, most of which tend to err on the side of aesthetics and support. That’s fine – other articles are there to cover that, the point of this exercise however, is to give an unbiased view on how these 2 shopping carts perform when it comes to the more mundane, day-to-day stuff – finding products.
CRE Loaded
In order to locate your products in CRE Loaded, you can choose from a variety of options (click image left):
1. Click the little folder icons on the left of each category in this list to drill down through your categories.
2. Use the ‘Search’ tool to locate products with similar titles, descriptions and prices
3. Use the ‘Go to’ dropdown to access any category within your store.
These options give you a great deal of flexibility and make it very simple to navigate precisely how you need to, depending on what works best at the time.
Verdict
| CRE Loaded’s got a great set of tools for navigating to, and through categories to find your products fast. The ‘Go To’ dropdown is the fastest of either shopping carts to get you to the category you want and the ‘drill-down’ folder navigation works well if you prefer a visual solution. | |
| Avoid the search tool because it isn’t focused enough for this particular task – it pulls back results from various parts of the store so you’ll have erroneous content mixed in with your products. The ‘drill-down’ folder navigation relies on time-consuming page-loads to locate products and is all too easy to slow you down if you’re in a hurry. |
CRE Loaded Rating: 4/5
X-Cart
With X-Cart, when you login, you’ll see the menu on the left-hand side. Click on ‘Products’ to access X-Cart’s product editing options.
From here you can enter a keyword or phrase and X-Cart will search the store database for corresponding products. There are various options that allow you to narrow your search depending on what you’re looking for.
As of 4.3 when you click on the ‘Advanced Options’ link below, it reveals dropdown category selection (useful for editing a whole category’s worth of products), search by SKU, ID, price-range, quantity, availability, provider (who added it to the database), free shipping, low availability limit, list-price and more.
Verdict
| X-Cart’s search-based approach to locating products is useful if you want to edit a bunch of products with similar titles, descriptions or keywords and the advanced search functionality makes it a breeze to dig out whole categories of products quickly, whatever the criteria you need to use in order to locate the items you’re looking for. | |
| Previous versions of X-Cart had the category drop-down as the primary way to locate products for modification and this is a more useful tool when you’re looking to grab all products from a category into a list so that you can edit them all together – it’s a shame they’ve chosen to make you click a link to access this core feature. |
X-Cart Rating: 4/5
Conclusion
There’s not much to seperate these 2 in terms of product search. Both offer differing and singularly useful ways to find products in your store’s database. If I had to pick I’d say CRE Loaded is good, but not quite as good as X-Cart, simply because X-Cart’s product-finding tools are more focused than CRE Loaded’s Search function, which pulls back non-product-related results if you’re using a keyword to find stuff and this lets it down if you’re in a rush…