What is easier to skin/theme x-cart or cs-cart

[spazmanian]

First of all I am new to the site and see that their have been quite a few reviews of ecommerce sites and I am now tasked with building two (one will be a candy store of sorts and the other a biker jewlery store that sells skulls and CZ stuff). Both sites have to support both retail & wholesale. With that, I have been looking at x-cart, cs-cart and interspire.. I want to know a few things and see what I get for input

1. Which do you believe is easier to skin/theme cs-cart, x-cart, interspire and why?

2. If you don't think either is easy then what would you use that supports retail/wholesale, not hosted and can export to quickbooks??

thanks!

[Chris]

I've not used CS-cart, but as I I understand it is similar to interspire, which is very easy to skin.

X-cart is reasonably easy to skin, but I've not used it heavily enough to really say for sure, I would say it is harder to skin than cubecart, but easier than oscommerce variants.

[agua]

I've used x-cart exclusively for years - the skinning is a learning curve to says the least - but they do have a webmaster mode which shows you which templates you need to edit in order to acheive your design depending upon which page you are on (its a popup window which refreshes as you go from page to page).

But - I have just looked at cs-cart - and I am about to download the 60 trial - so I'll let you know how I go at skinning that.

I've got to say though, there are a lot more features built into cs-cart compared to x-cart - if you bought the add on modules for x-cart to make it have the same features as cs-cart - then it would probably cost you nearer to $500 rather than $200 (or whatever it is)