XAT Racing

Stop renting your storefront.
Own it outright.

XAT Racing pays roughly $3,000 a year to X-Cart — forever, with the shipping still wrong on combined orders, the vehicle navigation hand-built as categories, and core charges settled over the phone. This is that feature set built natively, licensed once.

$3,000/year X-Cart, every year, forever
$5,000 once perpetual license — yours to keep
21 mo break-even, then it pays you
$9,580 difference over five years
X-Cart $3k$6k$9k$12k$15k
This build $5.1k$5.2k$5.3k$5.3k$5.4k

Year 1 → Year 5 cumulative. Ours rises only by hosting (~$7/mo). Card processing is unchanged either way — that is paid today, on top of the $3,000. Break-even lands in month 21; after that the line is flat and the other one is not.

One honest note on the comparison below. The features listed are what X-Cart’s Automotive edition sells — the tier XAT pays for. Little of it is visibly earning its keep on the storefront: there is no year/make/model selector (“Choose Your Vehicle” is a hand-built category), no structured fitment on any product — it is keyword-stuffed into titles instead — and the core charge lives in a paragraph rather than a field. Paying the automotive premium without the automotive tooling showing up is the strongest version of the argument on this page. Everything below is in this build already — and the cost figures above are modeled at X-Cart’s standard tier, so the Automotive tier makes every one of them conservative.

The Automotive edition, feature by feature

status is honest — live, seam ready, or designed
LIVE

YMM — Year / Make / Model lookup

X-Cart Automotive's headline feature: shop by vehicle.

Cascading Year → Make → Model picker over 25 curated Toyota & Lexus platforms with stock and popular-swap engine families. Resolving a vehicle sets My Garage — every fitting part badges ✓ FITS, one click filters to only-my-build.

Try it in the catalog →
LIVE

VIN lookup

Type a VIN, get your vehicle's parts.

17-char VIN decodes through the NHTSA vPIC API — free, keyless, US-government — and lands on the same fitment table as the YMM picker. No subscription anywhere in the path.

Decode yours →
LIVE

Core Charge program

Refundable deposits on rebuildable parts.

Core charge is a first-class field on every SKU: CORE tags on cards, a separate refundable "Core deposits" line in the cart with the refund-on-return note. Set per part in one line of config.

See it on a built engine →
LIVE

Customer gallery

Builds running the parts, linked both ways.

Gallery cards carry chassis + engine chips and link to the exact catalog parts each build runs — community as cross-sell. Submissions by email; photos drop into the repo.

Browse builds →
LIVE

Automotive PIM

One canonical record per SKU, tooling around it.

catalog.json holds everything — fitment, price, weight, core, photos. Re-derive in seconds without re-scraping, curated overrides for domain knowledge, one command publishes to the page.

Read the pipeline →
SEAM READY

SEMA Data · ACES/PIES fitment

Industry-standard fitment data, licensed.

The importer ingests ACES-style fitment rows against the vehicle table today — licensed SEMA data drops in with zero UI changes. The membership fee buys the data; the software side is already here.

Integration runbook →
SEAM READY

Warehouse distributor integrations

Turn14, DCi, Premier, ASAP Network feeds.

One importer lands any distributor CSV in the catalog contract — auto column detection, weights arrive trusted and flow straight into shipping math. Add credentials from each program and a nightly cron does the rest.

Integration runbook →
DESIGNED

AutoSync-style visualizer

Wheels-on-car / parts-on-engine 3D preview.

The house 3D pipeline (fitment-flag part slots, GLB delivery contract, CI validation) is proven on a sibling build and mapped to this catalog's engine/chassis axes — the swap configurator is its first application.

The design →

Honest ledger — what still costs money after the licence: hosting (~$7/mo), card processing (2.9% + 30¢, which is paid today anyway), and, only if he wants them, SEMA Data co-op membership (that fee licenses the fitment data, not software) and distributor API credentials. No software subscription, ever. Non-exclusive perpetual licence: the code is his to keep, host and modify for good.

Core program

refundable deposits, wired end to end — waiting on your numbers
From your own listing
“Please note this does not include the core charge.”
XAT Built 3UR / 1UR-FE Short Block — $5,655

You already run a core program. The store just has nowhere to put it, so the amount lives in a paragraph and gets settled on the phone. A customer looking at a $5,655 short block cannot tell whether the core is $200 or $2,000 without calling you.

On the product card CORE $500

Sits with the fitment and weight tags, so it is visible before the click — not a surprise discovered at checkout.

On the product page $5,655 + $500 refundable core

Stated next to the price, in the customer’s words rather than yours: refundable, not a surcharge.

In the cart Core deposits (refundable) $500

Totalled separately from parts, so the deposit never looks like part of the sale price. Refunds when the core lands back at the shop.

$500 is a placeholder, and it is the only invented number on this site. Every price, weight and option elsewhere came off your store. Tell us what you actually charge on a short block, a long block and refurbished calipers, and the figures go live on the cards, the product pages and the cart the same day — no template edits, no developer.

Beyond parity

what the rebuild does that no cart edition ships

Back to the catalog Book a walkthrough