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Interview With CEO of X-Cart Maxim Vydrin

Updated on September 27, 2019

7 Min Read

Maxim Vydrin is the the current CEO of X-Cart, an open source Ecommerce solution that was released in 2000. Maxim is heading one of the oldest Ecommerce solution softwares and has a lot of experience in the technicalities of the ecommerce system. Maxim shared his experiences and views about the Ecommerce industry and how cloud can benefit the ecommerce business. This was an interesting interview for me to conduct and I enjoyed it, I am sure you will enjoy reading it as well.

Maxim Vyrdin Interview

 

Cloudways: First of all, tell us about yourself. How did you start your career? What was the source of motivation behind delving into the Ecommerce Industry?

Maxim: When I studied at the University, X-Cart was one of the best and most prospective IT companies in our region, and all of my friends said that X-Cart managers were very selective, hiring new guys to their team. It determined my choice: I always wanted to work with the professionals and acquire new skills,  so I sent my CV to X-Cart.

Today, the entire IT Community of our region is very strong, with a number of successful companies working in this sphere, and X-Cart is among the leaders here.

Cloudways:  How and when did you join X-Cart? How is the experience of being a part of such a marvelous Ecommerce software? Would you like to mention a colleague who is awesome at their work?

Maxim: I joined the X-Cart team in October, 2004, when they were working on the release of version 4.0.4, if I recall right. By that time the X-Cart platform had already been very powerful and popular among merchants.

I do remember the day of my interview at X-Cart. Though I applied for the position of a technical support engineer, I was full of hopes that there may be another position opened. I wanted to be a webmaster, not a regular support agent in a call-center as I pictured this work to myself. So, when I met the HR manager, I asked for a different position right off the bat. He was quite lost to hear that, and they didn’t have other vacancies. He recommended that I still discuss the work in the Support Department  with Andrey Kuznetsov, the Head of the Support Team, and Andrey shed some light on the advantages of the job I was about to refuse.

This was the moment of truth. As a real X-Cart family member and a fan of his job, full of enthusiasm, Andrey began to tell me about X-Cart clients from America to Australia, about merchants from Canada selling animal skins, about Dutchmen selling ganjah and magic mushrooms (that business was almost legal in 2004 there!). Then he described the actual scope of work of X-Cart techsupport engineer. I learnt how important and how diversified the work of this first line of customer support was, how amazing companies were using X-Cart for their stores, so I no longer hesitated.

Thus, I started my career as a Technical support engineer, solving issues of our customers. It was a great opportunity for me, as I worked with customers from different countries and achieved valuable experience. Since X-Cart is self-hosted software, our support engineers have great experience of work on customers’ servers as well.

I often say that our support team is a rock band in X-Cart, as their goal is to make customers happy and sometimes this assistance covers even requests not directly related to X-Cart. Say, several years ago, when there were no “Google Translate” service, a Dutch customer of ours fell in love with a Russian girl and asked us to translate his romantic letter to her. More wonderful and tender letters followed, and we kept translating them till this Love Story ended happily.

Cloudways:  In an interview, you once said that you believe that success of products depends upon the success of the entire team. What do you think are the factors that are key enablers?

Maxim: Yes, X-Cart is a creation of a solid enthusiastic team which has significantly grown since the company establishment. Most people have been with the company for more than 5 years. All top management positions are held by those who have been with the company for a long time and climbed career ladder from regular staff, hence obtaining valuable experience to become professionals who know their business from inside.

We always aimed to hire people who can move the project forward themselves, who are concentrated on the results, but not the process. Also, we observe how people learn and what conclusions they make. Experience is important, but the ability to progress and grow professionally is of much higher importance.

There is a special word, which we use to describe the right person. We say that a person has X-Cart-DNA, a key-list skills which allow him to be a part of the team: this person is smart and has things done.

Cloudways:  X-Сart was the very first Ecommerce software. Currently, more than 30 thousand platforms are using X-Cart software. Now, we can see a number of ecommerce softwares like Magento and OpenCart on the market. How do you see the rising competition in Ecommerce industry? How do you see the future of X-Сart?

Maxim: Indeed, the competition on Ecommerce market is huge these days. A lot of software vendors offer SaaS platforms, self-hosted software and even retail platforms (like Amazon or Aliexpress) for selling online. Every business, regardless of size, may find a solution that fits its needs and budget. I’d split the market into three segments/audiences:

  • Retail platforms for super small businesses and private sellers. If you need to sell your scrapbooking, it may be the first option for you. Few to zero customization capabilities.
  • SaaS solutions for self-funded small to medium businesses. You may extend your business with APIs and add-ons to some extent.
  • Self-hosted software for funded businesses of any size and web agencies. Customization capabilities are practically limitless thus you may change anything.

Speaking about self-hosted software market we are in, it’s very competitive as well. You named two brands but I won’t mislead you if I say there are easily two hundreds of solutions in this very segment. Here in X-Cart we have chosen a tricky way to stand out from this crowd:

  • We strive to decrease/remove all entry barriers related to store setup and upgrades specific for hosted software, making selling as easy as at SaaS or a retail platform while keeping flexibility and customizability.
  • It’s also a big benefit to our clients (according to their words) that they can get everything related to their store at one place. From store set up to inventory management, from marketing assistance to security breaches mitigation, from anti-fraud checks to PCI-DSS certified payment handling via our X-Payments software.
  • We believe in integrations. X-Cart already supports a hundred of payment gateways, shipping and tax processors on board. We plan to integrate 150+ more services this year including web-analytics, predictive analytics, split-testing, customer acquisition, onboarding and so on. Every our client will benefit from it.

Cloudways:  X-Cart cloud is another important release of yours in the previous years. What do you think are the trends of the cloud hosting industry? Also, it would be great if you would like to mention the inspiration behind launching X-Cart Cloud.

Maxim:  Cloud e-commerce is the best solution for startup and small business. However, if you are planning to grow fast and be flexible – open source is your choice. You can focus on business goals while the IT work is handled by your solution partner. However, with the growth of your business you will need more and more custom cases implemented into your solution, and one day or another you will understand that you’ve grown out of your cloud solution. This is the time when the solution with the open code steps forward.

X-Cart Cloud was an experiment to see how our customers base will react to this solution. As a result we understood that our clients prefer the values of self-hosted software – open code, flexibility with hosting, etc – rather than get advantages of a cloud solution, but the interest to the latter still exists.

Therefore we decided to change the strategy and offer a full stack of services on our hosting, while the merchants continue controlling the code and own the software license. As a result, we combined the profits of both schemes: merchants get the 100% compatible environment and professional support from the platform developers with the full access to the code and customizable flexibility, we get businesses on recurring basis and at the same time we can help them to grow.

Cloudways:  How was the experience of working with the co-founders of X-Сart, Ruslan Fazlyev and Yury Zaytsev? Would you like to share any experience which is very memorable with these people?

Maxim: Ruslan and Yury are very different. Ruslan is more enthusiastic and an idea-guy. Yury is a kind of conservative and more-concentrated on the results. And together they make a very effective tandem. They gave me (and a many other people) a lot of opportunities to grow.

I remember а very interesting situation when Ruslan became the CEO of Ecwid, so he was choosing a new CEO for the X-Cart company. He created a poll for all employees to vote for the existing variants in the list or to offer their own candidates. I can hardly imagine the same situation in any other company. So I am a rare case of 100% democratically elected CEO. Shareholders simply approved employees’ choice.

Cloudways: Apart from your professional life, you are also a husband and a father. How do you manage to have work life balance? What activities do you like to do with your family when you get the time?

Maxim: My wife supports me every day. She invests a lot of time into our family and I just cannot imagine what I would do without her. My job is important, it requires closing tasks on time, so I have to work at home too. One of my main tools is my smartphone, because I need to be online all the time. I do my best to close all my tasks during the working hours and go home with empty inbox, but sometimes it’s simply impossible. I’m very thankful to my family, who understands and support me in such moments.

I like sport, I am a football fan (European football, not American) and I often go in for sports with my family, like skiing or swimming. At the same time we like travelling very much. My son was about 6 months only when he first visited the Baikal lake (it’s located in about 5K kilometres from our city and is known for being the deepest lake in the world. And one of the most beautiful places, I should add!).

Cloudways: How do you see the Ecommerce community? Would you like to mention people who you think are doing great work in the Ecommerce community?

Maxim: I don’t think Ecommerce community is a thing. There are a lot of high quality blogs, web magazines and curated email subscriptions related to ecommerce though.

Cloudways:  What do you think are the risk factors in the Ecommerce Industry? What would you recommend to startups of this industry?

Maxim: New startups must solve new problems. There’s no need in yet another shopping cart, I believe. 🙂 One of the most interesting trends in ecommerce is decreasing the power of ads vs increasing the power of word-of-mouth. This is a really interesting topic, as well as predictive analytics.

The main challenge for any ecommerce provider is adapting to fast changing industry.

Cloudways:  Have you heard about Cloudways? You can integrate X-Cart on Cloudways easily. Cloudways provides managed cloud hosting services including PHP hosting and Ecommerce hosting services. If so, what are your reviews?

Maxim: Yes, of course. Extra management layer for a buck is always a good model as long as the value exists. In your case it does.

Share your opinion in the comment section. COMMENT NOW

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Ahmed Khan

Ahmed was a PHP community expert at Cloudways - A Managed PHP Hosting Cloud Platform. He is a software engineer with extensive knowledge in PHP and SEO. He loves watching Game of Thrones is his free time. Follow Ahmed on Twitter to stay updated with his works.

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