Let me say this ... x-cart's database is FUBAR! I've been working on x-cart stores for the better part of 4 years now.

We just transferred two X-cart stores to Zencart (and have 2 more to do). Thank god we have a great database guy. But he did have to spend many hours getting the x-cart database worked out to fit into zencart. It's like putting a square peg into a round hole. Granted, each store has 3500+ products in each. But whether it's 3500 products or 20 products, the process was the same.

But he was very impressed with Zencart's simple, yet solid database structure.

So, I would spend the money to get a person who is very knowledgeable in SQL/databases to restructure x-cart database and upload to zencart. Otherwise, the typical layperson would not be successful.