30 Free Open Source eCommerce Platforms
May 14, 2012, by admin
Magento is organized as an open source eCommerce platform that relieves the stream between design and online sales. Magento is one of the fastest growing eCommerce solutions in the market, and with their long list of features it’s not tough to see why. Magento likes to out-smart other content management systems for eCommerce by affording excellent options to grow your site. Magento is a very flexible eCommerce platform that lets you Manage multiple websites, integrate Google Website Optimizer and over 50 payment gateways.
2. CS-Cart
CS-Cart is a entire shopping cart application that can rapidly allow any business to start selling online whether it is a single-product shop or a whole marketplace. The application exploits Ajax in many parts to ease usage and provides an overall smart logic for a better shopping experience like one-page checkout, featured/related products for cross selling and many more.
3. OpenCart
Open cart’s admin area has a well designed user interface that simplifies the process of pinching your site. When you first begin using this eCommerce platform you’re given a customizable layout that gives your products an sufficient amount of “breathing room”. OpenCart lets you take full control of your shipping features and the aptitude to take coupons. You can use coupon codes for your existing customers as enticements. Open Cart is ideal for small to medium sized businesses that are looking for flexibility and the power of useful tools at their fingertips.
4. Zen Cart
Zen Cart Free and straightforward, using Zen Cart drops within the abilities of almost everyone. Besides the standard features you’d imagine, Zen Cart presents a newsletter manager, discount coupons, quantity discounts, gift certificates and the aptitude to select exactly which cards you accept. There are tons of contributions to the software at your disposal with many from osCommerce preinstalled. This does make the admin interface a little cluttered for my liking though.
5. PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a free, open source eCommerce platform that distributes a large range of features such as the full control of your list, orders, shipping and tracking, allowing you to manage your business in real-time. This eCommerce platform has a WYSIWYG editing tool for your products and the managing of images. Your online store can be customized at any time, accept PayPal payments, and manage customer based subscriptions. PrestaShop can send payments directly to your bank account, or your PayPal account.
6. osCommerce
osCommerce has magnetized a large growing open source ecommerce community that consists of over 228,200 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being added on a daily basis. To date there are over 5,800 add-ons that are available for free to customize osCommerce Online Merchant online stores and to help enhance sales.
7. CRE Loaded PCI CE
CRE Loaded PCI CE is an open source e-commerce software which is the lighter, but still strong, version of a paid solution. It is designed to run on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server and provides lots of features which you can include more as it comes with the source.
8. Zeus Cart
ZeusCart is an open source e-commerce application that is built with PHP and MySQL. The application has support for selling any type of items (including digital goods) where items can have multiple properties like color, size and multiple images.
9. VirtueMart
VirtueMart can’t function alone: it’s an ecommerce solution designed to be used alongside the Joomla! CMS (content management system). In terms of a cart, it provides the complete package and it’s great from the shoppers’ point of view. Shoppers can register for an account, add addresses and view their order history with a minimum of fuss. VirtueMart supports multiple languages and currencies and you can add an unlimited number of products and product categories. Your products are searchable and can be rated by users. Despite its evident strengths, it does have some minor weaknesses, comprising a somewhat defectively structured forum and some untidy code here and there.
10. CubeCart
CubeCart , the standard edition, is totally free to download and utilize. It arrives complete with three different skins, customer order history, unlimited products, categories and images, multi-currency support, and product search. CubeCart 4, which costs over $100, comes with increased SEO, visitor skin selector, courier tracking URL, superior product search, and the aptitude to add and edit orders from the back-end. Both integrate well with any site and are appropriate for those already selling online or preparing to open a shop. If you’re not familiar with PHP and MySQL, however, you might find setting up CubeCart on your own quite a challenge.
11. WP e-Commerce
WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, visuals, and presentation in mind. The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is stylish easy to use fully featured shopping cart application appropriate for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
12. TomatoCart
TomatoCart is an open source e-commerce application that is branched from the popular osCommerce to offer a better experience. It comes with a totally new front and back-ends where the back-end is an imposing desktop-like ExtJS-powered interface.
13. AgoraCart
AgoraCart is not as popular as some of the other platforms reviewed here and we’re not quite sure why. It’s flexible and fully customisable, great for setting up simple stores or complex design concepts. In so far as design goes, you can choose from one of the templates on offer or design your own using CSS. Layouts and product categories can be tweaked to your heart’s content. In some ways, AgoraCart seems to have been left behind by some of the newer PHP based platforms, so is perhaps best suited to hobbyist coders.
14. eCart
eCart is an open source e-commerce shopping cart application that is built with PHP-MySQL. It is a fresh but powerful software which can handle multiple stores from a single admin interface, supports unlimited product categories, one-page-checkout and more.
15. Freeway
Freeway allocates you to handle your store using web-based administration interface. Built-in SEO tools will help attracting more visitors from search engines and increase your sales. Freeway is scalable, it will grow with your internet business so you can sell how you want to sell adding new functionality with ease.
16. OXID eShop
OXID eSales is an open source e-commerce application constructed with PHP & uses MySQL for storing the data.
17. Digistores
Digistore’s based on osCommerce, so will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever used that ubiquitous ecommerce platform. It’s a full CMS, very quick and easy to install and can be operated by people with little or no coding knowledge. There are a number of free templates available to use, but if you like, you can buy a sleeker template or even have your own personal one created for a small fee. You can manager and alter colours, site width, layout and template from within the admin area and even run multiple adverts to endorse your products.
18. Spree Commerce
Spree, an open source ecommerce platform based on Ruby on Rails, is constantly growing and improving thanks to its active development team. There are loads of great extensions on offer which you can use to tailor your site to your exact needs. Spree lets you change shipping, tax, discounts and coupons to suit your customers, who will themselves be more than persuaded with the single page checkout. It’s search engine friendly and has Google Analytics built in. It’s ideal for small and medium enterprises, but not the best choice for sites receiving the very highest levels of traffic.
19. PHPshop
PHPshop‘s main purpose of phpShop is to present a simple shopping cart solution that is easy to customize to suit any reason. phpShop has less features that many other shopping cart applications, but is usually easier to customize. We were recently informed the PHPshop is no longer active and is now under the name VirtueMart.
20. WHMCS
WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. WHMCS handles everything from signup to termination, with automated billing, provisioning & management. With WHMCS, you’re in control with a very powerful business automation tool. Great Software, it runs our Sales and Hosting Platform at RackWire.com.
21. DashCommerce
DashCommerce is an open source e-commerce software developed with ASP.NET & using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for storing data.
22. Avactis
Avactis, available as a free version or for a fee, integrates flawlessly with your existing website. Its web based help manual, video tutorials and setup wizard are adequate for most people to install and manage without the help of expert developers. Advanced features comprise newsletter management, marketing and sales reports which you can export to Excel, multiple storefronts, numerous payment ways including Maestro, the aptitude to export accounting data to QuickBooks and support for tax systems around the world. To make the most of every feature out-of-the-box, you’re going to have to pay $19.95 per month or a one-off payment of $199, which seems logical. There are additional charges, however, for hosting your cart, support, updates and installation (if you can’t do that yourself). The shopper experience is smooth, but a little drawn out, as customers must navigate through various pages before paying for their goods.
23. osCSS
osCSS is basically a php eCommerce shopping application that’s built on the oscommerce GPL code. It’s available for a free download and distribution. This version complies with current web standards by using XHTML 1.1 as the mark-up language. You’ll have full take on how to display your products and the way they will be shipped. Although osCSS isn’t the most popular or powerful eCommerce CMS, it sure does get the job done.
24. Übercart
Übercart is an e-commerce suite developed for Drupal. With the end user in mind, focusing on usability at store configuration, product – catalog creation and order administration, Übercart is a simple yet powerful shopping cart solution.
25. Afcommerce
If you want to keep your ecommerce platform simple, then Afcommerce could be the option for you. It’s not predominantly good looking, neither on the customer nor the user side, but it works right out of the box and is ideal for beginners. It has a speedy one-page checkout, customer help pop-up windows and customer accounts are generated automatically from orders.
26. SimpleCart js
SimpleCart(js) 2.0 is no longer only for Paypal. It now works with Google Checkout as well. You can now include increment, decrement, and remove buttons to your cart. You can also rearrange items, change the HTML tags, do whatever you like to display your cart how you want. No databases, no programming, no headaches. A simple javascript shopping cart in under 20kb that you can setup in minutes. It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and totally customizable. All you need to know is basic HTML.
27. RokQuickCart
RokQuickCart is a very simple cart for Joomla!. Its ease, however, is both a help and a obstruction as although it can be set up in minutes, it lacks some features which you’ll find in other platforms in this list, for example, it only accepts payments through PayPal and Google Checkout. Having said that, it usually looks good and product image display is impressive.
28. Stroe Sprite
In spite of being totally free, StoreSprite provides many features that you’d imagine to find only on paid-for and more popular platforms. These comprise loyalty points, customer ratings and reviews, status notifications, order tracking, special offers, best sellers and shopper accounts. The main drawback of the platform is that your store will come with visible StoreSprite copyright notices, unless you pay to have them removed.
29. X- Cart
X-cart is a commercial package with open-source code, but different from Magento, it falls within the budget of start-ups as well as established companies. Users get the professional support they’d imagine when buying a three-figure piece of software as well as community support in X-Cart’s forums.X-Cart is fast, W3C-acquiescent and search engine friendly. It uses the Smarty template system, which many programmers enjoy working with. On the flipside, although it’s cheap, you’re perhaps going to have to fork out for a few add-ons, which cost anywhere from $35 to $109 a piece. Technical support isn’t free either.
30. LiteCommerce
LiteCommerce is a commercial platform which anybody can manage, but you have to pay for this simplicity. It’s basically a slimmed down version of the popular X-Cart, with a Quick Start Wizard which guides you carefully through everything you need to do to get your shop up and running.Installation is easy and set-up very logical. You can tweak your shop’s appearance through the admin interface or edit store templates in DreamWeaver etc. Expert users, however, might find some unique features of other platforms lacking here.
