One of the most common questions submitted to us by readers and visitors to this blog is in regard to shopping cart solutions, e-commerce web hosting solutions and general questions about running an online store. We have decided to publish a number of posts about an online stores. We will write about software you can use and web hosting you might need.
Today we would like to start with a list of readily available free web applications for you to help you create robust online stores. Some of these applications may be already available in your hosting account, especially if your web host offers Fantastico or SimpleScripts.
OpenCart We decided to begin with OpenCart, even though you may have to download and install this application on your server by yourself. We do hope that OpenCart will eventually become popular enough for most of the web hosts to include it in their Fantastico or SimpleScript scripts for easy installation. While not without a “learning curve”, OpenCart is n extremely robust shopping cart solution, with dozen of powerful features. Here are some of the OpenCart features:
Unlimited Categories
Unlimited Products
Unlimited Manufacturers
Multi Currency
Multi Language
Product Reviews
Product Ratings
SEO Friendly URLs
Google Base Feed
Google Sitemap
SSL Support
Magento Magento is another very popular shopping cart solution. It is likely that Mgento can be installed with your hosting provider through Fantastico or SimpleScripts. The free version of Magento also known as Magento Community Edition. We find that Megento Communit Edition is does not have nearly as many features as OpenCart. osCommerce Another popular free shopping cart solution is osCommerce, and is available for installation with most web hosting providers via Fantastico or SimpleScript installation bundles. Here are some of the features available in osCommerce shopping cart:
Supports unlimited products and categories
Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
Multilingual support
Multicurrency support (with automatic of currency exchange rates)
Zen Cart Zen Cart claims to be the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. Zen Cart installation is also available with web hosting providers who that offer Fantastico and SimpleScripts bundles. Here are some of the features available in this shopping cart:
multiple customer modes
unlimited category depth
multiple sales and discounts
multiple display modes
multiple shipping options
multiple payment options
AgoraCart AgoraCart is a powerful “Free” Open Source ecommerce shopping cart software – offers you a very wide range of features that allow you to setup an online storefront or shop ranging from a simple template based store for novices to the integration of complex web design concepts created by your web designer. In addition to the free version, there is also a premium version of this software. We believe that free version of AgoraCart does not offer enough functionality as compared to either OpenCart or osCommerce. However the lifetime license of the AgoraCart Gold is just one-time fee off $55. CubeCart CubeCart is an “out of the box” ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world. CubeCart currently offers two versions (v3 and v4) on the v3 is free however it includes a “copyright” footer which can be removed for additional fee.
We hope that the above list will offer you good start in your research on solutions to power your online store. If you currently use any of the shopping carts on your website, please share your experience in the comments. Feel free to leave links to your live shops.
Comments on this entry are closed.
opencart is good, but abantecart is much better. It is very similar but more features and flexibility.
I love opencart, I think its one of the best opensource carts around.