Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Top 8 Open Source E-Commerce Platforms

Top 8 Open Source E-Commerce Platforms: "

E-Commerce business is booming at a very fast pace. With this, the number of E-Commerce platforms has also been increased significantly. Now you have sufficient number of shopping cart softwares to select from. While all of them have their positives and negatives, we have selected the best 8 platforms to work with, for our readers. There is no perfect or the absolute E-Commerce platform. It depends on your business requirements that which platform you opt for. Uploading products and customising your store can be very time consuming, so make sure you have given several platforms a try before you make that final decision and integrate one into your site.



Magento



Magento is the world’s fastest growing E-Commerce platform. It has earned a good reputation and acquired huge user base in a very short span of time. You will be amazed to see the long list of branded clients of Magento which includes: Samsung, The North Face, Stussy and Nespresso all use it to power their online stores. It has 60,000+ merchants base, 2000+ extensions and the number of downloads has been crossed 2 millions.


osCommerce



osCommerce is absolutely free under the GNU General Public License and caters very well to most people’s needs. osCommerce has attracted a large growing E-Commerce community that consists of over 236,200 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being contributed on a daily basis.


X-Cart



Building your store using the built-in templates X Cart is very quick and easy. X Cart runs off Smarty PHP which is daunting the first time you see it but nothing to get worked up about. X-Cart has a W3C-compliant storefront with a CSS-based layout. And it comes with several professional E-Commerce design templates. AJAX-based components and WYSIWYG editors improve the user experience. X Cart also has excellent database functionality which saves a ton of time when adding products or making changes.


Spree Commerce



Spree is an open-source E-Commerce platform for Ruby on Rails. Spree has been successfully deployed in real world stores with peak volumes exceeding one order per second. The endless list of useful features includes support for over 50 payment gateways, single page checkout and custom tax logic, which can save merchants lots of time and effort.


Cube Cart



CubeCart is a fully featured E-Commerce shopping cart solution used by over a million store owners around the world. It is easy to modify the look and feel of your store to match your company’s branding or to site comfortably beside your existing website due to CubeCart’s powerful HTML template system. To use CubeCart you will require a compatible web hosting account. Basically there are two versions: Cube Cart3 and Cube Cart4. Cube Cart3 is free of cost whereas the software license fee for Cube Cart4 is $130.00. It expires after 30 days.


Zen Cart



Zen Cart is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. It is very easy to install, manage and customize. Its features include unlimited category depth, multiple sales and discounts, and multiple display modes. It also comes with newsletter manager, discount coupons, gift certificates, featured products, quantity discounts. There could be unlimited extra pages, multiple shopping and payment options. Too many add-ons, however, and the UI does get rather cluttered, which is a downside of the platform.


Open Cart



OpenCart is designed feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface. The features include Unlimited Categories, Unlimited Products, Unlimited Manufacturers, Multi Currency, Multi Language, Product Reviews, Product Ratings and so on. It’s not as popular as Magento and osCommerce, so help and guidance is not so freely available. It comes with Free Documentation, Templatable, Automatic Image Resize, 20+ Payment Gateways, 8+ Shipping Methods and the list goes on…


Volusion



Volusion is also a wonderful E-Commerce platform. It comes with- Intuitive product merchandising, beautiful website designing, automated inventory control, innovative social media tools, Effective Search Engine Optimization, Convenient Order Processing, Integration with all major shipping companies, Integration with existing or new merchant accounts, Multiple administrator login, Free 24×7 live telephone technical support, 100% redundancy of all hardware, systems, applications and data and the list goes on..


The success of an E-Commerce business depends on E-Commerce web design and development. It is very important to select the best suitable E-Commerce platform. We might have missed out your favourite E-Commerce platform. So if you have some experience to share with us, please write in the comments.

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