Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software

If you own a business and don’t already have an online store then you are missing out on a lot of potential sales and you don’t have to break the bank to get a fully functional web shop online. If you are thinking about setting up your own Ecommerce site then getting a good shopping cart system in place is essential. Here is a list of some of the most commonly used Ecommerce software solutions. The one thing that bugs me about many of these shopping carts is that the sites they demo usually look pretty terrible. In my opinion some of these carts spend too much time building complex features into the software without thinking about how the cart actually looks. I would much rather use a simple, good looking site than one full of flashy options that looks a mess. Take a look at all the options presented below and see which one is right for you. Most of these shopping carts are open source and you can download and use all of them for free.

osCommerce

osCommerce has been around for a long time now and is available as free software under the GNU General Public License. There are many professional stores using this software but in my opinion it is not a particularly aesthetically pleasing solution. osCommerce supports multiple currencies and it allows customers to print off invoices from the order screen.

Magento

Magento is probably the most impressive of all the open source shopping carts and it has the look and feel of paid software. This is definitely the best looking shopping cart system out there but there are quite a few reports of this shopping cart being slow to use due to the demanding system requirements. If you plan on using Magento for high end projects then you might be advised to host it on your own server. I’m sure the speed issue is something that they will fix in time but right now it probably wont run that fast on shared hosting.

ZenCart

Zen Cart has been around for a while and originally started as an extension of Os Commerce. Zen Cart supports multiple payment and shipping options. Zen Cart was designed to be easy for non programmers to use and set up.

Open Cart

I had actually never heard of this one until I started researching for this article but I must say that it really impressed me. Open cart is an open source PHP based shopping cart that looks very easy to use and it has a fantastic looking design. The one thing that puts me off most of the open source shopping carts is the ugly looking sites they produce but the demo site for Open Cart looks really nice. OpenCart is designed to be feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is available under the Open Software License version 3.0 and is said to be a simpler, faster alternative to Magento. PrestaShop is a relative newcomer to the Ecommerce scene, having only been around since July 2008. They have an active forum if you want help. This might be one to keep an eye on.

CubeCart

Version 3 of CubeCart is free but you must leave their copyright notice in your footer. CubeCart has a large number of payment gateways including Google Checkout and Paypal. There is an active community that can help you out if you need advice or help setting up your shopping cart.

Ubercart

If you use Drupal to manage your sites then you might be interested in checking out Ubercart which is a powerful Ecommerce shopping cart add-on for Drupal.

Paypal

Some people may not be aware that Paypal offer a free shopping cart system which allows you to process credit card payments.

PHP Shop

phpShop is a PHP-powered shopping cart application that is released under the GNU General Public License. This PHP shopping cart was designed to be easy to customize and uses CSS themes. As the name suggests, this cart is written entirely in PHP and so if you are comfortable with PHP then this shopping cart would definitely be worth taking a look at.

StoreSprite

The final free shopping cart in this list is StoreSprite which is a free php/mysql shopping cart. StoreSprite is designed to be easy to install, customize and maintain. Take a look at their website and browse through some of the online store demos.

The shopping cart software you choose to use is a personal decision and must be guided by many factors. The best thing I can recommend is to take a look at the demos each site has to offer and find a free shopping cart solution that meets all your requirements.

I hope you enjoyed this round up of the best Ecommerce software. If I have missed any out then please feel free to comment and recommend other free shopping cart software. Also if you have a store that uses any of these shopping carts then go ahead and post a link to your store for other readers to get inspired.