E-commerce platform allows you to build business related to selling of products and services. You can choose any e-commerce platform among various Open-source e-commerce platform to develop an online store. Finding the right platform is not an easy task.
We provide you the list of some Open source e-commerce platform having their own advantages and disadvantages. These platforms are designed by keeping different types of users in mind.
Zen cart: Free Open-source e-commerce solution
It’s mainly useful for the complex sites. If your business involves in selling of a variety of products likes Perfumes, Accessories, Men’s clothes, Women clothes, sunglasses on a single website. It is PHP- based application requires knowledge of PHP programming. There are Plenty of add-ons available to customize their online store. It includes basic feature which is more expected such as discount coupons, newsletter, gift certificates and so on.
CMS is not available in the Zen cart application, so one has to integrate the separate system for CMS.
Magento: Free
It is the fastest growing open source e-commerce platform in the market mainly suitable for complex websites having a variety of products including books, electronics, software all on a single website. For Enterprise Edition, one has to pay as it includes highly useful features like CMS useful to customize the website whereas Community Edition is mainly for developers is Free.
Ubercart: Free
Ubercart e-commerce platform is designed to integrate with only Drupal. This is mainly designed to sell things such as event registration and tickets, file downloads, etc. Drupal users feel comfortable while designing the store using this platform since the they are familiar with the features but people who are non-Drupal user may find it difficult.
Open API is also not available so you will unable to integrate your store with other systems.
OpenCart
OpenCart is a PHP-based E-commerce platform having very much active community for user support. It includes the features such as more than 20 payment gateways and 8 shipping methods. It allows you to use multiple languages, add numerous categories, selling loads of products and so on. It is user- friendly as consumers are allowed to write reviews about the item from your store. It is full of having around 2,700 themes which makes it look much better.
VirtueMart:
VirtueMart is also a popular open source shopping cart designed to work with Joomla. In VirtueMart you can add numerous products and categories as well as you can map products to multiple product. It also allows different payment gateways. VirtueMart doesn’t provide the hosting support so owners have to purchase a separate hosting package with other vendors. It is suitable for small businesses.
PrestaShop:
It is a PHP-based open source eCommerce solution provides a high level of customization. Using this application you can manage your orders, shipping, inventory and customers in real time from baking. It mainly comes up with more than 3,500 modules and templates and have 600,000 community members.
Oscommerce:
Oscommerce is the extremely popular platform which provides around 7,000 free add-ons to customize the store. They provide the Live chat Room facility for direct communication with other members of other communities.
There are many more open-source E-commerce platforms are available, including above, so one has to try more than one platform before making a final decision and integrate into the site.