If you have a business, you will probably need the Best E-Commerce Software you most likely can’t afford to not sell your product, service or software online. That’s why many people look for eCommerce software to help them accept payments via their business website. But how do you find the right software for your business?
In a market as saturated as the ecommerce platform market, it can be very difficult to figure out which shopping cart software best meets your needs. If you are considering starting your own store, then chances are you have already run into this struggle at some point.
If you already have a business website, a good option is to integrate a standalone shopping cart—including open-source shopping carts—for ecommerce functionality. This is a good fit for those who want more control but would otherwise need technical expertise or an IT staff to host and manage an ecommerce site.
Another option that suits most entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is hosted ecommerce software. A hosted solution will provide everything from domain name registration to the tools you need to build an ecommerce website, including the shopping cart, with minimal tech and website design knowledge required. Many will also take care of PCI compliance in order to keep your customers’ data safe.
Open-source ecommerce shopping carts offer many advantages for small businesses. Open-source solutions can be developed to fit the needs of the merchant. They contain a nice combination of features at a minimal cost. And, though the support options may be more limited than proprietary or hosted platforms, open-source standalone solutions often have large communities of developers and partners to assist new merchants.
Free appeals to just about all of us and open source e-commerce solutions can give you just that. But it comes at a price, you need to hire someone or be more technical yourself. Most open source solutions also have premium versions that include support and service.
Magento is one of the market leading open source e-commerce solutions and has won many awards. The community edition is free (which means there is no support) and the professional level starts at $2,995 per year.
osCommerce has built an impressive customer base of 230,000+ online storefronts. They have a strong community and Live Shops directory where you can see what others have built.
Prestashop is a rapidly growing open source solution with an active user community. They have a good site with good demos and feature explanations. They have a bug tracking tool that shows they are responsive to customer input.
Zen Cart promises a very easy user-friendly install. Often open source is viewed as more difficult for the end user, but not according to Zen as they explain anyone with basic website building skills can do it.
Open Cart as the name implies offers an open solution. It sounded like one of the easiest to install, out of the box. But, there is no box. They offered some great features like search engine optimization (SEO), auto image resizing, unlimited products and more.
Spree Commerce is an open source flexible commerce platform built on the Ruby on Rails programming language. Completely free to use.
SimpleCart(js) is an elegant open source solution. If you can write basic HTML, they promise this lightweight (in terms of program size of only 20k) app is for you.