18 Great Shopping Carts to Power Your Online Store
E-Commerce is bigger than a sasquatch these days. If you have goods or services to sell, you may as well sell them on your website. The only hurdle, however, is choosing the right shopping cart to suit your needs. There are so many out there and it can be hard to know where to start. WebRulon to the rescue. Here are eighteen popular shopping carts that could send your e-business to the next level.
Free Carts
AgoraCart – The free version of AgoraCart still contains the bells and whistles the paid product is known for. However, if you upgrade to the gold version you will get access to more modules and support. Goodie!
Batavi – Started an 2007 by osCommerce core-team members and ICEshop members because they felt that eCommerce 3.0 was not advancing as they had hoped. With that in mind, Batavi offers customer- and group-specific pricing, payment and shipping modules, related products for crossselling and upselling, product price rules for pricing large product volumes and many other features that make it very friendly for business-to-business selling.
Magento – This was also began as a osCommerce offshoot but the developers soon decided to build the program from the ground up. They ended up building it on the Zend Network and the cart is PHP-based and is available as an open source option with extra modules that can be installed.
OFBiz – Apache OFBiz may be the perfect solution for all of your enterprise business needs. It’s easy, simple to use and a good match for any sized business.
OpenCart – OpenCart is another open source platform for all of your commerce needs. This one has more bells and whistles than usual, too. It supports a full templating system, support for over 20 payment gateways, over 8 different payment gateways, unlimited categories and products and more.
osCommerce – The best known shopping cart on the block, osCommerce has been around the bend and then some. It’s so popular, in fact, that lots of other carts are based on this humble and all-seeing program. What does it offer? A constantly growing developer community that continues to develop new plugins to make this shopping cart do everything but clean the windows. Also, the front end of the cart is highly customizable. This might be the gold standard.
PrestaShop – PrestaShop runs on PHP and MySQL and has an extensive admin panel. The system allows you to have orders placed for out of stock items, package tracking, merchandise return and so much more. There’s also access to lots of expansion modules for free.
Satchmo – Satchmo was originally designed in Python, as an attempt to overcome the limitations of PHP. However, Python was abandoned in favor of the Django web application. It includes many features such as PDF invoice generation, automatic thumbnail generation, inventory tracking and a whole lot more.
Ubercart – Ubercart was developed to work with Drupart, as such the program can be fully integrated with your site and community on any server that can run PHP or MySQL. It works best with companies that feature only a limited number of items to sell.
VirtueMart – VirtueMart started it’s life as a plugin named mambo-PHPShop. However, that faded when Mambo merged with Joomla. The cart still requires Joomla to work and as such may be viable for a small percentage o f businesses. It runs on PHP and MySQL, and is capable of supporting an unlimited number of products and categories.
Zen Cart – Zen Cart was built off of the popular OSCommerce framework and features a templating system and some popular osCommerce plugins such as the gift certificate module. It is PHP-based and uses MySQL databases.
Fee-based shopping carts
Avactis – This cart has tons of bells and whistles, including real-time shipping calculation, multiple currencies, sales reports, marketing etc. It’s PHP/MySQL based and it’s tag based cart system that allows you to add the system to any web site of your choice, whether it’s a static site or not. Also, there’s even a free limited service trial period. Good going!
CubeCart – CubeCart is another template driven PHP/MySQL driven cart. It does have some cool perks, including tax by state/zone or country, inventory control, gift certificates and more. The company also offers free updates and more plugin modules than you can shake a stick at.
Magellan Commerce – Magellan, in addition to being a great explorer, also knew a thing or two about e-commerce. As such, Magellan Commerce is a serviceable cart that could suit your needs quite nicely. It offers over 30 templates, real time shipping calculators, order and inventory tracking and a lot more.
ProductCart – ProductCart is written in ASP and relies heavily on AJAX to speed up the consumer experience. The system can also integrate with your current site if you prefer to building one totally on top of the cart. The feature set is more extensive than it would seem.
ShopSite – This cart allows you to add buttons to an existing site, quite handy. You can also build an entire site with their functional and easy to use wizard. ShopSite offers three levels of subscription to its shopping cart system, or you can pay one time fees for the top two tiers of service. Perfect for those e-businesses who want a full featured site without the headache.
ViArt – ViArt is a PHP cart that comes with lots of options. There is a free version but skips out on so much functionality, you are better off coughing up the beans. ViArt also provides you with a full CMS and Help Desk that can be integrated into the online store.
X-Cart – X-Cart offers different versions of its software to match the different needs of you, the e-merchant. From the most basic version on up it features a CSS-based layout for customization, MySQL databases, search engine friendly and more. Not a bad little cart.
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I love opencart, I think its one of the best opensource carts around.
Thanks for this interesting article. I am keen to see more on this topic sometime soon. Cheers again