Get your business up and running online using a free open source shopping cart.
Open source software has taken the marketplace by storm. Small business owners and multinational companies alike are using open source software to run their daily business operations. Today, open source software can meets the needs of various industries and market segments including those requiring an application server, web server, productivity suite, CRM tool, project management, integrated development environment (IDE), point-of-sale software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and ecommerce shopping cart software just to name a few.
Open source software provides a low cost alternative to traditional proprietary software. Merchants have the ability to customize open source products to meet their specific business requirement. When trying to select a shopping cart system, to run your online store, business owners must evaluate and assign value to the technical and operational specifications before deploying to production. Since one size does not fit all; merchants must choose the best product based on their unique requirements.
So how do you choose the best open source shopping cart software? First we’ll start by listing the major players in the small business market. In order to make my list the open source shopping cart must meet the 10 minimum requirements listed below.
Required Features:
1. Centrally controlled source code
2. An active developer community
3. Mature third party extensions (including PCI Compliant payment gateway extensions)
4. Support Linux and Microsoft Windows hosting environments
5. Software download must include all features listed on website (e.g. not crippleware or demoware)
6. Well written installation guide and user guide. Documentation may be available as a PDF document or as an HTML file.
7. Installs on a standard SSL certificate
8. Provides a custom notification email to the merchant and customer
9. Provides timely bug fixes and safe upgrade path
10. Installs in a dedicated and shared hosting environment
Now that we have our minimum requirements list we can begin to look at the top open source shopping cart programs. In my opinion, the top open source shopping carts for the small business market are:
• Magento Commerce
• VirtueMart
• osCommerce
• ZenCart
• CubeCart
• UberCart
• AbleCommerce
Each of the open source shopping carts listed above can be downloaded, installed and configured at no cost to the merchant. However, since most open source product installations come with a standard (non commercial quality) user interface most merchants will want to upgrade the GUI (graphical user interface). In order to upgrade the GUI and improve the end user experience merchants can choose to hire a web developer or simply purchase a custom template from sites like templatemonster.com. Template Monster (and others) provides thousands of affordable custom templates so merchants can easily deploy great looking online stores.
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