One of the main dilemmas of e-commerce merchants today is select the shopping cart solution for their shopping Web. The large number of options can be daunting – a recent Google search for “online” shopping cart “turned up 12.7 million hits, many of them offering shopping cart products themselves No wonder it is a difficult decision.
A good way to narrow the field is to decide what type of car will best suit your needs: open source (available free) or proprietary (available for a fee). There was a time when many in the world frowned on open source e-commerce products forehead. Some said they were difficult to install and configure, while others lamented the lack of available features and technical support. Fortunately for online entrepreneurs on a budget, then almost all gone.
The latest open-source shopping carts offer pretty much everything you find in a proprietary solution, provided you have the basic technical skills to install and configure. Most have become much easier to install than previous offerings and also enhances the contributions of many developers and customization. Technical support tends to take the form of user forums, which are, at least for the most popular products are very popular and often take an answer to a question of minutes.
The grandfather of open source shopping carts and still among the most popular is osCommerce. In operation for over eight years, she now claims 176,100 store owners and offers 4,700 free add-ons. osCommerce is compatible with all versions of PHP 4 and has an automatic installation on a browser-based and a backend object-oriented.
Another popular choice is ZenCart, which was based initially on osCommerce code but has developed dramatically and is a fully independent. Known for his long list of added features, ZenCart is PHP based and uses a MySQL database and HTML components. His unit frequently praised voucher allows merchants to create, distribute and manage digital coupons.
An alternative to these two options is Ubercart very similar to a shopping cart product built on the industry-leading Open Source Content Management (CMS), Drupal. Designed to take advantage of contributed Drupal core and other systems, gets high marks for its flexibility Ubercart and intuitive interface.
These are just some source shopping carts available today. All three are free under the GNU General Public License.
Which of these products (or other) open source would be best for the online shop of a dealer in particular? It depends on the needs of individual companies. Factors such as flexibility in design, search engine friendliness, reporting and backend functionality is important to weigh when choosing between products. Most pages are product demos and live lists of sites running the software, which can also help to differentiate between competitors.
Uncomfortable with the technical requirements for setting up a shopping cart application? It is possible that open source solutions are not for you. Owners of the programs cost money, but generally offer configuration, design and support services that can take the headache of opening a store for less technically inclined. For others – especially smaller merchants with limited budgets Start – Open source solutions can save valuable at a crucial stage in the development business.
