“25 Free Open Source eCommerce Platforms”

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, or consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Its very existence has allowed countless number of businesses reach new heights, and take advantage of endless possibilities. As new standards, ideas, and applications for eCommerce role out, the strength of your online presence must support these new trends.

Here is 25 Free Open Source eCommerce platform Applications we have found on the internet and select the one that’s right for you, your business and your customers.

1. Magento – Magento is classified as an open source eCommerce platform that eases the flow between design and online sales. Magento is one of the fastest growing eCommerce solutions in the market, and with their long list of features it’s not hard to see why. Magento likes to out-smart other content management systems for eCommerce by providing excellent options to grow your site. Magento is a very flexible eCommerce platform that lets you Manage multiple websites, integrate Google Website Optimizer and over 50 payment gateways.
2. PrestaShop – PrestaShop is a free, open source eCommerce platform that delivers a wide variety of features such as the full control of your inventory, orders, shipping and tracking, allowing you to manage your business in real-time. This eCommerce platform has a WYSIWYG editing tool for your products and the managing of images. Your online store can be customized at any time, accept PayPal payments, and manage customer based subscriptions. PrestaShop can send payments directly to your bank account, or your PayPal account.
3. osCommerce – osCommerce has attracted a large growing e-commerce community that consists of over 228,200 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being contributed on a daily basis. To date there are over 5,800 add-ons that are available for free to customize osCommerce Online Merchant online stores and to help increase sales.
4. Zen Cart – Zen Cart Free and straightforward, using Zen Cart falls within the capabilities of almost everyone. Besides the standard features you’d expect, Zen Cart offers a newsletter manager, discount coupons, quantity discounts, gift certificates and the ability to select exactly which cards you accept. There are tons of contributions to the software at your disposal with many from osCommerce preinstalled. This does make the admin interface a little cluttered for my liking though.
5. CubeCart – CubeCart , the standard edition, is completely free to download and use. It comes complete with three different skins, customer order history, unlimited products, categories and images, multi-currency support, and product search. CubeCart 4, which costs over $100, comes with enhanced SEO, visitor skin selector, courier tracking URL, superior product search, and the ability to add and edit orders from the back-end. Both integrate well with any site and are suitable for those already selling online or preparing to open a shop. If you’re not familiar with PHP and MySQL, however, you might find setting up CubeCart on your own quite a challenge.
6. VirtueMart – VirtueMart can’t operate alone: it’s an ecommerce solution designed to be used alongside the Joomla! CMS (content management system). In terms of a cart, it offers the complete package and it’s great from the shoppers’ point of view. Shoppers can register for an account, add addresses and view their order history with a minimum of fuss. VirtueMart supports multiple languages and currencies and you can add an unlimited number of products and product categories. Your products are searchable and can be rated by users. Despite its obvious strengths, it does have some minor weaknesses, including a somewhat poorly structured forum and some messy code here and there.
7. Ubercart – VirtueMart can’t operate alone: it’s an ecommerce solution designed to be used alongside the Joomla! CMS (content management system). In terms of a cart, it offers the complete package and it’s great from the shoppers’ point of view. Shoppers can register for an account, add addresses and view their order history with a minimum of fuss. VirtueMart supports multiple languages and currencies and you can add an unlimited number of products and product categories. Your products are searchable and can be rated by users. Despite its obvious strengths, it does have some minor weaknesses, including a somewhat poorly structured forum and some messy code here and there.
8. Avactis – Avactis, available as a free version or for a fee, integrates seamlessly with your existing website. Its web based help manual, video tutorials and setup wizard are sufficient for most people to install and manage without the help of expert developers. Advanced features include newsletter management, marketing and sales reports which you can export to Excel, multiple storefronts, numerous payment methods including Maestro, the ability to export accounting data to QuickBooks and support for tax systems around the world. To make the most of every feature out-of-the-box, you’re going to have to pay $19.95 per month or a one-off payment of $199, which seems reasonable. There are additional charges, however, for hosting your cart, support, updates and installation (if you can’t do that yourself). The shopper experience is smooth, but a little drawn out, as customers must navigate through various pages before paying for their goods.
9. AgoraCart – AgoraCart is not as popular as some of the other platforms reviewed here and we’re not quite sure why. It’s flexible and fully customisable, great for setting up simple stores or complex design concepts. Insofar as design goes, you can choose from one of the templates on offer or design your own using CSS. Layouts and product categories can be tweaked to your heart’s content. In some ways, AgoraCart seems to have been left behind by some of the newer PHP based platforms, so is perhaps best suited to hobbyist coders.
10. OXID eShop – OXID eSales is an open source e-commerce application built with PHP & uses MySQL for storing the data.
11. Digistores – Digistore’s based on osCommerce, so will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s ever used that ubiquitous ecommerce platform. It’s a full CMS, very quick and easy to install and can be operated by people with little or no coding knowledge. There are a number of free templates available to use, but if you like, you can buy a sleeker template or even have your own personal one created for a small fee. You can manager and alter colours, site width, layout and template from within the admin area and even run multiple adverts to promote your products.
12. Spree – Spree, an ecommerce platform based on Ruby on Rails, is constantly growing and improving thanks to its active development team. There are loads of great extensions on offer which you can use to tailor your site to your specific needs. Spree lets you modify shipping, tax, discounts and coupons to suit your customers, who will themselves be more than satisfied with the single page checkout. It’s search engine friendly and has Google Analytics built in. It’s ideal for small and medium enterprises, but not the best choice for sites receiving the very highest levels of traffic.
13. Freeway – Freeway allows you to manage your store using web-based administration interface. Built-in SEO tools will help attracting more visitors from search engines and increase your sales. Freeway is scalable, it will grow with your internet business so you can sell how you want to sell adding new functionality with ease.
14. PHPshop – PHPshop‘s primary purpose of phpShop is to provide a simple shopping cart solution that is easy to customize to suit any purpose. phpShop has less features that many other shopping cart applications, but is generally easier to customize.  We were recently informed the PHPshop  is no longer active and is now under the name VirtueMart.
15. OpenCart – Open cart’s admin area has a well designed user interface that simplifies the process of tweaking your site. When you first begin using this eCommerce platform you’re given a customizable layout that gives your products an adequate amount of “breathing room”. OpenCart lets you take full control of your shipping features and the ability to take coupons. You can use coupon codes for your existing customers as incentives. Open Cart is ideal for small to medium sized businesses that are looking for flexibility and the power of useful tools at their fingertips.
16. WHMCS – WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing &  support solution for online businesses. WHMCS handles everything from signup to termination, with automated billing, provisioning & management. With WHMCS, you’re in control with a very powerful business automation tool.  Great Software, it runs our Sales and Hosting Platform at RackWire.com.
17. TomatoCart – TomatoCart is an open source e-commerce application that is branched from the popular osCommerce to offer a better experience. It comes with a totally new front and back-ends where the back-end is an impressive desktop-like ExtJS-powered interface.
18. eCart – eCart is an open source e-commerce shopping cart application that is built with PHP-MySQL. It is a fresh but powerful software which can manage multiple stores from a single admin interface, supports unlimited product categories, one-page-checkout and more.
19. CS-Cart – CS-Cart is a complete shopping cart application that can quickly enable any business to start selling online whether it is a single-product shop or a complete marketplace. The application uses Ajax in many parts to ease usage and offers an overall smart logic for a better shopping experience like one-page checkout, featured/related products for cross selling and many more.
20. ZeusCart – ZeusCart is an open source e-commerce application that is built with PHP and MySQL. The application has support for selling any type of items (including digital goods) where items can have multiple properties like color, size and multiple images.
21. CRE Loaded PCI CE – CRE Loaded PCI CE is an open source e-commerce software which is the lighter, but still strong, version of a paid solution. It is designed to run on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server and offers lots of features which you can add more as it comes with the source.
22. dashCommerce – dashCommerce is an open source e-commerce software developed with ASP.NET & using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for storing data.
23. osCSS – osCSS is simply a php eCommerce shopping application that’s built on the oscommerce GPL code. It’s available for a free download and distribution. This version complies with current web standards by using XHTML 1.1 as the mark-up language. You’ll have full take on how to display your products and the way they will be shipped. Although osCSS isn’t the most popular or powerful eCommerce CMS, it sure does get the job done.
24. WP e-Commerce – WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.  The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online
25. Übercart – Übercart is an e-commerce suite developed for Drupal. With the end user in mind, focusing on usability at store configuration, product – catalog creation and order administration, Übercart is a simple yet powerful shopping cart solution.

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