Open Source E-Commerce Shopping Cart Solutions

Chossing a shopping cart from the many shopping cart available in the market complete depends on you. What shopping cart features you need for your website. In this post I will discuss of the open source shopping acrts that provides you access to your source code to modify it as per your specific needs and customize to your needs. The shopping carts I will be discussing are PHP/MySQL that run on both Linux and Windows servers and are easily affordable. Pay-per-month shopping carts are of less value as they are expensive compared to those I will highlighting.

In general all shopping carts share the following common features:

1. Customer Management
2. Product Management
3. Payment Modules
4. Shipping Modules
5. Order Receipt Emails
6. Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process

Features that vary from shopping cart to shopping cart are:

1. Time it takes to modify the cart to look like a current web design
2. WYSIWYG ability to modify product descriptions using different fonts, colors, etc.
3. Ability to import/export from Excel spreadsheet
4. Wholesale/Reseller Pricing

What shopping cart features you need based on that you can choose from the shopping carts I will be discussing.


Magento

Magento shopping cart is based on latest PHP5 OOPs standards and Zend framework.

Advantages The company behind Magento is Varian that keeps updating code and fixing bugs. Magento comes with good collection of default template and multi-store capable.

Disadvantages With very limited technical documentation it makes programming modification (except graphical changes) and customization very difficult. Also, Magento is very complicated and heavily layered so much more time and higher budget is required for customization. As the code is complicated and it is heavily layered this makes Magento run slow.


Oscommerce MS 2.2

oscommerce.com is maintaining Oscommerce shopping cart. Oscommerce also forms the basis for both Zen Cart and CRE Loaded.

Advantages Oscommerce is simple so it runs well through so forms the backbone of basics shopping carts. It has most available number of modifications and contributions. It is up to date with MySQL 5 and PHP 5 because of its latest security update.

Disadvantages To install Oscommerce all contribution (add-ons) for your shopping cart is time consuming and very costly.

Also, absence of graphic template system makes design modification very difficult.


CRE Loaded Chain Reaction Edition of Oscommerce

Oscommerce forms the basis of CRE Loaded. 3 versions of CRE Loaded is available of which regualr is free; Pro adds credit card encryption and better product attribute support and B2B adds separate price level support. CRE Loaded comes with many more contributions installed and most popular and used of all is Easy Populate which lets you populate your database from various sources (template system, administrator access levels, an affiliate manager, an Excel file, coupon codes). Also, the Oscommerce templating systems installed allows you to more easily integrate a design into the system and control which information boxes show on the left and right columns.

Advantages Many more contributions from Oscommerce already installed.

Disadvantages You will find buggy code for few modules like vendor shipping. Contributions from oscommerce more difficult to install compared to CRE Loaded own.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart features are based on Oscommerce but to use these need to be converted to Zen Cart. The wide array of Zen Cart features are product attributes managers, built in coupon system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, html editor for regular web page contents, template system.

Advantages Many contributions from Oscommerce are installed by default; Oscommerce is stable and requires no licensing fees.

Disadvantages As thera re many contributions admin arae becomes very disordered. To use Oscommerce contributions they need to be converted to Zen Cart.

X-Cart


X-cart is a commercial package and is most competitively priced and easy to modify.

Advantages Commercially supported and very few bugs. It uses Smarty Templates system.

Disadvantages Licensing fees


OSC Max

With many useful contributions installed this is best version of Oscommerce. It is easy to use as default Oscommerce installation.

Advantages No licensing fees; contributions installed are very useful; wholesale/reseller pricing module already installed
and is well-documented.

Disadvantages Has Personal preference disadvantage.


Joomla and Virtuemart

On the Virtuemart website they have a combined installer that installs Virtuemart with Joomla. This is the solution you would want if you have to have your CMS (Content Management System) combined with your shopping cart.

Advantages Virtuemart combines well with Joomla CMS and it is easy to install and posseses the basic shopping cart features.

Disadvantages Less add-on available compared to other shopping cart and high-end shopping cart features are missing here.


It is good to start with loaded versions - Zencart, CRE Loaded, or OSCmax to get out best for your shopping cart in less money and less time.