eCommerce shopping cart

There are two kinds of shopping carts in eCommerce. Open source (free)—they usually have the open source license you would need to accept, and premium shopping carts.

If you run small to mid business you would probable use the free shopping cart, because these non free are very expensive. For example, the Magento shopping cart enterprise edition would cost you starting from $15.000 per year up to $49.000 a year.

An online shopping cart platform is a peace of pre-programmed eCommerce software, that sits on a web server and allows users to reach and choose items through the Internet. This software will allow users to add items to a "cart" and go ahead to checkout and pay when they are ready.

There are many shopping cart platforms available. Here is the quick comparison of some free and open source chopping carts:

Prestashop shopping cart

Has great catalog management system. Organizing products in categories is very user-friendly. You have the Inventory and Stock (for physical products)—how many left. Also you can work with download-able products: to sell music, videos, etc. in Prestashop.

The back office of Prestashop is very intuitive. You have the great product search. The CMS features are built in, so you can create about page if you like.

Magento shopping cart

Recurring payments, per month make this system top-notch. Newsletter management also. The admin area is simple where you can control the gifts registry. The CMS is built in. There are three versions of Magneto:

  • Open source Magento
  • Magento GO (the eCommerce shopping cart is hosted on Magento servers). This is not the free product. The Magento GO would cost you $15/mos for 100 products
  • Magento Enterprise (this would cost you 15.000/year)

One fact about Magento—Magento community is great and awesome.

OS commerce shopping cart

This is a grand father of all shopping carts. Been here for a while. It is usually included in some hosting packages. Features:

  • Easy Order Management
  • Easy customer Management
  • Simple template Structure
  • Shipping and payment options

 

Spree Commerce shopping cart

It is based on Ruby on Rails. It has smooth and flexible checkout Flow, plus beautiful themes. It is very similar to Prestashop. Order/Customer management is simple.

It supports smart shipping options and 50 payment plugins (PayPal, Authorize.Net)..

VirtueMart

VirtueMart is free, easy to use and up-to-date e-commerce solution. Fully integrated into a free, but professional Content Management System of Joomla. It is an add-on for Joomla! IN VirtueMart you have the: Shopper Groups, Wish lists, Stock management.

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