When you are looking for an open course e-commerce platform you are bound to find many options and packages. But there are some free open source shopping carts on the Internet that have many advantages for you. It’s recommended that you try them to figure out whether their functionality is suitable for your business.

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Shopify

It’s a highly functional and powerful platform that is known for its user friendly interface. It has the potential of increasing your revenue by selling your inventory. It has the best administrative tools and smart security features that ensure your customers feel safe while shopping. You can also look forward to mobile commerce shopping cart and responsive templates, which mean your customers can buy anything they want from any device.

With the help of a wide array of web building features you can create a website that will have a huge impact on your users.

Volusion

It’s a hugely popular shopping cart you can find and that’s because business owners can use it without having any technical expertise. Its interface is user friendly and it can be a one stop shop for you to create an online store with the help of templates, optimization and marketing tools. It also has several detailed features, which is why it also makes sense for medium sized businesses that need to have stores to go with their capacity.

Magento Commerce

It is a platform that is packed with features for the convenience of business owners. You get a lot of flexibility with this platform and control over the look, content and functionality of the store. The intuitive administration interface that Magento has, also involves marketing, optimization and catalogue management tools. Thus business owners can ensure that they can build a store suited to their specific requirements. You will also be pleased to find the more powerful Enterprise version with this platform.

OpenCart

It’s one of the most beautiful e commerce platforms you can find on the market today. But the good thing is that it’s quite scalable, which enables you to create unlimited number of categories, sell a large number of products, use different types of currencies and opt for over 20 payment and shipping methods. Another advantage of OpenCart is that it is supposed to be search friendly and hence you won’t have to put in a lot of effort to work on your page rankings.

But you have to understand that this platform is lesser known than the others, which is why you might have some difficulty getting documentation and help.

PrestaShop

This platform is growing in popularity because of several reasons that include a solid back end system. Store admins are capable of managing everything from orders to customers, inventory to payments and more. You will not feel limited using this platform because you can work with endless categories, sub-categories and image pictures.

But you have to remember that there are reports which suggest that users tend to run into problems and need some kind of coding expertise to find their way around it. But overall PrestaShop is easy to set up and use, is quite functional and definitely worth a try for businesses.

Zen Cart

This platform was created taking into account shop owners’ experiences, which is why it caters to their needs appropriately. To begin with it can be easily installed and you can benefit from the customization options too. Zen cart is also a platform that can be easily managed even if you don’t have any technical expertise. There are many customer management and promotional tools including gift certificates, coupon codes, newsletter manager, automatic email order confirmation to make the most out of.

VirtueMart

It is an e-commerce component that’s compatible with Joomla Content Management System, since they are both written in PHP. This platform was initially seen as robust but it has become quite bloated after several additions over a certain span of time. VirtueMart seems to work well for small and medium sized businesses but it might not be the best option for enterprise grade performance or security for that matter.

OsCommerce

This is a tried and tested open source format that has been used for around 12 years. Not only is it feature rich but has brilliant functionality to enhance your website. OsCommerce has been the inspiration for many other open source platforms and it’s also because it makes it easier to set up a site. There is a small drawback; it takes long to modify the design and appearance of your shopping cart.

Conclusion

The good thing about open source e-commerce platforms is that you can try them out without bearing huge costs. They are easy to set up, which is why you won’t have to deconstruct your site and get started again. Moreover, you can easily stay nimble and change your approach whenever you want.

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