Deciding to choose an open source shopping cart software
Open-source software has taken the market by force. Home entrepreneurs and conglomerate firms alike are using open-source software to run their daily business operations. Today, opensource software can meet the requirements of numerous industries and market segments including those requiring an application server, internet server, productiveness suite, CRM tool, project management, integrated development environment (IDE), point-of-sale software, co. resource planning (ERP) software and ecommerce shopping cart software solely to name a couple. Community developed software provides an inexpensive alternative choice to conventional exclusive software. Merchants have the power to customize community based products to meet their explicit business obligation.
When making an attempt to choose a shopping cart system, to run your web store, entrepreneurs must appraise and allot worth to the technical and operational specs before employing to production. Since one size doesn't fit all; merchants must select the best product primarily based on their unique needs.
So how does one select the best open-source shopping cart software? First we'll start by listing the big players in the SOHO market. To make my list the opensource shopping cart must meet the ten minimum needs listed below.
Needed Features:
- Centrally controlled source code
- An active developer community
- Grown up third party extensions (including PCI Compliant payment gateway extensions)
- Support Linux and Microsoft Windows hosting environments
- Software download must include all features noted on site (e.g. Not crippleware or demoware)
- Nicely written installation guide and user guide. Paperwork might be available as a PDF document or as an HTML file.
- Installs on the standard SSL certificate.
- Gives a custom notification e-mail to the merchant and customer
- Provides timely bug fixes and safe upgrade trail
- Installs in a dedicated and shared hosting environment
Now that we've got our minimum needs list we are able to begin to take a look at the top free shopping cart programs. In my judgment, the top free shopping carts for the SOHO market are
- Magento Commerce
- VirtueMart
- OsCommerce
- ZenCart
- CubeCart
- UberCart
- AbleCommerce
All the free shopping carts mentioned above can be downloaded, installed and configured at no charge to the merchant. Since most community based product installations come with the standard (non commercial quality) control interface most merchants will need to upgrade the GUI (graphical control panel). To upgrade the GUI and improve the consumer experience merchants can decide to hire a web developer or get a custom template from sites like template monster. Template Monster (and others) provides thousands of cheap custom templates so merchants can simply employ good looking web stores.
To ensure you are choosing the best shopping cart for your business merchants should think about the following:
Capacity - The merchant must know and understand the product capacity limitation. For instance, if you've a product catalog of one thousand products but the shopping cart has a nine hundred product limitation then that solution isn't for you. Note: all the opensource products noted above have an unlimited product catalogue.
Performance - If your ecommerce web store is slow purchasers will simply shop someplace else. You must check performance with high user loads and with increased information loads. Both eventualities can bring a web store to its knees.
Community Support - Determine a powerful development community exists. Review the online forums to determine if the product has an active community of developers. Look for online questions then see how long it took for the user to get a reply.
Technical Support - Guarantee support is available thru an active developer community or as a fee paid contract. There's little worse than having a production issue and waiting five days or more to receive an answer.
Payment Gateway Support - to accept and process card payments the open-source shopping cart must provide 3rd party payment gateway extensions. The number 1 payment gateway services provide secure payment modules for many open-source shopping cart programs.