One of the things you need to do while planning your new online store, or replacing the old one with a new and shiny one, is to decide on which e – commerce software you will use for your website. In this article we are going to suggest the open source ones so you do not have to cash out again.
We realize that buying a domain and hosting, paying for marketing, paying for data entry experts to enter the products in your website is expensive enough, so we will omit a payment for e-commerce software. Enough talk, here ‘s my top 2 e-commerce software:
1 – PrestaShop
I got the chance for implementing this one for one of my clients, and is one of the best that i have seen in the market, and it is powerful enough to outdo the commercial equivalents. It is one of the highest in demand e commerce products in the Web Development & design world and it will be in the list of my recommendations, the feature list is here:
- Is able to export products to eBay and import them from there
- Calculates tax for each country out of the box ( well, for most countries )
- Layered navigation with each product to it’s own category
You are able to set a limit for products on each page, implement payment options like Paypal, Moneybooker etc easily. You can ship your products using major carriers, and set up unlimited carriers and destinations. This product is too awesome to pass up on.
2 – OsCommerce
OsCommerce is a SEO-Friendly and feature rich eCommerce script from the osCommerce team (including a great Web Developer in the name of Harald Polce de Leon by from the Happy Giraffe company). It supports product categories, product listings, voting for products, leaving reviews, and it has a page to see the newest products so users can see which products are the hottest in this week. Let us give you the full list of features though:
- Customers can view their order history and order statuses
- Customers can maintain their accounts
- Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
- Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
- Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
- Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
- Forseen checkout procedure
- Secure transactions with SSL
- Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
- Global and per-category bestseller lists
- Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
- Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation
As you can see, this product has many features for the users.
3 – ZenCart
Pfft. I wont even be able to fit the list of features of this one in a single article. You can simply go throw a look at it – http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/Features_List. This is one of the most asked for e commerce platforms ( both design and module building work for it).
You should not take my word for fact about any of these e-commerce platforms. You can simply see the features and the pros with the cons youself, by setting up a testing installation on your local server.
Thanks for reading and keep being awesome!