15 Top Open Source Ecommerce Platforms

For those searching for an open source ecommerce platform, the Internet offers a wide range of choices from free ecommerce platforms to those that cost a few hundreds per year. This article takes a look at 15 of the best ecommerce platforms for those planning to open an online shop or upgrade to a better open source platform.

1. Magento: Magento is the world’s fastest growing free ecommerce platform. It caters to 30,000 merchants and deals with $ 25 billion transactions.
2. osCommerce : osCommerce, another free ecommerce platform consists of over 229,100 store owners and developers who support each other. It also offers over 5,800 add-ons some of which you have to pay for.
3. Zen Cart : Zen Cart’s strengths lie in the fact that it is free with tons of software at your disposal, many of which that are osCommerce preinstalled.
4. X-Cart : X-Cart offers a number of fast, W3C-complaiant and search engine friendly open sourced packages which start from $115.
5. CubeCart : CubeCart’s standard edition (free) comes with three different skins, multi-currency support, product search, customer order history and unlimited products, categories and images.
6. VirtueMart : VirtueMart is an ecommerce solution that is designed to be used with Joomla! CMS (Content Management System). Its plus points include support for multiple languages and currencies and an unlimited number of products and product categories.
7. Ubercart : Ubercart, similar to VirtueMart, must be integrated with a CMS, but in this case Drupal. Its specializations, apart from physical products include, event registrations, sale of file downloads and access to members only websites.
8. PrestaShop : PrestaShop, launched in 2007, currently does business with more than 25,000 stores. By using the well-known Smarty template engine, combined with an Ajax heavy back-end, PrestaShop offers product image zoom, package tracking, PDF customer invoices and cross-selling.
9. LiteCommerce : LiteCommerce’s wide range of benefits includes easy installation and logical set-up. But it comes at a price, starting from $109.
10. Spree: The Spree platform based on Ruby on Rails, offers great extensions that lets you modify shipping, tax, discounts and coupons to suit the various needs of your customers.
11. Avactis : This open sourced ecommerce platform is available as a free basic version or at a fee of $19.50 per month. It is easy to install and includes many useful features like multiple storefronts and numerous payment methods.
12. AgoraCart : This free open sourced platform is flexible, fully customizable and is best suited for setting up of simple stores by hobbyist coders.
13. WordPress e-commerce Plug-in : Being downloaded over half a million times, this ecommerce plug-in is by far the most popular plug-in of this type. Its versatility lies in the fact that it can be integrated with PayPal and Google Checkout which will be familiar with most of your customers.
14. OXID eShop : OXID eShop offers three editions of its ecommerce platforms out of which the Community Edition is totally free. It comes with a completely integrated CMS, clean code and effective SEO.
15. Digistore : This ecommerce platform is based on osCommerce and can be easily installed and operated by people with little or no coding knowledge. Digistore also offers a number of free templates that can be installed.