Experts predict that global e-commerce revenue in 2019 will exceed $2 trillion.
That’s an enormous pie out there, ready for anyone to take a piece of. All you need are products to sell, and a website to sell them from.
Ok, that’s not exactly all that you need. If you’re going to be able to sell your products in a way that most shoppers have come to expect, then you’re going to need a shopping cart. This might sound like a complicated thing to add to your website, but free open source shopping carts make adding one to your site a breeze.
So read on as we take a look at 10 of the best free shopping carts for your e-commerce site.
Drupal is a free open source content management framework. Alongside WordPress and Joomla, it is one of the most popular methods of building and managing a website.
Drupal Commerce is designed to integrate perfectly with Drupal-built websites, allowing them to offer multilingual e-commerce capabilities in a wide range of different currencies. The fact that is is built on the Drupal CMS makes it highly compatible with a content marketing strategy.
If you’ve built your site with Drupal, this is a great choice.
Spree Commerce is a great option whether you’re a technophobe or a hardcore developer.
It’s ideal if you’re looking to build a mobile e-commerce platform. Built on the Ruby on Rails framework, it allows developers to grow its capabilities as your business scales.
It’s also the option of choice for big companies such as Puppet Labs.
Ubercart is another great choice for your Drupal site.
In fact, Drupal Commerce was actually developed by the same team that developed Ubercart. And whilst they are similar in some ways, they are radically different in others.
Ubercart is currently the most popular option of the two but has been in town a lot longer. There are certain things that you can do with Ubercart that you can’t do with Drupal Commerce. And vice versa.
If you’ve got a Drupal site, check out both and see which is a better fit.
The imaginatively-titled OpenCart is well-known for offering easy access to transactions and orders.
There is a large online community, which means that if you hit a problem you can easily find someone to help. It’s very easy to use for beginners, with no need to have to tinker with any code until you’re ready to.
And it’s also the option of choice for sites including the British Red Cross.
PrestaShop is a great option for a global marketplace.
With more than 250,000 merchants, it’s used in more than 65 countries. And it’s available in more than 75 different languages, with the online community helping to improve the quality of translations.
It also has a multi-store mode that allows you to manage all of your stores from just one location. If you needed any more convincing, it is also used by McDonald’s.
The basic tools you need for your shopping cart are all available for free with this open source software.
There are more powerful additional tools that are reserved for the paid versions, however. This is not a great choice if you are new to the world of creating websites; it is intended for use by experienced developers and has a pretty steep learning curve. But if you’re confident with your coding skills, it can be a powerful tool.
This e-commerce software has been in the game longer than most. One benefit of this is that there are a huge number of third-party add-ons for it.
It is beginning to show its age a little, with the front end looking particularly dated. But the reason that osCommerce is still around after so long is that it is easy to use and simple to modify to the exact set-up that you want.
It isn’t so good when it comes to scalability, but for someone new to the game, it’s still a great choice.
Zen Cart actually grew out of the osCommerce code. In 2003, Zen Cart branched off to focus more on providing useful templates.
Zen Cart is highly customizable and has a large user community to help you work through any problems. There is no real customer support however; if you’re stuck you’ll need to turn to the community.
It’s not a great option for total beginners, but for larger businesses with a tech team on board, this can be a powerful choice.
Jigoshop is a great plugin choice if you’re running a WordPress site.
It’s packed with features but is also easy to use. It means that you can get your online store set up in no time. There are also a large number of extensions that you can use with it.
If you’re used to managing websites with WordPress then you’ll find the interface very easy to use.
WooCommerce is another huge e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
It has become incredibly popular for its ease of use, as well as the range of customization options. If you’re completely new to e-commerce, the choice can be a little daunting, but setting up your first online store shouldn’t be too much a challenge.
And since it’s so popular, there’s a huge amount of information out there to help you if you get stuck.
When you’ve decided which of these great open source shopping carts you want to use, you’ll need a site to put them on.
We offer powerful web hosting solutions, that are fully scalable to meet the needs of your business as it grows. We provide you with all the tools you’ll need to build your website and maintain it.
And we’re partnered with Softaculous to make installing applications such as your open source shopping cart a breeze. We have over 400 applications to choose from including Magento, Drupal, and PrestaShop.
If you would like to know more about the services we offer then don’t hesitate to get in touch.
