Tuesday, 12 September 2017

Practical Ecommerce/Sig Ueland: 20 Open Source Ecomnerce Ideas

Practical Ecommerce

20 Open Source Ecommerce Platforms
September 11, 2017 • Sig Ueland

Practical Ecommerce Editor’s Note: We first published this article in 2014, as “11 Open Source Ecommerce Platforms.” We updated it in Sept. 2017, below.

Open source ecommerce platforms offer businesses an inexpensive and customizable option for launching an online store. Many of open source platforms also have active support communities and scalability, for growth.

Here is a list of 20 open source ecommerce platforms. There are new and established platforms, with both core features and contributed add-ons. Many of these open source community solutions also have enterprise platforms for larger players.
Open Source Ecommerce Platforms

WooCommerce. WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce platform, with nearly 31 million downloads powering approximately one-fourth of all online stores. Originally a developer of WordPress themes, WooCommerce is built on the WordPress framework. WooCommerce is highly customizable, with over 400 official extensions and many plugins.

WooCommerce.

WP eCommerce. WP eCommerce is another popular ecommerce platform built for WordPress. Choose from free gateways such as ProPay, PayPal, and Worldpay, or choose premium payment gateways such as Stripe and Authorize.Net. WP eCommerce has a wide variety of features, including built-in marketing tools, multi-tier pricing, built-in shipping tools, and integration with popular couriers.

OpenCart. OpenCart is a free open source platform written in PHP. The OpenCart marketplace features over 13,000 modules and themes to start and expand a business. OpenCart also has an active community for support, with more than 110,000 registered members and more than 550,000 posts.

Drupal Commerce. Drupal Commerce is an open source ecommerce platform built on Drupal 7, a content management system. It offers a complete product administration system, shopping cart, and checkout form. It supports multiple languages and currencies out of the box, with additional ecommerce features and usability enhancements provided by contributed modules.

Drupal Commerce.

Spree Commerce. Spree Commerce began as an open source ecommerce platform in 2008. Almost 500 developers have contributed to Spree. The modular platform allows for easy customizations and upgrades. In 2013, Spree Commerce launched its integration platform, now called Wombat, which automates backend operations for storefronts using any platform, not just Spree. More than 45,000 retailers use the platform.

Magento Open Source. Previously “Magento Community Edition,” Magento Open Source is a free version of the Magento ecommerce solution, one of the largest ecommerce platforms, with 150,000 active developers and over 300 partners. Magento’s marketplace features hundreds of extensions and themes to customize a store. Magento also offers ecommerce training courses and a certification program.

Reaction Commerce. Reaction Commerce is a fast, scalable, real-time reactive, and open source Node.js commerce platform. It is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Create personal experiences for each user with real-time analytics. Merchandise based on location, weather, market trends, and other data points. Reaction Commerce is one of the top open source commerce projects on GitHub.

Reaction Commerce.

PrestaShop. PrestaShop is a free shopping cart platform that helps small and large businesses create and run a successful online store. Choose from 3,000 features and 2,000 designs with PrestaShop add-ons. PrestaShop also offers training courses and a technical support plan. The project has nearly 400 contributors on GitHub. PrestaShop powers more than 270,000 stores and has 1 million community members.

Saleor. Written in Python and using Django, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, and Docker, Saleor has an industry-standard checkout process, offers a mobile shopping experience, and is search engine-friendly. It scales to support millions of products, customers, and orders. Show prices in local currencies and accept payments using popular payment gateways. Saleor’s easy-to-use dashboard makes it possible to manage your store from any modern device.

Sylius. Sylius began in 2010 from a family company selling cosmetics. The company went out of business, but the ecommerce component survived and managed to gather a strong following of developers. Its first beta release was in 2016. The project now has over 400 contributors and over 4 million downloads. The flexible platform has been designed with integrations in mind and is easy to host and scale.

Sylius.

nopCommerce. nopCommerce powers corporate and small business sites, selling physical and digital goods. nopCommerce provides a variety of checkout options — one-page checkout, anonymous checkout, addition of checkout attributes, and more. Featuring an active community of users and developers, nopCommerce is used by over 27,000 storeowners and has been downloaded nearly 2 million times.

VirtueMart. VirtueMart is a complete ecommerce solution to use with Joomla, the content management system. Change the look and feel of your site by using Joomla templates. VirtueMart has a very small team. There are few active developers, who help evolve the core system and update the project’s open program sources. However, Joomla has an active forum and extensive extensions directory.

simpleCart. simpleCart is a JavaScript shopping cart that you can set up in minutes. It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and fully customizable. All you need to know is basic HTML. The core comes with the ability to check out with PayPal Express, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments.

simpleCart.

KonaKart. KonaKart is an ecommerce platform for all retailers — small and large. KonaKart offers a free Community Edition for smaller businesses, as well as a premium enterprise extensions, installed on top of the Community Edition, to provide more features and functionality. Customizing a store is easy as the user interface code is provided, and the remaining source code is sold as a separate product. KonaKart will run in any hosting environment that supports Java-based applications.

Shopware. Shopware began in 2000 as a German family business. It has grown into a solution for international companies of all sizes. Shopware offers a free open source edition, as well as professional and enterprise editions. Shopware strives to create inspirational and emotional impressions with shoppers.

OroCommerce. OroCommerce is an open source B2B ecommerce platform that helps drive online business growth, improve customer experience, and reduce total cost of ownership. It has a community edition and an enterprise edition. Features include shopping list management, buyer-seller interaction, multiple currencies, multiple warehouse management, scalability, Elasticsearch, forums, and more.

OroCommerce.

Pimcore. The Pimcore framework is for creating flexible B2B and B2C ecommerce experiences. Use the Pimcore data model to create a database for implementing complex product wizards. Use object relations for manual product recommendations. Define flexible marketing and pricing rules. Create a compelling user experience and still fully integrate into the ecommerce system. The ecommerce framework is available for partners only.

Oscar. Oscar is an open source ecommerce framework for Django. Oscar is domain driven (able to capture subtleties of a domain), making feature development and maintenance easier. Any product type can be handled, including downloadable products, subscriptions, and child products.

Zen Cart. Zen Cart is a popular ecommerce solution that has been around since 2003, when it branched from osCommerce. It has a large support community (over 150,000 members and 200,000 threads) and a wide variety of add-ons and community-contributed modules. Zen Cart uses a customizable template system that is ready to run immediately.

osCommerce. osCommerce began in 2000. Its “Online Merchant” edition is a complete store solution that contains both a front-end and an administration backend that can be easily configured and customized using nearly 9,000 free add-ons. osCommerce also offers a mini template system.

osCommerce.
Sig Ueland   
Sig Ueland
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Comments ( 64 )

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    Springbot
    September 29, 2014
    Reply

    Magento Community Edition is a great way to get started but is generally aimed at larger retailers who need more flexibility with their code.
        Prashant Telang
        September 30, 2014
        Reply

        I would not suggest Magento unless you have a dedicated data entry staff with good understanding of Magento data management.
        Woocommerce is easy to manage but it is built on WP which is not a native e-commerce platform. scalability may be a problems.
        Prestashop although open source its plugins and extensions are expensive.
        If your site is going to be content heavy (articles) I would suggest Joomla with e-commerce extensions like VirtualMart.
        OScommerce is spend force not upgraded actively.
        I would suggest Opencart instead. Simple but powerful. Easy backend admin , many extensions at reasonable cost.

        Prashant Telang
        TransPacific Software
            Leo Koo
            October 1, 2014
            Reply

            There’s been studies on the scalability of WordPress, and it has been proven that some of the most visited and popular blogs are powered by WordPress, which powers 20+% of websites worldwide :)

            Also, large WooCommerce powered stores do well, and might be even more powerful than Magento or OpenCart.

            Btw, WooCommerce seems to be evolving at a much faster rate than OpenCart :)

            https://gplclub.org/top-5-largest-woocommerce-stores/
                Evan mugford
                January 15, 2015

                you should really read links you post lol

                UPDATE

                We’ve spoken with Hype Beast who have now moved on from WooCommerce, citing difficulties managing their increasing orders and huge product catalogue.

                lol sounds like a great solution tho glad I didn’t use it haha
                Alexander
                June 30, 2015

                We already helped many clients update from WooCommerce to our platform VirtoCommerce – http://virtocommerce.com. All due to problems handling larger catalogs, integration and ease of customizations.
    Lam Woon Cherk
    September 30, 2014
    Reply

    Not forgetting nopCommerce, one of the most popular ASP.Net e-commerce platform. http://nopcommerce.com. :)
    Ben
    October 1, 2014
    Reply

    Nice article, although Jigoshop now has over 250 themes and over 300 extensions and is compatible with WooCommerce themes.
    Shravan Tallam
    November 26, 2014
    Reply

    Which free and open-source ecommerce solution is best for a beginner like me?
    I planned for automobile spares & accessories e shop includes batteries, ups, lubricants etc.
    I will include even some books & downloadable content.
    Please suggest…..
    Schwartz
    December 31, 2014
    Reply

    Yes, PrestaShop should definitely be on the list. I am using it for 2 years and I think it is very easy to use and very secure. The latest version is available to install and you can follow https://www.rosehosting.com/blog/install-prestashop-on-a-centos-vps/
    Paul Stanely
    January 9, 2015
    Reply

    Its a great review by publishing the best features of eCommerce platforms. I would prefer Opencart and magento if you are selling products . Opencart is much better as you can manage multiple shops from single admin interface easily. You can find a lot of free and paid extensions that makes your job easier. You can find some here: http://www.fmeaddons.com/opencart.html
    Sudheer
    January 11, 2015
    Reply

    Great list. Love WooCommerce for a very simple requirements on my blog.

    Infact, i have listed a big daddy list of ecommerce solution you may want to view as well…..

    http://appaloud.com/the-ultimate-list-of-ecommerce-solutions/
    Jeff Klan
    January 13, 2015
    Reply

    I think Abantecart should be in this list. It is much more superiou than some on this list. Especialy, latest version of Abantecart is a good example.
    Saumava
    January 22, 2015
    Reply

    Please suggest virtuemart as well. Joomla is becoming the best CMF in current days and virtuemart is one of the best e-commerce platform for joomla
    Evgeny Grigul
    February 19, 2015
    Reply

    I would like to add Virto Commerce. Virto commerce is the only enterprise level e-commerce platform fully available under Open Source license.
    Riya Mehta
    February 19, 2015
    Reply

    It’s free studio plan for ecommerce. Select your best ecommerce store so open this blog then comparison to other. http://www.best-ecommerce-platform.blogspot.in
    yash
    February 25, 2015
    Reply

    I Purchased a VPS with Opencart Installed from gkwebhosting company

    http://in.gkwebhosting.com/unmanaged-vps-hosting/

    They also customize Header and footer of opencart along with installation for just $3 Monthly.
    Velmurugan Kuberan
    March 14, 2015
    Reply

    I created a free beanstream payment gateway for woocommerce… you can checkout this payment gateway on wordpress plugin directory….
    please have a look at this plugin…..

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/beanstream-gateway-for-woocommerce/
    Jay
    March 15, 2015
    Reply

    hi, i currently have been on xcart for the past 6+ years. want to move away from it now and to a new and up to date platform.

    i have over 30,000 products in my online store and its going to be increasing monthly.

    what platforms do you guys recommend?

    also ease of database transfer…
        Dean Steinberger
        May 31, 2015
        Reply

        Jay,

        I am in the exact same predicament with our websites.

        http://www.eyedocshoppe.com

        What have you found?
    Mikhail Bortolotto
    March 18, 2015
    Reply

    I would add Loaded Commerce http://www.loadedcommerce.com as it is shaping up to be a great product with stores worldwide and being open source offers plenty of scope for customising your store.
    Free for basic version the PRO and B2B is resonable if you warrant the extra features you be the judge.
    Jini
    April 10, 2015
    Reply

    Good article. really interested. my working area.
    Sathya
    April 20, 2015
    Reply

    You can add another free ecommerce software http://www.exlcart.com in this listing.
    Isabella
    April 28, 2015
    Reply

    OsCommerce is a great open source platform.Building a shopping site is really easy now a days. Oscommerce provides great customization features.
    Isabella
    April 29, 2015
    Reply

    Great listing of ecommerce solutions.Open source ecommerce solutions like Magento and open Cart are good choice.Both of the them are powerfull tools and good for large products.
    Bob
    May 6, 2015
    Reply

    Tell me please which ecommerce apllications can work on Mac – OSX Mountain Lion and higher up to Yosemite.
    Thank you
    Alexander
    May 19, 2015
    Reply

    One more open source ecommerce platform that was missed in the review http://virtocommerce.com
    Sanjay Darji
    May 22, 2015
    Reply

    Thanks for sharing list of open source eCommerce platform. Having few more eCommerce platform with review, features, comparison, demos and price quotes. You can refer them at http://www.softwaresuggest.com/ecommerce-platform-software
    Lloyd
    June 22, 2015
    Reply

    Magento claims almost 24-28% of the total online storefronts today. Magento 2 has been in development for, I believe over 4 years now. Awesome platform for the Php proficient with plenty of server resources. Also the most widely attacked platform so better beef up your security or hire someone that knows.
    Lori
    June 25, 2015
    Reply

    Great list. I switched to Opencart nearly 3 years ago now and love it. The ability to handle all 20+ of my stores from one admin is worth it’s weight in gold! I used to manage 13 separate stores and that was painful – just logging in to each one wasted so much time. I had everything up and running in Opencart within a day. Highly recommend it.
    alex
    July 1, 2015
    Reply

    Gocart is also an open source ecommerce that is based on codeigniter 3.

    Sometimes an ecommerce like Magento or Prestashop is way too much for small business to many things to configure and the modules or themes have huge prices.

    Gocart is for big companies and also for small business, in my opinion Gocart is the best option for clients or developers.
    Travis
    July 6, 2015
    Reply

    AbanteCart is a good one. Have installed recently according to https://www.rosehosting.com/blog/install-abantecart-on-a-linux-vps/ and I am testing various settings.
    Djordje Jovicin
    August 2, 2015
    Reply

    All open source platforms are interesting but not always the best possible solution for people who are not quite tech savvy. I often recommend SaaS platforms to my clients, and lately, i was mostly recommending Kooomo (www.kooomo.com). It is a SaaS e-commerce platform that can match Magento Enterprise in terms of features, but the billing system is much better. They don’t charge $15k a year, but only take a percentage out of the turnover. Definitely worth of putting into a review.
    salman khan
    August 6, 2015
    Reply

    TechFas provides web development solutions. We promise to provide the best and affordable solutions for all of your web related problems, be it customizing. http://techfas.com/
    peroper
    October 8, 2015
    Reply

    For my company the best is symfony framework because its enterprised oriented. One example is http://gialia.net.gr, its multiple connected with ERP.
    Ipsita
    October 27, 2015
    Reply

    I came across https://youtu.be/vbG3vIuNcrc
    It looks promising
    sarel
    November 2, 2015
    Reply

    hi where can i find help building my own e commerce site
    with thanks
    Technocrab
    November 5, 2015
    Reply

    I think that Virto commerce should also be included in this list.
    Apart from this it was the perfect article.
    Ted R
    November 17, 2015
    Reply

    I’ve had a great experience with VirtoCommerce http://virtocommerce.com/ . I really think it’s best for enterprise level, it’s open code so the customisation potential is basically endless
    Prathamesh L
    December 3, 2015
    Reply

    I’m using Avactis PHP Shopping Cart! It’s not much popular but gets the work done! Also it is open source so I can customize it very easily.
    http://www.avactis.com/
    Krzysiek
    December 8, 2015
    Reply

    We are very happy to announce the availability of GrandNode v3.60 for download. Visit our official site here (http://www.grandnode.com/downloads)
    Full list of features and highlights is available in the features description on grandnode.com/features.
    Do not forget to leave a feedback in comments!
    Anastasiia
    December 14, 2015
    Reply

    Awesome list! Especially WP plugins! We have made our list of some essential elements in PHP ecommerce development
    http://mobilunity.com/blog/the-essential-elements-of-php-ecommerce-development/
    I hope it will be interesting for you!
    Prashant Kumar
    December 29, 2015
    Reply

    Hello,
    Is woocmmerce a good option? Or should I go with Magento or Drupal? Please suggest me. I don’t want to write thousands of lines or code and reinvent the wheel.
    Aaqil Mahmood
    February 9, 2016
    Reply

    OpenCart seems most easier and beautiful
    Sheila
    February 19, 2016
    Reply

    What is the best ecommerce solution for downloadable products? I want to set up a WordPress site for corporate marketing templates. All of my products will be downloaded no shipping required.
        Ecommerce
        June 11, 2016
        Reply

        I use Abantecart to sell ebooks. Others did not work for me
    Chirantan Patel
    March 11, 2016
    Reply

    I concur with this stuff. There are numerous compelling benefits for enterprises by using open source platforms solutions. The growing industry of ecommerce solutions has quite transformed the traditional brick and mortar kind of business. Today most brands and shops have launched their own online shops to entice more number of customers by offering them convenience of shopping from the comfort of their homes – at any time of the day and you mentioned OPENCART & DRUPAL ECOMMERCE are very popular ecommerce platform now days and using this I feel quite independent to add the products in back end as well as SEO friendly options tends to more visibility. Here you can read this amazing article on https://opensource.com/business/15/4/open-source-ecommerce-friendly-cms and you can also look for ecommerce Software in market places like softwareadvice.com, getapp.com and also http://www.softwaresuggest.com/ecommerce-platform-software.
    Rijina Minj
    March 22, 2016
    Reply

    All of them are good according to the requirement; however, I would go for WordPress because it is more user-friendly and more SEO friendly.
    Jenny
    May 5, 2016
    Reply

    LSNetX is also a good choice with lots of features and services benefits.
    I tried it’s free trial.
    Paul Piper
    June 19, 2016
    Reply

    Perhaps http://www.scipioerp.com is also worth a look :)
    Gaspare
    July 26, 2016
    Reply

    Hi, I would like to inform you about a new system to make a free ecommerce account. The system is http://www.42commerce.com.
    Let me know your review… thanks Gaspare
    nemeth9
    August 2, 2016
    Reply

    LiteCart is also a great choice, best with SEO solutions: https://www.litecart.net/
    Lynda
    August 10, 2016
    Reply

    Opencart is the best platform for online store hosting. WordPress and all other platform are also good but comparatively, opencart has more features that any online seller would need. I admit they have some bugs but you can get a bug free solution of it on easystorehosting.
    Purvesh
    August 12, 2016
    Reply

    I think people should look at this new Laravel5 Based e commerce.
    To me laravel is very awesome framework for developing basic website and easy to use with the help of composer and packages. so its always easy to extens any application in laravel.
    https://github.com/mage2/laravel-ecommerce
    André Tavares
    August 25, 2016
    Reply

    All these platforms get the job done, but they all feel dated! Plus, customising and extending is very complex and tailoring the perfect experience to the client is every merchants dream!
    What if, instead of building plugins on top of a complex and dated platform, we could build our own custom e-commerce platform with all the bells and whistles and easily?
    Look no further! https://github.com/yoonic
    Fork the repo, build your ecommerce. It’s easy ;)
    kaveri
    August 29, 2016
    Reply

    I would recommend http://www.lsnetx.com Really easy and perfect for Indian businesses
    Lorry Motts
    September 9, 2016
    Reply

    Perhaps this is a older article, but It is missing
    Abantecart. This application has top reviews on many other sites, this is how I came across
    Suresh J Nathanael
    September 14, 2016
    Reply

    Fantastic Article! I Really like this. But I would Suggest webnexs.com, webnexs is best ecommerce website builder. webnexs provides 130+ templates, 200+ features and more features. Check this
    http://www.webnexs.com/smb-ecommerce-website-development.php
    dhananjay
    October 16, 2016
    Reply

    Another Open source E commerce website is Freeshopwebsite.com. Here they provide free ecommerce website for life time no hidden charges no registration fees.
    Mayank Singhai
    December 5, 2016
    Reply

    Recently an open source platform whatacart has been released on top of high performance yii2 framework. The product is nice to work with. In the first release a good set of features have been provided. The admin interface is quite simple and intuitive. Have a look.
    Bakhtiyor
    February 3, 2017
    Reply

    ecommwar.com provides a good overview of the most popular open-source e-commerce platforms in various programming languages and frameworks.
    Neil Patil
    May 4, 2017
    Reply

    Here’s a technical, non-editorial list of ranked open source commerce systems.

    https://www.ecommwar.com/

    You’ll notice the war is with the top 3 on the list, each with a different language/framework: Spree (Ruby,Rails); Magento (PHP/Zend); Reaction Commerce (Javascript/Node.js).

    Walmart has just completed much of their migration to Node.js & React.
    Amber
    August 25, 2017
    Reply

    Nice. This list has a couple Ecommerce platforms I didn’t know existed like DrupalCommerce and Jigoshop. Definitely hope to see new ones released in the future. I think I may test DrupalCommerce out and see how well I like it. The showcase sites definitely look very nice.
    Om Prakash
    September 6, 2017
    Reply

    I have used opencart for many websites. It works like charm. It is available in cpanel which makes it easy to install. I don’t think it takes more than 5 minutes to set up your website and give it an e-commerce finish. You have all the options which is available in major shopping website. You can add products using the backend. No huss and fuss. You can add images, you can set price, you can set discount, you can set stock availability, etc. etc. Find more discussion about this topic at http://questionsignal.com.
    Fotis Kourmadas
    September 12, 2017
    Reply

    CS-Cart is also an open source platform with a large community and many extensions. There is a marketplace and a forum. CS-Cart is multistore and Responsive out of the box. Has many payment options integrated and comes with almost over 50 Addons implemented. Its also offering a marketplace solution called Multi-Vendor. You can check it out in CS-Cart.com and in Ecommerce Expo in London on 27 and 28 September in Olympia Expo stand E1126.

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