8 Best Open Source Shopping Carts

Posted by Brett in Open Source

Tags: e-commerce, mySql, Open Source, perl, PHP, shopping carts

Apr

Hey Everyone, On Sunday I was contacted by a client and they said the needed a shopping cart up by Monday. Since they needed this cart up so fast I went to the easiest solution I knew, Open Source Shopping Carts. I browsed through tons of shopping carts and put together a list of only the best carts. The list is below.

is robust, professional grade e-Commerce shopping cart that you can download, install, and use for free. In the back end, you will use a full featured back end to manage your inventory, orders, shipping, and customers in real time. Your customer’s payments are sent directly to your commercial bank account using the latest security technology. You can even add your own modules to the shopping cart.
is an open source PHP based online shopping cart system. OpenCart is easy to use and is SEO optimized with a very nice interface. A great feature of OpenCart is that customers can write their own reviews of the products.
is a professional open-source e-Commerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. Magento is awesome, I would never believe it is an open-source project. It features clean urls and SEO from the start. Everything is designed in a clean and simple way. Magento also features: Unlimited flexibility, Completely Scalable Architecture, Professional and Community Support, and Smooth Integration with 3rd party apps.
is very popular shopping cart. CubeCart V3 is free, with the exception that you leave their copyright notice in your footer. CubeCart has a large amount of payment gateways and shipping gateways. Their support forums are lively and many people contribute plugins to the cart. To use CubeCart V4 you must pay but it has many features that V3 doesn’t have.
is another very popular online shopping cart, written in Perl/MySQL. It features a css manager so you can edit the look of your cart online. AgoraCart also features unlimited product options, up to 4 different tax zones at the same time, tons of shipping and payment gateways/options. The setup options range from a simple template based store to the integration of a complex visual design and support for program modification.
is a free, user friendly, open source shopping cart. Zen Cart focuses on the merchants and shoppers instead of the developers. Zen Cart also supports multiple payment and shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons. Also Zen Cart is very easy to install.
is an online shopping cart that offers a wide range of features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly. osCommerce is backed by a great and active community. It also supports multiple currencies, allows customers to print invoices from the order screen, and has an easy database backup system.
is a powerful, free PHP/MySQL shopping cart system that is easy to install and customize. The Cart is free but it does have copyright notices that you can pay to get rid of. StoreSprite has many features including automatic tax calculation, automatic delivery cost calculations, customer ratings and reviews and featured products.

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Mike Harmon says, April 22nd, 2008

I came across your blog on Technorati. Nice site layout. I will stop by and read more soon.

Mike Harmon

James says, April 23rd, 2008

So which one did you go with and why?

cebu web design says, April 23rd, 2008

nice articles… how about 2checkout..is this included in the list ?

thanks..

shanna says, April 23rd, 2008

you guys ready my mind this week. THANKS!

Edwin says, April 23rd, 2008

Frankly, I think OSCommerce sucks, and ZenCart sucks a little less, but still sucks…

rich says, April 23rd, 2008

I came across ZenCart awhile back while still hosting with dreamhost (they have it as one of their one-click installs). Eventually I used it for my first eCommerce project because it was open source, and dreamhost recommended it.

It was tricky to get into at first, but they have a great walk-through book available via a link at their site, and the forum community is one of the best I’ve been part of. It seems as though every question I asked was answered immediately, and by one of the cart developers.

I’d def recommend it, but be prepared to get your hands dirty (but this is nothing new for any project)

BeyondRandom says, April 23rd, 2008

I have been searching for a great cart script to add to a new project. Some of these I have yet to come across so thanks alot for the info!

Cutt says, April 23rd, 2008

thanks for this post, I need to read something like this right now.

enovar says, April 23rd, 2008

Hello,

You forgot the best one.
Check out:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

AlexH says, April 23rd, 2008

I’ve been looking around for a good shopping cart with a feature that I need: people can buy credits, and then a plugin that I write can deduct credits as a virtual product is used, ie pay per e-card sent :). Not having much luck on their feature pages though. Does anyone know if this can be done with an existing cart program?

James Carlos says, April 23rd, 2008

Thanks for the heads up on Magento. I’m hoping it can integrate well with other applications.

fwolf says, April 23rd, 2008

Weeeeell … osCommerce might be popular, but just because it’s an all-around solution, but not because it’s well coded or thought out. It’s a horrible chunk of spaghetti code that still gets my pulse raging everytime I have to dig into its guts … X-(

cu, w0lf.

Brett says, April 23rd, 2008

Its great to hear from everyone. The shopping cart I chose was Magento because of the code it outputs and its has so many great features. I look forward to hearing what others have to say about these shopping carts.

Venkat says, April 23rd, 2008

Another good opensource shoppings carts

konacart.com
A free enterprise java shopping cart application

Thomas says, April 23rd, 2008

Please take osCommerce off of your list . It is a steaming pile of crap and has scarred me for life.

Matt V. says, April 23rd, 2008

I’m working on an ecommerce project using Ubercart (http://www.ubercart.org/), which is a full-featured shopping cart module for the Drupal content management system. The fact that it’s built on top of Drupal makes it extremely flexible. So far, Ubercart has been a breeze to get set up and has one of the nicest user interfaces I’ve seen among the open source ecommerce platforms.

Ben says, April 23rd, 2008

Having had experience with both osCommerce (on the list) and Ubercart (not on the list), I’d swap out osCommerce for Ubercart.

Bracko says, April 24th, 2008

yea really great layout, and great info too.

business says, April 24th, 2008

Thanks for the list. I just started using Presta Shop and I like it better than some of the expensive commercial shopping carts out there.

TheMystical says, April 26th, 2008

Nice, thank you.

haags says, April 26th, 2008

hello,

join me here.

this is my personal website
i want to update catchy more entertenment and plz guide me about this
how can i update my website

http://www.shezhaag.com

browman says, April 26th, 2008

I have to agree with Matt V. Ubercart + Drupal is a winning combo, especially if you ever want to customise things (including areas outside of the cart).

Tony Cheetham says, April 26th, 2008

What the hell? It’s a shopping cart, write your own for christ sake.

Tyler Menezes says, April 26th, 2008

@Tony Cheetham:

Yeah, everyone should make their own shopping carts when there are free ones out there which do exactly what people need. In fact, no one should use prebuilt libraries.

Why doesn’t everyone write their own programming languages, for Christ’s sake?! I mean what the hell? It’s just a programming language!

In conclusion, Tony Cheetham, shut the fuck up.

Crusty says, April 26th, 2008

Anyone know if Magneto can be installed on a server that you don’t control (Network Solutions hosting package)?

Geoserv says, April 27th, 2008

STUMBLED!

Sweet list, never heard of some of these, thanks for compiling.

VOTED for this list at:
http://www.newsdots.com/tutorials/8-best-open-source-shopping-carts-webtecker-the-latest-web-tech-resources-and-news-/

Jenny says, April 28th, 2008

I think I like PrestaShop.

sterling | bizlift says, April 28th, 2008

Nice review of open source carts. I think the best one isn’t even listed. Apache’s Open For Business is by far the most solid and mature open source cart out there. But, with enterprise capabilities, it might be a bit overkill for most small cart projects.

I’ve been working with Magento for the last 4 months, and it spanks any other PHP cart I’ve ever worked with.

Brett says, April 29th, 2008

I really love hearing from everyone!!! I must say that even though OSCommerce might be very, lets say old fashion. It’s on this list because its been used by over 13,000 registered websites and yes I agree with you that it is not the perfect solution. But it has been used to provide a free E-Commerce solution.
On a side note Magento is one of the best solutions I’ve found.

Andy says, April 30th, 2008

Thanks for the list - has a couple I hadn’t come across.

I’d like to add my ‘osCommerce sucks’ comment to the ones you’ve got already: it’s a steaming pile of smelly stuff that was clearly coded by 3-month-old baboons with Attention Deficit Disorder.

This comment inevitably also applies to any cart solution that’s built on osCommerce.

Berlen says, May 2nd, 2008

Hi Crusty,

Magento can be installed on any Cpanel as long as it has a few packages installed:
php5-mcrypt php5-mhash php5-curl php-pear re2c php5-mysql libio-pty-perl libnet-ssleay-perl libmd5-perl php5-gd

These are all stable packages and if you have a nice host they should install it for you.

Keep well.

Fredrik says, May 3rd, 2008

Great list! Thanks

Web Design Colorado says, May 3rd, 2008

While we’ve always used an inhouse solution, Magento is the future of e-commerce (if it were only a little faster and smaller ! )

Akbar Ali says, May 6th, 2008

hi,
Curently I m useing Agora shopping cart, there is only one option for customer. but i want give spical rebate to my wholesaler resaler. mean i wnat to make 3 area 1. customers 2. resalers and 3 wholesaler so please sugest me…which shopping cart i use…