8 Best Open Source Shopping Carts

So which one did you go with and why?

you guys ready my mind this week. THANKS!

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

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!

Hello,

You forgot the best one.
Check out:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

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

Another good opensource shoppings carts

konacart.com
A free enterprise java shopping cart application

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

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.

Nice, thank you.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Great list! Thanks

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…

The ZenCart is a fantastic, tableless css cart script. Best of the 8 for me. Nice list.

Another great shopping cart is Option Cart – http://www.optioncart.com. It’s only available through authorized resellers (I’m one), but it’s a great catalog system that requires no HTML knowledge for the user and works in conjunction with Mal’s ecommerce.

SEE MY SITE

see my site i want to my site well up to date can you help me please
and what is software?

Hello,

Thanks for the list. I am looking for a shopping cart to use it on my web site, and I think I will use Magento after reading all the comments.

Cheers

Thank you for your article.
Wonder which one would you recommend as the best one?
After all you must have chosen one to accomplish the task.

For all people interested in zen-cart that are scared off by the template/code nightmare, there is an alternative storefront with a much simpler structure and and a growing number of plugins: ZenMagick! (http:/www.zenmagick.org)

I agree the admin side is not much to look at (or too much!), but it’s getting better.

ZenMagick also includes an object oriented API to access virtually all storefront data which allows integrating products, cart, etc in other applications.

Check out the demo site (http://demo.zenmagick.org) for some sample Ajax features like drag & drop (from the product list)

Best of all, no more SQL in templates!! and no manual patching required.

mano

Most of these carts aren’t easy to customize and the fact that you only have a cart and nothing else is the big reason why i choose virtuemart. with virtuemart you get get everything else why? cause its a plugin for joomla. joomla has all the plugins you need from community builder to forums to blogging to gallery stuffs to newsletters and they are combine in to one system. not like standalone carts that you will still have to integrate your cart with your forum and your blog. now thats nasty. i see this in a perspective of a developer who has had customers tending to want stuffs that aren’t with in the bounds of the cart that they wanted.

Do any of these provide user product customization? For example, say you wanted to sell computers and give customer options for RAM, hard drives, etc.

Haven’t had the need to install a shopping cart yet, but I find this post to be very interesting with lots of very good information. I will surely keep this in mind.

Great post

Has anyone had problems with Magento?

Great info. Does anyone know if Magento requires html knowledge? Because I make my own products, do my own website and take my own photos, I need a quick up and running cart.

Any help would be appreciated.

Pat
http://www.TheBouquetBoutique.com

I’ve recently started messing around with OsCommerce…boy what a headache!!!

For all that are interested in picking zen-cart, but are worried about the templating mess, have a look at ZenMagick (http://www.zenmagick.org)

ZenMagick is a replacement for the zen-cart storefront code. It’s MVC based and includes an almost complete object-oriented API to query/update the database. No more SQL in templates and no more include/require orgies!

Best of all, ZenMagick comes with a comprehensible plugin API that allows to extend without the need to modify core files.

Code sample:

$product = ZMProducts::instance()->getProductForId(3);
echo $product->getName();

mano

Some comments why I am not recommending magentocommerce just yet for most of my customers: it’s deadly slow and the template system is a headache – it’s indeed easy to learn the basics of it but most of the tags aren’t documented at all (I am guessing that it’s their strategy for offering expensive services)

I am still striving to get the best out of magento but please be aware when diving into it – you may regret it.

on the other hand some of the open source ones, this includes oscommerce are lighting fast and if you install a template system like STS it’s very easy to customize the design. And let’s face it – if you need any additional feature for your oscommerce website you might find it in the contribution section or a decent programmer can easily code it for you.

Please also consider payed shopping carts too – give it a look to cs-cart or xcart

Hi there,

Anyone can briefly compare Magento vs. aspdotnetstorefront? I am not talking about PHP vs ASP.NET or free s/w vs. $1500, but from the end-user point of view. Which offers better features, user-experience etc.? Any comments about integration with ERP like SAP B1 will also be appreciated.

Tx,
Dukhifat

I am as well using Magento for selling 3d images for products software, CD or ebook.
This is my website if you want to have a look:
http://www.smartcoyote.com

Prestashop.hu >> new design and hungarian language demo available!

Thanks for great list. it’s useful for me !

Thanks for the list, Brett. It’s a good place to start. I agree with Gavin. A comparative study of these plus some of the others suggested, eg ubercart, virtuemart module, would be really useful. My only experience is playing round with ZenCart, which while simple to set up is a bit daunting when you’ve got very little time (and no money) to spend on it and need something to set up and go.

I currently use oscommerce and I’ll admit is has its limitations. The main reason why I continue using it is because it is easily customized. For example a customer wanted a module in their admin that would allow club information inputted and have that information be a required field during checkout to prevent non-store owners to order from the site. That customization took me less than 2 hours to do. I’ve been looking at Magento and the features it offers are great. My only concern is how difficult would it be to do the same customization I mentioned above with Magento? Anyone know?

Hi

Did you know that you can have a free copy(no limitations) of Avactis shopping Cart if you are a web Désigner, Web Dev etc?

I had a copy for free and it works very well!

Veyr nice back office.

I installed a copy on a client website.( http://www.products-plus.net/manicure_supplies/manicure_supplier/index.php )
What I like about Avactis is the “Tag” system” and “blocks”(small php templates) that allow you to integrate shopping cart fonctinality in an existing web site. So you may fit cart into the design of a web site.( like cartweaver) Of course it can be used as a stand alone also.

Now I am looking for shopping cart with multi-language option (french)

I tried LiveCart a little, I like it but not too shure how to customize and modify the design…hum…not much help about it too.

So I guess I will continue trying other carts out there.

Hi everyone!

Just installed Prestashop localy and for once, the experience was “exciting and pleasant”!! I mean it’s the first time installing a php script goes so well and smooth till the end. After creating the database it took me only 2 minutes to go trough install.

I have tried the demo on their website and I was impressed by the ease of use and all the features already available.

Now I’ll dive deeper into it and start customizing and configure the front store.

I’ll keep you informed about my progress and give you my experience on how easy – or not – it is to work with.

After reading your post I went with Cubecart for my latest project and highly recommend it to anyone else, Thanks for your post.

My Cubecart driven shop can be viewed at http://www.forpetmenot.co.uk

DO NOT USE ZENCART! It requires all your buyers to login and there is no option to disable it. Also the admin interface is terribly terribly complicated and frankly excessive. It is definitely not the simple solution.

Does anyone knows if any of these allows for product customizations (like Dell or HP)?

This is great. Shipwire order Fulfillment is integrated into most of these; but, I need to reach out to a couple. Thank you for this list.

Nate
ecommerce order fulfillment service

@mohamed: Maybe, but most large PHP projects are moving towards PHP5 (see http://gophp5.org/ for more details).
Personally, I find this about time too. I’ve started using PHP5 features in ZenMagick and have never looked back.

mano

BTW: zen-cart is also on the list of projects moving to PHP5

Hey man, magento sucks, when we install some themes and i think its little bit slower.

hi
juzeilnj9ii0hi27
good luck

Hi!! i live in a southamerican country ecommerce is growing day by day…. im thinking on putting a store like bestbuy some thing like that i will have a lot of products, can some one please tell me what is the best script for a big store with a lot of option and we want to give our web site our design….

I prefer zeuscart which is the best open source software.But you have not listed in your post.

Came across your site on stumble. Great info thank you. It’s in my favorites.

Zen Cart together with ZenMagick allow guest checkout.

The next version of ZenMagick will also easily allow to customize the storefront in a way that no initial address is required to register. This might be useful in cases where the store is also used as master user repository for other 4rd party apps like forum, blog, etc.

I have just started working for a company that uses ZenCart, and IMO it really does suck!!! We are however using an older version. The database has so many redundancies it is unbelievable. The layout from a developers point of view is all over the place. Just my two cents.

Hmm, I setup a zencart site and it seemed easy to start with.
Then I tried to change templates and such and add paypal and google checkout. Paypal went in nice but google checkout is a pain to install. I enter 1800 products for sale. What a task.
I fought with pictures and other small things that should work but do not work and spent tons of time online trying to find a way around them.

I gave up.
I loaded magento.. took a few trys… 10 to be exact.
magento is partly easy to use and partly very difficult.

by the way google went in easy.. Paypal is a pain.. one cannot win.

I think the site looks good but it cost me tons of time and I did have to pay a programmer to do a few things.

One of the Problems with magento is finding out how to do something. Tons if Blogs and Tons of info.. But not a lot of answers.

Also..

I built the site to sell stuff.. I have about 20,000 item that I want to get up for sale.

I cannot believe how hard it is to do that.. Uploads might work sometimes and sometimes not. It takes a long time to enter a product on line with there interface.

Excuse me… We are here to sell products. Right.

That should be one of the most important features of a cart program I think.

So we are all stuck with people selling ecommerce programs that might work.. should work… and not have to mess around with templates and the rest of the stuff..

I am in business to sell stuff and that is what I do.

This whole thing should be EASY!

By the way I have sold stuff on line for about 15 years…
Had a BBS before the http://WWW... Not like I do not know what I am doing.

Finding a cart that works the way you want it to work should be what we are all looking for.

another opensource cart option is wosci.com

So far I have used oscommerce, cubecart and magento all on production websites. And I really feel they all have their strengths and weakness’s.

cubecart4 – my client purchased this and had me implement it, he also bought a template so I didnt have to do any of the design. My original only task was to get the thing up and running. It was simple to install, quick, light weight, and easy to modify. However alot of random stuff didn’t work they way it should of, some browsers add to cart didnt work, if u a product has options like color or size and click add to cart without selecting an option nothing happens. and so on. Also my client sold shirts and shoes, so he would have a pair of nikes that came in multiple colors and multiple sizes all for the same product. Out of the box cube cart does not support multiple inventory levels for one product. ie I have 10 pairs of a size 10 in black on 2 pairs of size 8 in white. I had to build that out myself (it suked). also the image managing is horrible and so is a lot of the admin section. I would only recommend this if u are a small e-commerce looking to sell less the 250 products. I personally would never use it again, nor recommend it especially since it cost money for the latest version.

oscommerce – It works! and its dead simple, code is getting a little unorganized, and its lacking some key features but u can easily find any mod/template for it since its been around so long. Problem is once u start adding all these mods/contributions to it random stuff starts breaking. but its free simple quick and reliable.

MAGENTO!!! – out of the box this one has it all!!! Highly recommend for larger more serious e-commerce sites. it is much harder to use and the admin can be a little slugish. but I installed it for a client who does about 7 million in sales a year, and has about 10,000 different skus and it works amazing. But it is definitely harder! only recommend if you are a larger site with the need for more advance catalog system.

Hope this helps anyone

Dear all, thinking that the articles is brilliant… However, I am completely clueless when it comes to installing the fabulous MAGENTO Programm on my pc; can someone recommend an easy step by step guide?

Many Thanks

MamaG

Superb new development and list to go with need some more to make developers feel of ease

I am currently using Oscommerce for my store. It came with my template and the code is hacked and makes installing some of the contributions a bit challenging. However, maintaining products and such is fairly easy. Just be prepared to modify php files. I do like the oscommerce support system and community. I have had no problem finding information for modifications.

I am also working with zen cart, which has a similar feel to oscommerce. I am not using a template for my testing. So far, I have no major complaints except for figuring out how to set up the ability to download virtual products. Zen Cart, like oscommerce has a fairly good support community as well.

So, after reading the positive reviews of Magento I thought I would give it a try. It is much slower and is very difficult to manage categories and products. The demo store looks nice but, I have not been able to get a product listed on it yet. I am almost ready to give up on this one.

Nice list of sites. It is good to try out several and see which one(s) will work for you.

I think Open Cart is ace! I use all other carts and found opencart is the best. Opencart code is clean, powerful and easy to handle. BTW, the new version is excellent! highy recommend to all developer and shop owner!

Brett, how is that magento store working for you? Have you tested others since? You should also test out Interspire shopping cart (link above).

OpenCart looks like a nice Magento-lite shopping cart to me.

I expected zeuscart and I go for that.

Thank you for this list. After reading these reviews I think I will checkout Zen Cart and Magento…

hi
all,
good list of open source shopping cart scripts,
but unfortunately you all forgot about
joomla and virtuemart combinition,
its excelent ecommerce package,
joomla is one of the most stable and popular open source cms and virtuemart is one of the most used ecommerce component

regards
webworldguru
http://www.webworldguru.com

Hello,
Could anyone recommend me an affordabl e-commerce?
I don’t mind paying $30-$50 / months.
I’m looking for a reliable e-commerce that my graphic designer can customized easily (unlike shopsite that has the ugliest templates in the world). My dreamt e-commerce has a customer support, is easy to use for an unexperienced woman, not too pricey (Not Nexternal), and that won’t take a fee of each piece I sell (unlike Shopify).
I run a jewelry business so I would probably start w/ 20 products. I used Shopsite for a minute but the templates were close to uncustomizable and they suck !
Please help me to find this!

I would like to say that OpenCart is definitely the greatest shopping cart available out there. I’ve benn through some others and spent a lot of time and none of the others worked at the end.

Try http://www.chromiumcart.com. Very nice, simple, and clean shoppingcart!!!

Nice Posting
Thanks

good list of open source carts, joomla and virtuemart is also good combination for small users.

Good Post all shopping cart information find at one place. What about .net shopping cart?

This is a warning to users thinking about PHP open cart be very careful the primary developer is very unhelpful. I believe this to be since he’s trying to get you to fork over for upgrade/downgrade services. (An often not very easy nor well documented process.) Just scan the forums and see what I mean. Upgrading the thing usually means you have to fork out cash for the upgrade process or an alternative is having to redo the entire site over which is an absolute pain.

I have to add my vote against osCommerce. It truly is a steaming pile of poo. It’s inclusion on a list of “best” Shopping Carts merely because it is popular is a terrible disservice to your readers.

If you want to make a list of the most popular Shopping Cart suites, it belongs on that list. It does not belong on this list.

great collection though cube is the best among them

Hi:
I need a open source code that let me add external providers using an api like xml and integrate easy, can anybody recommend me some???

Thanks.

Tried some of these for the purpose of an online boutique.

Magento – Lots of hype, easy to learn, not so easy to install, can be tricky installing on third party servers.

OsCommerce – non-Phd coders need not apply.

Zen Cart – designed for Zen code masters.

Prestacart – perfect.

I really depend on your needs, free sometimes will help you at times you will need to pay, all of them are good but will it work for you? Million Dollar Question.
I personally recommend Xcart about $115, Cs Cart $265.
Get a programmer to customized this two cards
Add CRM to it with bonus add synchronization with QuickBooks
You will win big time

But remember it has to be simple and stupid some times
Too much complication will overwhelm you

awesome stuff but online mall. http://www.169-shop.clickshopnow.com

If you don’t mind using ruby on rails, then spree is a wonderful open source shopping cart.

here is the web site which has demo store and live cart examples

http://spreecommerce.com/ (no affiliation)

Having used ZenCart for an ecommerce build, I can say that is is very good, but the code would make Chef Boy-ar-dee proud. You do have to know PHP/HTML/CSS and be prepared to dig around in it if you want to get the most benefit from it.

Great post, it’s very helpful to have everything all in one place.

have tried them all, dug rewired and butchered them all.

Cold fact is that if you are planning to run a serious online business with the growth potential, none of the open source shopping carts will be able to scale and flex over to accommodate. they are ALL buggy with security issues that you have to watch closely for patches updates so you don’t get screwed over by some security issue etc.

my recommendation for an incredibly powerful and flexible piece of software that you can own would be interspire shopping cart.

If you prefer managed solution including hosting Volution shopping cart is your friend.

P.S.

have you seen a Family guy episode where Stewie creates his clone? yeah, that clone=magento

tats it.

The upcoming version of ZenMagick (http://www.zenmagick.org/) will be available as either a zen cart mod or as full installer. That means effectively ZenMagick will become a fork of zen cart.
Advantages:
* based on a patched PHP5.3 ready version of zen cart 1.3.8a
* simpler templates
* growing community and support from zen cart developers
* real plugins
* rule based form validation that allows to change validation without changing core files
* the storefront code offers most of the features announced for zen cart 2.0 – today!

i totally agree with the user above the virtue ecommerce but the templating is the issue

I have 2 years experience of PHP developing and about 2 weeks ago i started using Magento, after some testings and breaking down the code i realized that people that created Magento had taken the maximum out of PHP as programming language, read it again, the maximum from the PHP language. It is something amazing how code is organized and how it functions. Never tried any other shopping carts so i won’t go into judging.

I have over the years used osCommerce and Zen Cart and used a number of CMS systems.

I have to say I will never recommend anything but Drupal again. Drupal actually gives you a choice of 2 e-commerce systems.

ecommerce – http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce
ubercart – http://drupal.org/project/ubercart

I have used Ubercart many times and I have to say it does what it promises. A few times I have tried to make it do things it was not designed to do and it got a little frustrating but having Drupal as a development platform makes all the difference. If Drupal is good enough for the whitehouse.gov then it is good enough for me.

Drupal + Views module + CCK module + UberCart module makes for a very powerful combo. Cant wait to try out the ecommerce module and compare it to Ubercart

But dont take my word for it, have a look this list of sites Dries Buytaert (the man that started Drupal) has put together – http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites

And lastly let me just say that I will never again use Joomla for anything.

Very useful information provided, you have definitely made life for a lot of other website owner.

Zen Cart is seems OK until you realize how many things require tweaking and modifying. Keeping all your overrides in order is a little crazy. The overall template system makes a lot of sense but, it also seems that Zen Cart’s designers didn’t put any effort into the invoice, packing-slip, or email sending part of it – poor template system and difficult to follow when trying to modify.

I recently try Interspire Shopping cart, its awesome one and rich feature, I used to use OSC which is a mass in my eye.

You have missed out http://www.osCMax.com a loaded version of osCommerce using Basic Templating System.

Keeps close to the original source, lots of pre-installed functionality, easily editted, easy to add your own mods but developed enough to use out of the box.

New Version 2.1 coming soon with redesigned admin section.

If you are looking for a good hosted solution I’d throw http://www.WebplusShop.com into the hat. It’s not as milky as zencart and much easier to us than OScommerce.

OS wouldn’t be so bad if they had better support…..any recommendations on an OS host with at least business hour phone support?

i wonder why zeuscart aint that popular i think its a pretty good online cart

Regarding shopping carts.

It’s not JUST the shopping cart, it’s the BACKEND that really counts. ALL of these so-called shopping carts (Magento, OSC, Zen…) have absolutely *NO* accounting featutes built-in.

After you spend 1000s of dollars getting your website operational, and you start selling products, it’ll suddenly hit you… What about all the accounting? You are making sales, collecting tax, every transaction REQUIRES auditable accounting!!!

You’ll have to start recording that $1.50 profit you made as taxible income… Huh? Go grab a paper and pencil because you didn’t think things through.

SO: What next? Well, because you unfortunately chose a shopping cart w/o accounting, Magento (and a few others) have so-called “connectors” that interface with QuickBooks, Sage, and even SAP, but they are expensive and require expertise to implement and maintain. Also, they are not perfect, using dissimilar databases, communicate over XMLRPC, etc.

Suddenly, you now have “another” database to backup, another machine to maintain, another consultant to call and pay. Basically, they are all hokey “kludges” that are slow, unreliable, and when you have to troubleshoot “where are my transactions”… A nightmare.

SOLUTION? First choose an ERP *with* ecommerce features, like Apaches OFBiz (Open for Business).

http://ofbiz.apache.org

A SINGLE database (mysql, postgres, even ORACLE!) handles all the ecommerce, accounting, inventory, stock, EVERYTHING. If you need to update the stock inventory, you just go into the catalog manager, update the stock/price and poof, the website has the new information. You want to take a telephone order.. Or you have a brick and morter shop? Well, use the built-in Point OF Sale (POS) terminal that is automatically integrated with your (global) catalog manager. You need to call a customer? Built-in.

You make a sale, OFBiz automatically performs the ecommerce duties (credits your merchant account) *AND* updates your general ledger, stock, etc.

It’s all java based, so it’s secure/safe, unlike those PHP security nightmare based shopping carts that are dog-slow (like Magento).

People. It’s *NOT* just about the shopping cart… That should be about about 30% of your decision making process. Keep your life simple and look for automated accounting features. None of the above shopping carts have this.

Don’t make the mistake of choosing the shopping cart because it has cool features and templates. Think about how the shopping cart will interface with day-to-day business. If you don’t, your success will be your worst enemy, and you’ll be spending all of your time getting your accounting caught up.

I would watch out for Magento, cause yes its free and yes its nice…but for primary features to work (RIGHT)attributes, importing and exporting etc etc you need 3rd party apps, and let me tell ya, those 3rd part get VERY pricy, and they starting to break down modules into seperate submodules then so once you buy one, to get the feature you need, you quickly find out, you need to by another again, to get the full fuctionality. I would stay away from Magento, if you a poweruser, or plan on being successful.

this is a great list and since i’ve recently reviewed most of these here are some recent comments.

OpenCart:
To reiterate the comments on opencart, I suggest that everyone seriously consider reading the forums before using it for a live website. It’s a shame because the UI is excellent. It’s obvious that the opencart developer is very inexperienced and has no concept of open source release management. If you don’t agree, look at the fact that the 1.4.x release has already had 5 updates in a few short weeks including both bug fixes and enhancements which are untested and take a look at the SVN repository at google code (http://code.google.com/p/opencart/) and see there is no release management at all. I would barely consider this as a true open-source project but rather a single developer who shared his code online so the world could test it for him and an attempt to make some money by sharing it. Kudos to the guy for trying, but try harder.

PrestaShop:
This looks good and may be one of the best UI’s next to OpenCart, but I had issues with online admin demo. Issues may or may not be browser related, or may be because it’s a “1.3 beta” version. Either way, I need a cart today and i’m not using beta software for a live store. I may come back after the official release version comes out and consider it for future sites.

osCommerce/zenCart/ZenMagick
oscommerce used to be the best you could get which is why it has so many shops using it. ZenCart was forked from it is still not much better than the original beast. ZenMagick is nothing more than a face-lift to make working with the original beast easier. It’s time for a major redesign and rewrite to clean up the old mess before this to reclaim a spot in any ‘best of’ list.

Magento:
Based on various comments here and in other forums, this didn’t make my short list. It may be pretty code that easy to maintain, but if it’s sluggish and has a complex database then it’s not well designed and you can’t easily fix that in a minor release.

UberCart:
this might be a great cart, but it doesn’t belong on the ‘best of’ cart list because it’s built on a CMS system. If i wanted to use Drupal as the backbone for my cart, I would have installed Drupal. If you are already using Drupal, then this is a great option but otherwise it doesn’t belong on the list.

CubeCart:
Only the older version is free and if you want free you don’t want “old and free”. If you are willing to pay a small fee for your cart then it’s a decent option but probably not the best.

phpCart:
I’m adding this to my review list in case anyone asks…Don’t bother with it. It requires either the zend or ioncube optimizer to be installed and it took me several hours to just get it working (and it’s not even a full catalog and doesn’t have a database). After simply reviewing the files that are not encoded, the php code was bad and I deleted it from my test system.

zeuscart:
The older 2.3 version was a decent simple shopping cart and the new 3.0 adds some nice features. The new AJAX admin is nice but is having some layout issues for me. Doesn’t make the list of top carts for me because it’s missing some core features. It includes “product variations” which is a limited way to handle options but not very well. Also, shipping costs are defined per product and it doesn’t appear to include any type of shipping modules which are core these days.

X-Cart:
My final decision is to pay the small $115 fee to buy X-Cart. For those osCommerce users, it includes a lot of the same complex features in it’s many modules but it’s a lot more stable since it comes as a “package” from the vendor and is well organized and uses templates organized into a skin folder. Doesn’t require much php or developer experience and templates can be updated by anyone that knows html. Also, documentation and support is very good. My only complaint is the busy admin navigation which is poorly laid out but hopefully this will all be improved in the next 5.x version but for now it works.

Has anyone heard of or tried a “self-calculating web form” instead of a shopping cart?
These are the two I found:
https://www.fospace.com/FOSsellstuff.htm
http://elbowspace.com/FRHformexample9.htm
They seem to work by using a script to calculate the cart totals without having to reload the pagee. It’s probably most effective if you have a small number
of products or services.

I’m trying to find an OSS shopcart for software distribution at an academic institution. I’ve used this site as a source for my interim analysis, which may be useful to others wanting to choose an appropriate OSS shopcart. If interested, it’s at:

You could also use the above link for a traceback.

Thanks
harry

Thank you for the list, I think to use Cubecart to see how it goes.

@jc2010: Well, I guess these misunderstandings are one reason I am desperate for a website relaunch
ZenMagick is slowly growing into a separate application with (so far) compatibility with zen cart databases.
The storefront side is definitely not compatible, themes/templates are *very* different.

So, the aim is to provide the same functionality, but with fundamentally different code. ZenMagick uses zen cart code only where really necessary to maintain compatibility (the checkout process, mostly)
On the admin side things are not so far apart, however, my current work on the next release (ZenMagick 0.9.9 has just been released) will start to change that.
As of the next version the ZenMagick admin UI will be integrated, but completely separate and use the same MVC framework the storefront code uses. Both admin and storefront will be separate apps, but still share a lot of the database access code.

I hope that gives a clearer picture of where things are heading with ZenMagick and what the benefits are.

mano

Calib: I checked, and OpenCart DOES have a QuickBooks “connector”, here:

http://www.webgility.com/store/

You’re going to need it, eventually. I does cost money, and will require others things as well, like time, money, and energy to test/implement. Better factor that into your selection process (see my previous mz4wheeler post).

Eventually, you’ll understand that it’s not just the shopping cart, it’s the accounting that REALLY matters. When you want to do special stuff, like dropshipping, you’ll understand the nature of your selection.

My vote is for prestashop.Magento is ok my installing complications!!!
JO

I am looking for travel ecommerce system.If Mr.Brett know any travel open source,pls let me know.Thank you very much.Joseph

About OpenCart, one thing I’ve discovered is that they’re not a nice bunch. Daniel Kerr ignores most of his messages, and the developer who answers most of the questions in the forum has an attitude. The one time I made a donation, I didn’t get a thank you. Their attitudes are curious given that they depend on donations. Even so, I am glad I installed OpenCart. The program is simple, elegant and fast. Some customizations have to be made in the code, but you can find instructions in the forum if you search. The shipping modules are a little complicated. My biggest complaint is that you can’t put Buy buttons on the main page — a visitor has to go to each product page to put it in the cart, but that isn’t as tedious as it sounds. Also, I would like it if the cart supported wish lists.

I must say, though, that if I hadn’t installed the program, and if Daniel Kerr called me an idiot in an email (as he did the poster two messages above), I’d look elsewhere.

A pure shoping list to be make one healthy website.

REally love the list. i have check most of the shopping carts i think zen cart is the best.

Another robust open source shopping cart—— http://www.tomatocart.com
Can it be included here?
Thank you!

I feel an obligation to update my comments about OpenCart since things have changed slightly. My biggest complaint (as stated above) was that there were no Buy buttons on the main page. They have now installed that feature, although the buttons look like a little plus signs, so your customers may not know what they are. As for wish lists, they are going to add that feature in the next release. And since they come out with a new release every two or three months, that means it will be here very soon. Some features remain poorly implemented, such as the shipping module, but in most respects the cart works very well. It is both fast and elegant.

Oh yes, there are some important features missing from the cart (volume discounts and minimum orders in particular) but those features are available from the private site of one of the developers at a low cost.

Unfortunately, the guys who develop the program and run the site are still not very nice. But the forums allow you to find answers to most of the questions that you have.

I am reading some comments against OpenCart and i think that lots of developers want to be lazy and just accuse developers who had sat down and did some open source project.
OpenCart is very good cart with very easy way of customizing the template or adding some module or extra functionality. Also the admin panel is very easy to extend too, so building module that works from the admin panel is very easy.
I also have recently worked with XT-Commerce which is quite a copy of OSCommerce but it costs money and the code in both sucks so much and it is so old, whilst OpenCart gives you very good MVC structure.
About the thing that OpenCart doesn’t work without JavaScript, i think if you have accepted an offer to build web shop and if you don’t know how to fix the “javascript disabled” thing, then you should change your profession and try do something else for living. In every shop i did, i always had to change lots of things and do some tweaking to make it the way customer wants.
I think developers should be more grateful for open source projects such as OpenCart, if not they should build a better one and stfu.

Hey Thanks for this list, I hadn’t heard of Presta Shop before… I’ll be keeping this list handy in the future.

Thanks again!

If you are in need of a full-fledge and easy-to-manage shopping cart system, I recommend TomatoCart(http://www.tomatocart.com) rather than Magento, osCommerce and other. (It is undeniable Mangento is great, but I think it is too complicated to run a small or medium sized business.).

If you spend only a few minutes, you can expertly operate it due to the “Desktop” admin control panel, that is based on RIAs.

Moreover, TomatoCart is a fork of osCommerce,that inherits all functions from oscommerce, and integrates its own robust features, such as web analytics, SEO, Promotion tools, and more.

TomatoCart is the best out of box, and totally open source. You might have been heard of a few others, but you will not be disappointed with the functionality and amazing design of TomatoCart. Worth a look at http://www.tomatocart.com.

Zencart is something I have invested a lot of time in, even donations, but I can’t wait to port to something else. It’s the forum mostly. If you are not prepared to praise, and instead provide (even constructive) criticism, it’s as if you are back at school. Take the Image Handler add-on crowd, for example. They may be a talented bunch but woe betide you if aren’t fawning all over them and their pretty essential but wanting mod. Then you have to suffer belittlement, insults and humiliation. Protest and *you* become the problem. Of course there are many helpful people in the forums too, but there are simply too many contributors involved – including the forum administrator – who have an “it’s free you should be grateful” attitude. It’s only a shopping cart for god’s sake, but anyone would think you were criticizing the Chinese Govt.! If you like being humiliated and talked down to, on an all too regular basis, then Zencart’s for you. And yes, at some stage you are gonna need the forums.

We develop using java and we found shopizer, it is free and does also online invoicing http://www.shopizer.com

It is very use full and its great experience.

Thanks

The article itself is kinda crappy for not having a real comparison done between different Shopping Carts, BUT the comments are the real gem here and worth all the time in the world to read them through.
After trying a few of them I have remained with OpenCart for no-other reason that being very simple to use and having a Guest Checkout option, which PrestaShop doesn’t have.
Even so, there are a lot of little things that have annoyed me, nothing that required coding however, just small stupid things like not updating the currency on the front end (even though I have selected something else than the sterling pound as default) until I actually deleted the sterling pound.
It’s really full of this small stupid annoyances, but other than that it does work and does what it’s supposed to do.

Several people have recommended tomatocart, I didn’t like the feel of their forum. The possible security issues were not answered to by the developers.

One of the carts I will try in the future is Shopizer – I like everything about it so far, but I’ve found it after managing to cleanup all the OpenCart bugs. So I just couldn’t bring myself to test Shopizer as well.

Now if you need a really really pro solution and you have to think about accounting and stock issues, you have more than one store sharing the same database and also a physical store sharing the same database and all kind of high end demands, then I suggest you go with OFBiz.

Nice Information, I will use Magento for my new website for sure.

OpenCart is the best and there is even a book was written about it.

So which one did you go with and why?

I use magento mainly and wordpress ecommerce plugin

It is very use full and its great experience.

finally, i select the zencart for my review site of mobile phones. i will be back after installation and let you all know about my site. thanks for the nice writing.

magento is doing great for sure.

nowadays, there are lots of open source shopping carts available in the market. I have used Magento, Prestashop, osCommerce and zen cart. but i prefer only Magento. Magento is the best open source shopping cart.

a artical wonderful…My Favorite is PrestaShop..

My personal choice is opencart because it uses MVC-L framework where all components are clearly categorized. It is highly customizable for developers because of nice coding as well.

using zen cart is the most easiest if you want it to be done less than 12 hours.

ZEN CART !

I have used this cart for a number of years. It has just about all you could want. It is easy to change design.

The best thing is support because they have a very active forum and someone will most likely respond to a problem within mere hours. Other products lack the large well informed community support provided by Zen cart. osCommerce is similar in support but Zen ( based on osCommerce ) is easier to configure because it adds so many more “adjustments” to the layout directly from the control panel.

Consider Zen to be osCommerce on Steroids! Highly recommended.

Nice Information
Thank

I came here while searching for the best open source shoping cart to use, nice reading and thank’s for sharing.
Since my site is joomla based i choosed to try vrtuemart..

Ya nice comparision of shopping carts.
Howver I feel using magento because of its stability when large no of products are added.
Its a bit slow , but i hope it will be faster with higher version

I have to agree with the others Ubercart in Drupal is a winning combo, especially if you ever want to customize something simply. Used Magento in the past, it is nice but sloowwww and full of major bugs, so now happy with flexible and fast as Drupal with Ubercart.

Hmm, I am biased, but with ZenMagick that should be relatively easy to bypass the checkout process with some custom dummy shipping/payment modules.
Might be a good thing to add to ZenMagicks features

dear frnd
i have add VirtueMart best shopping cart in joomla. i have add some shopping cart in public support Portal.

Thank dear

Great list of shopping cart. Thanks everyone for your comments and recommendations.. Saves me plenty of time searching for cart myself.

My short list:
OpenCart= User friendly, Clean codes, Slick look, low cost addons
PrestaShop = Has impressive professional templates-downside high cost for simple addons

I guess the best way for you to pick a cart is by your own individual needs now and the near future goals –otherwise none of these will work for you.

There are many benefits from shopping online, such as saving my time and money. http://www.pickcheaps.com, it is a good site, nice products, fast shipment, good reply, good service. I really appreciate that,

Magento has the best functionality, but instead of messing with the code and installations I found pipfrog.com which seems to offer all Magento functionality already hosted. And its free of any charge. I’v been using it for over a year now without paying a dime.

,;; I am very thankful to this topic because it really gives up to date information “,-

Seems that Magneto and Presta seem to be the most popular – will try these and compare

>Hi guys, nice information. well i want to know is there any
>Online shopping cart which also support some Point of sale.
>So we can use same Database mostly in MySQL.
>Thakns

Yes. Ofbiz supports Online shopping cart, POS, and a full ERP backend (for accounting, AP, AR, etc.). It also supports barcodes and countless other features. A single database (Mysql/Posrgres/Oracle/SQLServer) supports the whole system.

thanks for this! this is a great help for me.

Excellent article! I’m wondering if the same applies to WordPress-driven sites, as I am building a site with said CMS.

Thanks for providing links for shopping cart .they are really useful.but is there a way i could add shopping cart for credit and debit card payment rather than paypal

As long as you go on updating oscommerce security patches you will be safe to use the cart life long.

One of the most used carts all over the world. my vote to oscommerce

Thanks
Nav

Both OSCommerce, zencart, and anything else branched off of that foul, atrocious code should have been aborted before they ever began.
It’s difficult to believe anyone could work with that mess. You can customize them to do whatever you want, but god knows how many hours you will waste digging through that chicken scratch when you could have started with a well programmed website from the beginning.

Hi, I’ve used ZEN CART on a few websites and am always looking for something better!

I think I might try PRESTASHOP unless someone can point me to a better shopping cart.

Great post BTW and thanks for sharing.
Cheers
Warren (UK)

I too prefer Magento. You can achieve many goals from its back end. Its better to add a voting associated with this post. so the new comers can be select one based on the vote.

I love zen cart.my mixcof store build by zen cart.

I think prestashop is better, I have used 5 of them but I prefer prestashop…Good work here..thumbs up

I am looking for a cart solution for a new site, and this is a very intresting page, even though it is now 3 years old. The comments and recommendations are especially usefull.

BTW. http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/ebay-agrees-to-acquire-magento/ Ebay are aquiring magento.

very good script! looking through a few right now but this looks amazing!

My preferred ones are Mangento and OSCommerce, but this is great to know that other good platforms exist.

very good post and having insigth knowledge of open source shopping cart solutions. I am magento developer @ magento development company.

Tried oscommerce didn’t like it will try magento, thanks,

Cool blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere? A theme like yours with a few simple tweeks would really make my blog shine. Please let me know where you got your design.

I work for a small web design company and we’ve been making ecommerce sites for a while. We traditionally used OSCommerce and OSC Max, but only because it was the main one around when we started. It is tough to unpick the code, and the admin section is a bit un-user-friendly, and our clients are often a bit dissappointed/confused if they are doing the site admin (try to add products etc). Also, its a pain when you want to add extra static pages eg everybody wants as “About Us” page, and you have to manually create it and edit multiple files to get it to appear – should feature an integrated cms system in admin. I’m trying to drop it if the truth be told. Have been trying to familiarise myself with Opencart and Magento. Opencart seems very user friendly. I worry that it may not be as supported as OScommerce. Magento seems good but has so many options, and concepts to get your head around (website/store/store view/design packages/themes etc), I worry our clients will find it confusing to use. Also hear it is a bit hefty and slow. Would like to hear from users of both Magento and Opencart.

Cool list, we are looking around for some faster systems. We are currently using Joomla/Virtuemart combination. It is good for smaller systems in our opinion but for our shop with 10000+ products the system combo is too slow. Also 2checkout is a nightmare to configure. The community is at a loss since they are not getting much support from the guys at 2co. Also to create a free shipping if you spend a certain amount had to be custom coded for us. These are standard things a cart should have coming right out of the gate. It should also have a good import and product management tool which Virtuemart really lacks in. We purchased a component that works well but like I said this should already be in a shop. Just my opinion. Again thanks for the list, this will give us a starting point for more research and if you want to see what we managed to accomplish with Joomla/Virtuemart combo you can see it at 247perfumeshop.com

I have a shopping cart based on NOP Design JavaScript Shopping Cart 4.4.0 which is still out there to be downloaded. I have had it running for nearly 10 years and it has been highly modified. It is in html and javascript with a bit of php in the final checkout. I have 4000+ products in a mysql database.

I am looking for something that might be more robust but really want only the checkout shopping cart portion. I do not want to start over again on my web pages (at least not now).

So the features I need are:
Uses my mysql database for product information during checkout
No customer log in wanted
No payment gateways used
Permits me to customize sales tax and shipping (USPS)tables. (We are based in the US but do a lot of international business.)
Currently orders with credit card data are sent to me in encrypted email. I like this option but would consider others if completely secure.
I am familiar with working in javascript and html and would like to stick with it if possible. A customizable product is preferred.

Suggestions?

Hi…

Does anyone know of any open source shopping carts that have full import and export features?

Specifically…

Importing of CSV product files.
Exporting of store databases like, customers, products, etc… etc.

And MOST importantly, exporting in the proper formats for all the shopping portals like, Google Product Search and so on.

And MOST important of all… pushing to eBay with support for multiple eBay store categories AND sub-categories.

Thank you for your time and help.

John

how can your forget…oepncart..common dude..that is the best

Thank you for pointing out the benefits of each shopping cart.

I’m really loving the theme/design of your site. Do you ever run into any internet browser compatibility issues? A number of my blog audience have complained about my blog not working correctly in Explorer but looks great in Opera. Do you have any ideas to help fix this problem?

Hmm it appears like your site ate my first comment (it was super long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I as well am an aspiring blog blogger but I’m still new to the whole thing. Do you have any helpful hints for inexperienced blog writers? I’d definitely appreciate it.

These list are really amzing and very helpful for us, I would prefer magento professional open-source e-Commerce solution.Great post.

Hello there! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a team of volunteers and starting a new project in a community in the same niche. Your blog provided us beneficial information to work on. You have done a marvellous job!

Such a useful information sharing and its helpful for everyone.

- Remove Ingrown Hairs

hi
thanks for information’s.but i need little help.im not English native country.then by country does not accept pay pal.i need alert pay supported shopping cart i search every where but cant find it.also i need it to be trust to use with real

AbanteCart is pretty new and innovative ecommerce solution. Still in finalization of prod release but a lot has been done.

I purchased wpStoreCart Pro. It looked good and it was only $27 – almost the same as free.:) I’ve uploaded all my products without any problems, but still had lots of questions. I emailed them and went on their forums, filed support tickets – and it’s like a cemetery out there: it’s dead, no response to anything. So frustrating… I still don’t know how to set up my affiliate links there… I wish I’d come upon your thread here before buying it… I see that no-one here even mentions it! Well, no surprise – it sucks!

Nice article! I’m wondering if the same applies to WordPress-CMS sites too?

Magento Community is great for small to medium companies. However getting it to scale to 100,000+ users a month is a bit tricky. We have built some of the largest Enterprise Magento sites and can help with this.

We are also launching a fully hosted Magento Community edition for small to medium business with full support. Hit me back if you want to know more.

I recently heard great about things about ecwid for small clients and prestashop for larger clients with custom configuration needs. Both hava an intuitive interface and good support. I’ll put my summary thoughts below, but I’d also like to hear other peoples experience with these or others. I’ll be honest about what’s important to me (1) the learning curve should not require you to learn a whole new language – one to two weeks max 2) themeing needs to be easy and based on what we already know about html/css (3) community support should be stellar.

*So here’s my experience:*

**Magento**
-bloated
-themeing is a real pain (non-intuitive)
-extremely antiquated
-poor support unless you pay
-frustrating to learn

**ECWID**
-http://www.ecwid.com/
-Great for small business and clients who are not savvy for maintaining
-Hosted and maintained by ecwid
-No SSL to deal with
-No costs for SSL, or dedicated ip
-All feeds same database
-Embeds Easily & Works on any platform (it embeds easily on any site, even Facebook) – this -means you can embed the cart on numerous sites
-Easy to learn, very intuitive
-Fast setup
-Mobile friendly
-*Support* – Forum support but they answer same day
-*Additional Comments*
-Ecwid is the simplest cart on the market
-Free version works up to 100 products
-Subscription for only $15 a month offers more features

**PrestaShop**
-http://www.prestashop.com/
-Prestashop is much more customizable for the larger clients (replaces Magento)
-Addons cost money but their core is free
-Modern interface
-Built on a much more solid framework than Magento
-More intuitive to manage than Magento
-*Support*
-Presta has great support because most likely you will buy some of their addons
-*Additional Comments*
-The key to making Presta shine beyond core is to go through their addons and customize the -package for your client. It’s flexible
-Adons are developed by presta…so their is stability

Very informative. I’m wondering though if the comments are skewed a bit to PHP products. As a Java guy who never developed in PHP I understand it to be for smaller system so scalability might be limited. I also noticed a comment how PHP has a lot more security issues than Java. Plus I’m not sure of integration issues if I wanted to integrate Java libraries, etc.

I think I’ll look at the Apache OFBiz™ and maybe the Ruby on Rails http://spreecommerce.com/ out of curiosity since I could integrate with JRuby.

Can anyone comment on integration issues or suggest other eCommerce open source platforms that would integrate well with Java/J2EE?

FERNANDO M. SALGADOEn temas de gestión sanitaria estamos cayendo sistemáticamente en demagogia, la oposición critica lo que luego hace y el gobierno hace lo que antes criticaba. Los ciudadanos estamos más que hartos de que jueguen con nosotros ofreciéndonos informaciones absurdas en cuanto a tiempos medios de espera que desde luego no se cumplen; señores/as, no nos hagan idiotas haciéndonos creer que en 40 días se hace una resonancia en los hospitales gallegos, o que no hay casi nadie que lleve esperando más de 180 días por una intervención quirúrgica; revisen las listas del Chuvi.

Very informative.Good site. I will stop and read more.

Have a nice day

Tomato Cart is still the best for me

These all are in php. Is there any opensourse shopong cart script in Java? (jsp)???

For those claiming that Magento offers good support, guess again. Magento Enterprise support is horrible. They takes weeks to respond and every single time a bug is reported they blame it on a custom 3rd party module without offering much of a solution. Don’t waste your money on this convoluted system if you want to have a customizable/extensible shopping cart. The learning curve is steep (we’re 8 months in and still struggle with it) and you can expect simple development tasks that normally take hours to accomplish to turn into days or weeks in Magento. This so-called “user community” that they tout is useless, as is most of their out-dated and cryptic documentation.

It’s unfortunate that our “leadership” chose to use this product. Had we chosen more wisely we’d have had our new storefront up months ago, and without all the gray hair and frustration that comes with working on an over-engineered system like this. Instead we’re a solid 6 months out from launching our new store and taking heat from management on why we aren’t closer to launch.

Hyder says:

> These all are in php. Is there any opensourse shopong cart
> script in Java?

Check out Apache’s Open For Business (OFBiz)

http://ofbiz.apache.org

Complex, but it is a full featured business framework which includes a great e-commerce shopping cart.

This is a very good tip particularly to those fresh to the blogosphere.
Brief but very precise info? Thank you for sharing this one.
A must read post!

Good article! I used to take OSCommence for my two web stores, but I prefer Opencart for my new electric curtain track online shop (http://y2shop.com) since it meets all my requirements. I would like to recommend Opencart for small online shops!

According to my point of view magento is best shopping cart, i know its development changing is not easy but its have lot of plug-in and feature that reduce the time.

EasyStoreHosting is best Online E-Commerce Store creation software.

I have tried it, and its genuinely works.
The best thing is that provide “technical support service” free of cost.
So you have to do anything by yourself, just shoot a mail to them, they will do it for you.

What about RoR Spree? LemonStand?

Nice listing. These are independent application only meant for Shopping cart. Can you review on something like Jigoshop for WordPress CMS. However, opencart is a great software but it lac in nice user interface at admin end and making a template is a big deal in open cart. I feel WordPress is quite easier but it sometimes lac in speed.

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I’ve found an incredible plugin intended for opencart termed “OpenCart Drop Shop”.

here the url: http://codecanyon.net/item/opencart-dropshop/4603886

Some Features of OpenCart Drop Shop Module

1) Drag the items to this Cart and Drop !
2) Manage cart items from the DropShop.
3) Items can be dragged from Product Details Page, Search page, Featured, Latest, Bestseller, Category page etc.
4) Seven (7) different DropShop Themes.
5)DropShop is automatically set at the bottom area of the site.

when i wach thme it seemes coplex but at last they are very esy and usefull.