One of the main dilemmas of e-commerce merchants today is take the shopping cart solution for their shopping Web. Thelarge number of options can be daunting - a recent Google search for"online" shopping cart "turned up 12.7 million hits, many of themoffering shopping cart products themselves No wonder it is a difficultdecision.
A secure way to narrow thefield is to determine what character of car will better fit your needs: opensource (available free) or proprietary (available for a fee). There was a sentence when many in the world frowned on open source e-commerce products forehead. Somesaid they were hard to establish and configure, while otherslamented the want of available features and technological support. Fortunately for online entrepreneurs on a budget, then almost all gone.
Thelatest open-source shopping carts offer pretty much everything you findin a proprietary solution, provided you get the basic technical skillsto install and configure. Most havebecome much easier to establish than previous offerings and also enhancesthe contributions of many developers and customization. Technicalsupport tends to get the frame of user forums, which are, at least forthe most popular products are really popular and frequently have an answer to aquestion of minutes.
The granddaddy of open source shopping carts and even among the most popular is osCommerce. In surgery for over 8 years, she now claims 176,100 store owners and offers 4,700 free add-ons. osCommerceis compatible with all versions of PHP 4 and has an automaticinstallation on a browser-based and a backend object-oriented. Anotherpopular choice is ZenCart, which was based initially on osCommerce codebut has developed dramatically and is a full independent. Known for his long name of added features, ZenCart is PHP based and uses a MySQL database and HTML components. His unit frequently praised voucher allows merchants to create, distribute and manage digital coupons.
Analternative to these two options is Ubercart very like to a shoppingcart product built on the industry-leading Open Source ContentManagement (CMS), Drupal. Designed totake advantage of contributed Drupal core and early systems, gets highmarks for its flexibility Ubercart and intuitive interface.
These are but some source shopping carts available today. All 3 are free under the GNU General Public License.
Which of these products (or other) open source would be better for the online store of a trader in detail? It depends on the needs of private companies. Factorssuch as flexibility in design, search engine friendliness, reportingand backend functionality is crucial to consider when choosing betweenproducts. Most pages are product demos and livelists of sites running the software, which can also help todifferentiate between competitors.
Uncomfortable with the technical requirements for setting up a shopping cart application? It is possible that open source solutions are not for you. Ownersof the programs cost money, but generally offer configuration, designand support services that can make the concern of possibility a store forless technically inclined. For others - especiallysmaller merchants with limited budgets Start - Open source solutionscan save valuable at a crucial point in the growing business.