There are many different variations of needs when it comes to your shopping cart! And there are a few good Open Source shopping cart systems, but depending on your needs will depend on what open source cart will suite you best. I have spent the last 7 days installing, configuring, testing, and researching each of these following open source cart systems. What you will read in this blog are some of my main findings in bullet points:
WP Ecommerce
- Ecommerce plugin for Wordpress
- Best for a simple shopping cart – where a website is centered around something else and needs a shopping cart attached
- Paypal & Google Checkout capabilities
- Has option for shoppers to purchase without an account
- Upgrade to Gold plan for Authorize.net gateway and multiple images for each product
- Very very easy to use and train others on how to use
Prestashop
- Great looking cart system right “out of the box”
- Import mass products with a .csv file
- great multi lingual capabilities
- Terms of service tool – (force accept)
- control redirection after adding product to cart
- Suppliers Block
- Great Newsletter Feature
- Manufactures Block
- Top Sellers Feature
- PayPal Integration
- Send to Friend tool
- Feature Products tool for homepage
- Google Sitemap tool
- SMS Notifications Feature
- Easy management for product features, attributes, and groups
OScommerce
- Large community for modules and themes
- Attributes more difficult to manage than other systems
- Default display is not very good
- A good rating and review system
- Authorize.net integration
- Lighter than Zen Cart
- Paypal Payments Pro capabilities
- Banner Manager
Magento
- Only the Default, Modern, & Telescope themes available
- Large file and database size
- Very professional looking application
- Great newsletter tool
- Polls
- Great related products tool
- Up sells and cross sells
- Multiple store management
- Importing Wizard
- Paypal
- Authorize.net
- Google Checkout
- Best looking shopping cart right “out of the box”
Ubercart
- For the Drupal content management system
- Drupal themes apply
- Best for sites that sell access to premium content
- Great for sites that sell paid downloads
- Anything where there is a community around a product
Zen Cart
- Many Premium themes available to purchase
- Linkpoint API
- Authorize.net
- Ugly out of the box
- Horrible template structure
- Group Pricing feature
- Backend is very busy and difficult to train others on
- Customer HAS to create account before purchasing a product
All of these highlighted things I mention here are of course excluding the very basics an Open Source shopping cart should have. Category and product manageability, Add to cart, checkout, SSL etc. My purpose in this research was to find out in what situation do I use one open source cart over the other. I think so far I have a pretty good idea!
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Disclaimer: I am an Ubercart developer:
Chase, This is a great analysis! I have used, or at least tested all of these e-commerce systems and, for the most part, you are spot on. If it were me, I would recommend Zen Cart over OScommerce in almost every situation. For those people who don’t know, Zen Cart is a fork of OScommerce. Zen Cart was forked for all the right reasons which I won’t go into, but the result is better code and a better community around Zen Cart IMHO.
Magento is a great stand alone cart. You are correct, it is a little resource intensive, but that is the price you pay for a flexible feature rich cart.
WP E-Commerce is a good solution for sites which are mainly blogging with a little e-commerce on the side. Not exactly feature rich, but easy to use and well suited to what most Word Press users need.
Warning: Ubercart sales pitch follows:
After years of looking at e-commerce solutions and running multiple e-commerce sites for a living, I arrived at one basic truth. A successful E-commerce site includes a good CMS. Her is how I arrived at this. Anyone can put up an e-commerce site. The hard part is getting sales. You won’t get sales without visitors. You won’t get visitors without search engine (Google) placement. You wont’ get search engine placement without good, fresh content. You won’t be able to create good, fresh content without a Content Management System to manage it. Therefore a successful e-commerce needs good CMS integration. This is why we designed Ubercart to be fully integrated into Drupal. Not only does Ubercart gain good content from Drupal, but we also get all the great features, modules, and themes of Drupal.
Here are a few features Ubercart supports which Chase didn’t list:
Paypal & Google Checkout
Linkpoint API
Purchase with / without an account
Order / product import and export
Terms of service tool – (force accept)
Control redirection after adding product to cart
Newsletter Feature
Polls
Manufactures Block
Google Sitemap tool
A good rating and review system
Authorize.net integration
And many more.
For more information on Ubercart, go to http://www.ubercart.org
Peace
Andy
Thank you for your information. Don’t worry about the “Sales Pitch” man. Your welcome to sell us your open source project any time you want to
Good stuff though. I have featured it in a post on this blog for you.