Select A Free Shopping Cart – Create A Profitable Online Store Part 3
This is part 3 of a 5 part series on how to create a profitable online store. So you’ve signed up for your webhost, registered your domain name, and established where you are going to source your goods. It’s now time to start working on your online store front.
Most people have the misconception that you have to pay thousands of dollars to hire someone to create a website for you. Thanks to open source, there are many fully featured shopping cart software packages out there that are absolutely free. What’s nice about using an open source shopping cart is that you aren’t tied down to a specific company or service provider. You can take your store wherever you go and you pay absolutely nothing.
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When my wife and I first started our online store, the available shopping cart choices weren’t nearly as mature and feature rich as they are today. Now is the perfect time to start a professional online store at no cost whatsoever. For this article, I went ahead and downloaded, installed and evaluated the latest open source shopping carts to provide you with recommendations. I’ll also talk about some of the choices my wife and I made in selecting our shopping cart software and the reasons why we made our selection.
Introduction
There are many free open source shopping carts available. Some of the carts that I looked at were
While everyone will have different criteria for their own shopping cart, I narrowed down my recommendations based on product maturity, features and 3rd party support.
Please note that some of the carts that didn’t make my recommended list are absolutely fantastic and have lots of potential but were ultimately lacking a few features that I felt were important. Prestashop, for example is an amazing and modern shopping cart but lacks a few key payment modules for the US marketplace. If you have any specific questions about any of the shopping carts above, please feel free to leave a comment or email me directly.
In any case, my philosophy is that if you are new to building an online store, you are going to want to err on the more conservative side. You’ll want a shopping cart that is stable, fast, does what you want it to do and has a good responsive community. It is based on this criteria that I can wholeheartedly recommend the following carts OSCMax, ZenCart and Magento.
OSCMax
OSCMax is based on the granddaddy of all open source ecommerce shopping carts, OSCommerce. In fact, OSCMax is identical to the base install of OSCommerce except that it has many useful plugins already pre-installed. Because it is based on OSCommerce, you have access to the thousands of free third party plugins available on the OSCommerce website
The library of plugins is so vast that if the base install of OSCMax is missing something, you will probably find someone who has written a plugin for it. The only caveat is that adding plugins can be a major pain in the ass and you’ll probably need a tiny bit of php knowledge to do this. Personally though, I think that the OSMax base install is very feature rich already.
ZenCart
ZenCart is a branch off of OSCommerce and is extremely feature rich and easy to use as well. In fact, ZenCart is probably the easiest shopping cart to install and get running right away. Why? It’s because most if not all webhosts offer a one click installer right from the CPanel interface. You pretty much just have to click on the Fantastico installer and voila, you are ready to go.
ZenCart probably has most if not all of the features that you might need to run a small-medium size store. However, if you need additional functionality that ZenCart doesn’t offer, it will be extremely difficult to add. Because ZenCart is a completely different branch off of OSCommerce, ZenCart users do not have access to the same vast plugin library. If you are considering Zencart, you should probably take some time to look at the default features from the website to make sure that what you need is all there.
Magento
If you know that you are eventually going to require the most feature-rich open source shopping cart available to run your online store, then Magento is probably your best bet. After playing around with Magento for a few days, I can say that it is probably the most feature rich open source shopping cart out there right now. You can perform some very intricate sales promotions on individual or groups of items. You can even manage multiple stores from a single installation.
The downside is that Magento runs extremely slowly and thus can not be run on shared hosting. This is unfortunate because Magento pretty much does everything, but all of that functionality comes at the cost of speed. Since it can be major pain in the ass to switch shopping carts though, you may want to consider starting out with Magento.
What If I’m Completely Tech Averse?
Some people just don’t feel comfortable installing or tweaking their own website let alone modifying an open source shopping cart. One time, I tried to help a coworker of mine launch her online store using OSCMax. Unfortunately, she didn’t possess the basic knowledge to even make simple edits to her store and had to ask for help for every little change. Ultimately, I had her go with a paid solution because of the added support. If you fall under this category, you may want to consider CRELoaded and XCart which are paid shopping carts that I recommend.
CRELoaded
CRELoaded is yet another shopping cart that is based on OSCommerce. Just like OSCMax, the Pro version of CRELoaded has many features already built in. The main advantage is that you have a full staff and backing of a company to support you as you implement your store. The code base is stable and professionally maintained. They also offer this hosted credit card processing service that is PCI compliant out of the box (more on this in part 4) and seamlessly integrated into the shopping cart.
XCart
What sets XCart apart from some of the other companies is that XCart offers a complete out of the box solution for all of your eCommerce needs. The code is extremely robust, stable and is used to run many brand name online stores.
What makes things easy is that XCart offers hosting services on top of their shopping cart. If you are completely tech averse, you can have XCart set up your hosting account and the entire shopping cart for you. XCart is also known to provide excellent support.
You’ve Given Me Too Many Choices. What Should I Choose?
Unfortunately, only you can answer that question. I’ve already narrowed down the field from hundreds to just a handful of shopping carts for you. Most if not all of these shopping carts can provide you with a test drive of the front and back end of the storefront as well. Do your own due diligence and run through the features of each cart to determine what you need.
I would naturally start with one of the 3 open source shopping cart options that I’ve recommended because they are free. If the coding or installation is way over your head, then I would then look at some of the paid options that I mentioned above like XCart or CRELoaded.
What Do I Use?
I selected the base OSCommerce install to run our online wedding linens store. Looking back, this was probably not the best decision but I went with OSCommerce because I was paranoid about server speed. Things can be quite unpredictable when you use a shared hosting environment. I knew that I wanted my store to run as fast as possible, so I chose a very basic store and only added the functionality that I absolutely needed.
The following are must have features in a shopping cart
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Availability of 3rd party templates and themes
- Fast product upload from a spreadsheet
- Coupons/Gift vouchers
- Wide array of payment processors
- Cross selling
- Dynamic photo resizer
- Integration with real time shipping services
- Single page checkout
Today, my store is so heavily customized that it is a major pain to add any new features. Eventually, I will migrate our cart to something more powerful but it will be an extremely painful move. If I were to do it all over again, I would have used OSCMax or Zencart. Both OSCMax and Zencart run fairly well on a shared hosting environment so you have nothing to worry about. Good luck!
Next Up – Select Your Credit Card Payment Processor
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[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
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If you have the time and skill you should do everything yourself. However, I find that most people don’t have the time to that. And a professional looking site is important also.
I have been using Zen Cart for the last 2 years and once you get to know it the things you can make it do are unlimitles. There are some great mods for it, the people on the forum are a great help and unlike some other OS carts they are willing to help for free.
@MGL
Even if you have limited knowledge, you can still put together a great looking and functional store because of premade templates which I’ll discuss in part 5. If you are completely tech averse, you can still go with one of the paid solutions I’ve suggested
@Paul
I’ve been impressed with ZenCart. Back 2 years ago when my wife and I started our business, ZenCart wasn’t nearly as good as it is today. But now, it’s a pretty feature rich cart with excellent support
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
Among the list that you gave, I only tried CRE Loaded, Magento, ZenCart, and osCommerce. Among the four platforms that I have used I like Magento because it’s simply the best.
@Algozone
I agree. Magento is awesome. If it only ran a little zippier.
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] The downside is that Magento runs extremely slowly and thus can not be run on shared hosting . This is unfortunate because Magento pretty much does everything, but all of that functionality comes at the cost of speed. … Follow this link: Select A Free Shopping Cart – Create A Profitable Online Store … [...]
I am with Pappashop (with Mals Ecommerce) and I am thinking of switching. The customer service is always very helpful and the system is easy to use but there are a few features that are missing. I may look into Zen Cart. Thank you for this list!
@Carla
I’ve heard of Mals Ecommerce before (not Pappashop). Do they host everything for you or can you take the software along with you when you switch hosts? I always try to not be reliant on any 3rd party provider which is why I went open source. Why are you considering switching?
@Steve – Pappashop host everything for me, but I wouldn’t be able to take the software to another host. I can use a different software for this host though (Zen Cart, etc) via their cpannel Fantastico. There are certain features that are lacking in Pappashop. Its not severe but I’m not able to do things like give more than four or five options for a particular product. I tried an open source (Joomla!) and it was a nightmare.
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] Part 3: Select A Free Shopping Cart [...]
[...] can be easily integrated with all of the shopping carts I recommended in my article on Choosing the Right Shopping Cart Software. As orders come in, they can be automatically sent electronically to Shipwire for [...]
[...] can be easily integrated with all of the shopping carts I recommended in my article on Choosing the Right Shopping Cart Software. As orders come in, they can be automatically sent electronically to Shipwire for [...]
Why would you choose OSCMax if you moved away from your current cart? I know OSC itself is old if you are using 2.2 but it is solid and just works. Why would you add a cart that is just OSC modified by people that didn’t originally develop OSC. I always hate to work with something that wasn’t developed directly by the author of the original program.
As for templates, how are you getting OSC to use templates? Did you modify it to use BTS or one of the others?
Thanks for your blog it is very informative.
Hi Phil,
OSCMax is simply OSC with a lot of the essential plugins pre-installed. Our online store is a heavily modified version of the OSC base install. Having installed many plugins by hand, I can definitely say that it’s a major pain, not to mention the fact that you have to thoroughly test your cart once you are done. The people who maintain OSCMax install the plugins for you and do the testing as well.
I always prefer to use a standard install as well but the OSC project has been taking too long to integrate new features in the cart. You kind of have to rely on other people’s plugins in order to have a fully featured cart. This guide is meant for newbies as well. It’s much easier to have something working out of the box and tested which is why I recommend OSCMax and ZenCart as a good starting point. The last time I checked, the base install of OSC was missing some key features.
The templates for OSC that you can purchase online depend on the version you are using. For most versions of OSC, the term “template” is a bit misleading as it’s not so much a template that you get but installation files that you copy over the base install when you make your purchase. It’s definitely not as nice as when you use a cart with a built in template system.
For my cart, I did all of my modifications by hand, but I have helped several friends with their online stores in which purchasing a template first and then making minor modifications was the right choice. In general, I can’t recommend the base install of OSC to non-tech saavy people. There are just too many manual changes that need to be made.
I think the template override system in Zen Cart is a real winner. When their much awaited Zen Cart 2.0 is released, it will really shake up the open source shopping cart space. I’m really looking forward to it! The great support through the Zen Cart community forum is worth it’s weight in gold too.
Hey Steve,
Would you be willing to post the mods/add-ons that you use? I have been looking through the community site and there are a ton of them and some of them are duplicates so I am not sure which is the one to use.
For instance, monthly sales reports? There are several add-ons for this, same goes for coupons, etc.
Thanks,
Phil
Impressive article.
Hi Steve. I’m in the process of installing oscmax. Unfortunately, the very last step (enabling the template) just isn’t working for me. The url that they gave me ends in php. I wonder if for some reason my computer can’t read php extensions? Do you know if there’s something I can download to be able to read it? Thanks!
[...] manage shipping and allow for a multitude of sale and discount options. These days, many of these shopping carts are open source and free which makes it easy for anyone to get [...]