True top 5 Free Ecommerce platforms

If you are looking to start an ecommerce business or upgrade your existing ecommerce platform, you will be overwhelmed with a large number of solutions and articles providing reviews. Many articles are very old or a copy of older reviews and list over 20 solutions, where some solutions are obsolete and no longer supported, and yet listed as top ranked. This misleading information confuses readers and does let newer and better solutions to be reviewed and find their users.

We decided to create a review of top 5 open source ecommerce solutions that we use and provide for our customers. Details provided are based on our 17 years of experience working with eCommerce platforms and valuable feedback from our customers.

There are a number of advantages for using open source solutions over locked code and SaaS. A main advantage is that most open source solutions are free, allowing you to start your shopping cart online with less upfront expenses.

Here are some other advantages:

You are in control of your data and source code.

Because you can modify the code, virtually any business model can be achieved with open source

You can sell very customizable or unique products or services

Very specific integrations with third party services can be implemented

You can start with the lowest cost possible

Anyone can be a contributor to open source ecommerce and community.

Platforms that we overview here are based on PHP programming language, that is widely supported and easy to learn. If you want to pay for professional help, there are a large number of inexpensive freelancers or companies helping expanding ecommerce platform functionality or creating custom business processes.

All top 5 platforms provide a large number of features and can be customized to your individual store’s needs, same as, all applications support manual payment solutions such as checks and money orders and are also pre-configured to work with a number of major payment gateways.

Let’s get to our 5 top pics of free open source ecommerce platforms or shopping carts listed alphabetically.

AbanteCart

AbanteCart is a free eCommerce solution for merchants helping with creating online business and selling products online quickly and efficiently. AbanteCart application is built and supported by experienced developers that are passionate about their work and contribution to the rapidly evolving eCommerce industry. AbanteCart is more than just a shopping cart, it is a rapidly growing eCommerce platform and ecosystem.

AbanteCart started in 2011 and it is the youngest out of all 5 top platforms reviewed. AbanteCart is top rated by actual users on a number of customer review sites.  Most feedback from customers indicate quick setup, ease of management and fast loading pages.

On the technical side, AbanteCart is built with extendable code architecture with sophisticated extensions API and tools to help with extension development. Additionally, worth mentioning AbanteCart system check tools, data encryption, taks for processes, and APIs for admin and storefront.

Pros:

• Easy and quick to start
• Feature rich out of the box
• Lightweight with powerful control panel and UI
• No programming skill needed to start
• Ability to embed products into other sites and blogs.
• Very low start cost and maintenance.
• Proven to have stable updates and extensions backward compatibility

Cons:

• Smaller number of plugins compare to other platforms
• Multi-vendor available only with commercial licence.

Magento

Magento is an Open Source software solution for managing all aspects of virtual shopping carts. It’s currently used by nearly a quarter million merchants including big name companies like Nike, Cisco Systems and Ford. Magento was originally developed in 2007 and the platform is now owned by Adobe.

However, Magento is not easy to set up, install, and customize even if you have some skills with HTML and CSS, as the template system is not very user-unfriendly and requires advanced developer skills. Although Magento may seem like a cheap option at the glance, you will likely have to pay a lot for developers to set up, support and maintenance.

Magento comes with free and paid versions.

Pros:

• Feature rich out of the box
• Large number of integrations and paid plugins.
• Enterprise solution is also available

Cons:

• Medium to hard and require training or skills
• Might require some technical skills to get started
• Might run slow depending on the installation and hardware
• Requires more powerful hardware (server) to run application
• Expensive to run (Maintain and expand)

Opencart

OpenCart is a robust ecommerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. OpenCart is designed feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface.

OpenCart and AbanteCart can be put together into close comparison. OpenCart provides the same ease of starting, managing and expanding as AbanteCart. OpenCart’s marketplace is larger than AbanteCart’s marketplace, but AbanteCart provides more features out of the box.

Pros:

• Easy to start
• Feature rich out of the box
• Faster running
• No programming skill needed to start
• Low start cost and maintenance.

Cons:

• Less feature compare to Magento and slightly less than AbanteCart
• If you need many addons it might be costly and hard to manage.
• Because of the code organization and redundancy, Opencart is one of the few open source ecommerce platforms that experienced developers would rather avoid.
• New updates can cause issues to your website if it has custom elements on it. Bugs will invariably appear as they can’t be tested on every custom website

Prestashop

PrestaShop provides an easy to use and beautiful interface. Another thing to consider is that it doesn’t take much experience to install the plugin and get started on building your store. Therefore, small start-up businesses will find it pretty easy to get started.

Pros:

• user-friendly interface.
• interface for multiple languages and currencies.
• fairly lightweight ecommerce platform as opposed to Magento. Not as fast performing compare to AbanteCart and Opencart
• multi-vendor support similar to AbanteCart and Opencart if you want to run multiple stores.
• PrestaShop arguably has the best collection of themes in this entire list.

Cons:

• Is not robust as Magento, so the scalability is not there.
• Expensive extensions.
• The default theme provided is not as nice as provided by WooCommerce or AbanteCart
• Lacking on the marketing tools.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is a free shopping cart plugin for WordPress, to allow you to install a fully-functioning ecommerce site to any WordPress install.

There is a wide range of addons available for adding different levels of functionality to your shop, such as for inventory management and stock control, as well as a number of integrations.

Although addons tend to have a cost associated with them, most addons tend to be relatively inexpensive with one time cost or annual renewal fees to maintain support and upgrades.

Woocommerce is a good choice if you are running a WordPress blog and like to integrate shopping carts by starting an online retail business, whether for physical products or even digital ones.

Pros:

• Easy plugin to WordPress
• Large number of plugins and major payment gateways
• Wide community support
• Good for small businesses
• Can be cheaper to operate

Cons:

• WooCommerce has several moving parts. It requires WordPress + the WooCommerce plugin. Beginners can get intimidated by these.
• Some technical knowledge and developer skills needed for WooCommerce to be cost-effective.
• Cannot be used without WordPress.
• Can run slower compared to AbanteCart if installed on the same hosting.

As a bottom line, we suggest AbanteCart or Opencart for small shopping carts and AbanteCart or PrestaShop for small to medium businesses.. For larger businesses with the budget for developers, Magento will be a choice.

Woocommerce is a good choice if you run a WordPress blog and looking to add a shopping cart as well.