What is an E-commerce Platform and its features?
An e-commerce platform is a software that helps you to develop an online store and have a business online. This platform gives you the tools to create and manage your own site like products and day-to-day operations.
Different reasons to use e-commerce platforms:
- Very easy
- One solution fits all
- Cheap
- Customer service
Today there are many types of open source E-commerce software available for every business. Choosing the best e-commerce platform is not an easy task. In this article, we are going to share the open source e-Сommerce software comparison.
To help you with that, we’ve compared some popular e-commerce website builders. At the last, we hope you are ready to make a decision on which platform is best one for you.
Enhance your e-commerce sales in few months
TOP 8 E-Commerce Platforms
1. WooCommerce (On WordPress)
This is an open source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that is designed for small or large-sized online merchants using WordPress. With this, you keep 100% control over all your data, there’s support for mobile devices, and the potential to scale your sites is limitless.
Benefits of WooCommerce:
- This is on Word Press: WordPress is one of the popular and efficient content management platforms.
- Its plug-in is free to download and install. Plug-in is most important for website development.
- It easily connects to all major payment gateways.
- With WooCommerce theme, you just need to add content in website.
- You can provide discounts and coupons, along with adding multiple other features.
Downsides:
- Frequently WooCommerce updates: Mostly users are dissatisfied about the update of WooCommerce.
- There are extra expenses in WooCommerce theme, extra extensions, domain name and hosting.
- WordPress and WooCommerce are free of cost and also there are many themes and plugins are available but sometimes it does not fulfil your requirement.
2. X-Cart
This is an Open Source Ecommerce Platform for High-Performing Online Stores that has helped to make over 35,000 online stores. This software is extensively growing over the past years. This is founded by Ruslan Fazlyev in 2000. This offers integration with shipping carriers, such as Australia Post, FedEx, Canada Post, UPS, and USPS. It has 39 more payment providers and ensures fraud screening for payments. In addition to this, X-Cart free trial premium plan is available for $495.
Benefits:
- This is a user friendly platform that allows users to add products and their corresponding information as needed.
- This is completely free and open source.
- X-Cart is pretty fun to play around with. Experienced developers will have full control they need with X-Cart.
- It has most reputed and reliable payment gateways of the world.
- You get happy to known that X-Cart is completely secure and PCI Compliant.
Downsides:
- You wont have any access to direct customer support without paying an extra fee.
- Hosting is paid
- Good Developer skills required
- Annual upgrade of software required fee.
- You need to pay for hosting if you choose for one of the paid plans.
3. Zen Cart
This is an online store management system which is PHP-based and requires knowledge of MySQL database and HTML components. Zen Cart is more user-friendly and easy than many of the other open source ecommerce platforms. This is available in different languages and currencies and under the GNU General Public License. Zen Cart is apparently best and affordable online store management system. Moreover to this, Zen Cart not only manages your shop easily but also available with loads of great features.
Benefits
- Zen Cart is known as very secure software. All you need to know that your website and customer information is protected.
- You can send out HTML emails directly from your website.
- There is a large support community available.
- There are a significant number of add ons.
Downsides
- It’s very simple and ugly out of the box, you’ll need to take some time to customize it.
- This doesn’t provide any dedicated support.
- It is difficult to upgrade your software.
- The templates are not very impressive
4. Magento Open Source
Magento is most popular open source ecommerce platforms, and for good reason. This is an open-source e-commerce platform which written in PHP. The given software was originally developed by Varien. Magento gives online dealers with a flexible shopping cart system. Users have a good control over content and functionality of their online store. Magento gives powerful search engine optimization, marketing and catalog-management tools. Magento has business user tools that enhance the user experience of the software. This software gives business owners an opportunity to expand their business operations in the digital e-commerce world. Furthermore, Magento is a leading eCommerce platform, empowering over 200,000 online retailers to date.
Benefits:
- It’s free and also has a paid version of it if you want to upgrade.
- Magento has Versatile Content Management.
- It has Advanced Search Engine Optimization
- You can customize the user interface whenever you want.
- This is very Powerful and Spacious
- It has Easy Third-party Integrations
- This is time and money saver.
- Magento is built exclusively for ecommerce
- Open Source eCommerce Platform
- Create your Webstore in Minutes
- SEO and Marketing Promotion tools
Downsides:
- Magento is an open source runs on PHP, may create problems with heavy load
- Magento could be expensive if you run a small business.
- PHP will not handle the load regardless to the amount of hardware used at it.
- You need a proper team of experience people for working on magento platform.
- Magento is made by an application of enterprise Java, but code is in PHP. So person should have knowledge of both Java and PHP.
5. OpenCart
OpenCart is an online store management system which is PHP-based and made using a MySQL database and HTML components. This software is very easy to use and lightweight. OpenCart is appreciated for high level of its functionality. It allows you to participate in e-Commerce cost-effectively and also available for free. This supports unlimited number of categories, products, customers and transactions. It is managed from one admin interface and supports multiple languages, stores and currencies. In addition to this, OpenCart is highly recommended for startups as it requires less time to customize the website.
Benefits
- The startup costs are pretty low.
- OpenCart is search engine friendly
- OpenCart developers give free lifetime updates and support.
- The average person should be fine with setting up OpenCart.
Downsides
- Updating and plugins, sometimes updated plugins will not work or show error.
- OpenCart is not fully SEO friendly, you need to buy a paid SEO module
- This is not ideal for large scale business. Managing large business in OpenCart is difficult.
- In OpenCart more you add products, website becomes very slow.
- This is easy for beginners, it means customization options are less.
- It has poorly thought out interfaces and features
6. Shopify
Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. It is easy to get started and to create an online store with shopify. They give you with a dashboard/admin and integrate a theme using admin/dashboard. Only basic technical knowledge is required to get started. Shopify also provide you hosting, you do not need to go anywhere for hosting your domain. Shopify great option for starting out in eCommerce.
Shopify is an incredibly reliable and cost-effective platform. It has Great Customer Support which include Email, chat, and 24/7 phone support. Users can easily manage their store on Shopify’s mobile apps. This platform is fully responsive and will be optimised for visitors regardless of whether they open it from a mobile device or a desktop computer.
Benefits
- Shopify is the easiest, cheapest and most convenient software
- It has really good app integrations with SaaS services
- Shopify is very much secure & reliable
- Shopify has the advantage of being a globally hosted solution means they can load the website much faster for you.
Downsides
- You have to pay monthly for every little thing.
- It has less customizability. It only allows you to change limited part of its functionalities
- Shopify is not a content management system, not friendly with rich content like videos, carousels and whatnot on your site.
- Moving from one e-commerce platform to the other becomes difficult with Shopify.
7. Drupal Commerce
This is open-source eCommerce software that augments the content management system Drupal. This is written is PHP. Drupal is a distinct module that helps you to build your ecommerce site rapidly. Drupal is most common options for designing any kind of website. Drupal is powerful and flexible platform to give a rich commerce experience anywhere within their environment.
Drupal allows you to build your ecommerce site rapidly. It is very flexible to fit into the way you do business. It is the most flexible e-Commerce solution available. This is an open source in which users can extensively enjoy doing things at lower costs without negotiating quality.
Benefits:
- Drupal Commerce is the only e-commerce platform that is develop and built on an enterprise CMS. It units content and products perfectly to drive online sales.
- Drupal facilitates lower costs, greater innovation, higher quality, excellent security record and faster speed.
- It has built-in caching, so the speed and performance are much better in Drupal than other open source ecommerce platforms.
- It provides Integrations with social networks and supports adaptability and customization.
Downsides:
- It is not easy to work on Drupal. Development of a Drupal e-commerce can be difficult for any newbie web developer.
- Drupal has high system requirements.
- Drupal is completely CMS based and CMS is not easy use to and difficult to learn.
- It gives trouble in Upgrading and can consume many of the resource
- User gets less high-quality design in the free version.
- Problems occurred in Drupal while installation of program modules and updates
- Hosting with Drupal Commerce is costly as it requires a VPS or dedicated server.
8. JigoShop
JigoShop generally gets compared to WooCommerce because of it is user friendly and clean interface. It is pretty easy to pick up, even as a beginner. It is a WordPress eCommerce plugin developed and created by adroit professionals with years of experience and knowledge delivering online shops for global brands.
JigoShop is not only free to use, but also has WordPress eCommerce plug-ins features available. You can get your online shop up and running in minutes with less code base. It gives a wide assortment of shipping tools, payment gateways, full order management and a beautiful dashboard.
Benefits:
- JigoShop is an open source platform and user friendly for beginners or intermediates.
- It has large collections of themes. Some of them are the best-looking themes on the market.
- You don’t need developer knowledge for developing a website. It is very easy to edit the code for your site
Downsides:
- There is no customer support service available in It has only forums and blog posts online.
- JigoShop is not completely free, sometimes you need to install and buy some add-ons.
- It has beautiful themes but you will have a hard time finding themes for free.
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