Choosing an eCommerce shopping cart solution may be overwhelming.
You really need to analyze the features, compare them and more. Some carts are suited for particular products and some for other business. You can download them for free. Find the right cart software package, which you believe, is good in terms of features and security.
Here I prepared a list of best and free Open Source Shopping Carts. Being Open Source is a great advantage, earlier I prepared a list of 15 Free Best Open Source Forums. And also we reviewed 3 Best Hosted Shopping Carts.
1. Prestashop
Prestashop is robust, professional grade e-Commerce shopping cart that you can download, install, and use for free. In the back end, you will use a full featured back end to manage your inventory, orders, shipping, and customers in real time. Your customer’s payments are sent directly to your commercial bank account using the latest security technology. You can even add your own modules to the shopping cart.
2. OpenCart
OpenCart is an open source PHP based online shopping cart system. OpenCart is easy to use and is SEO optimized with a very nice interface. A great feature of OpenCart is that customers can write their own reviews of the products.
3. Magento
Magento is a professional open-source e-Commerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. Magento is awesome, I would never believe it is an open-source project. It features clean urls and SEO from the start. Everything is designed in a clean and simple way. Magento also features: Unlimited flexibility, Completely Scalable Architecture, Professional and Community Support, and Smooth Integration with 3rd party apps.
4. AgoraCart
AgoraCart is another very popular online shopping cart, written in Perl/MySQL. It features a css manager so you can edit the look of your cart online. AgoraCart also features unlimited product options, up to 4 different tax zones at the same time, tons of shipping and payment gateways/options. The setup options range from a simple template based store to the integration of a complex visual design and support for program modification.
5. Zen Cart
Zen Cart is a free, user friendly, open source shopping cart. Zen Cart focuses on the merchants and shoppers instead of the developers. Zen Cart also supports multiple payment and shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons. Also Zen Cart is very easy to install.
6. osCommerce
osCommerce is an online shopping cart that offers a wide range of features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly. osCommerce is backed by a great and active community. It also supports multiple currencies, allows customers to print invoices from the order screen, and has an easy database backup system.
7. StoreSprite
StoreSprite is a powerful, free PHP/MySQL shopping cart system that is easy to install and customize. The Cart is free but it does have copyright notices that you can pay to get rid of. StoreSprite has many features including automatic tax calculation, automatic delivery cost calculations, customer ratings and reviews and featured products.
8. Ubercart
Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal, the leading open source content management system. This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much much more! Ubercart leverages the advantages of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing your users with shopping cart functionality that integrates with other parts of your company or community website.
9. Open For Business – Apache
The Apache Open For Business Project is an open source enterprise automation software project licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0. By open source enterprise automation we mean: Open Source ERP, Open Source CRM, Open Source E-Business / E-Commerce, Open Source SCM, Open Source MRP, Open Source CMMS/EAM, and so on. Being open source under the Apache 2.0 license and driven by a community Apache OFBiz offers both flexibility by design and by access to code, and a solution where you’re not alone but rather can work with many others to get things done.
10. ZenMagick
ZenMagick is an addition to Zen Cart, one of the major Open Source e-commerce applications. It provides database access to virtually all data relevant to templates (and more) via an object oriented API. ZenMagick also includes an alternative theme/templating system which offers a superior separation of application code and custom HTML. ZenMagick layout and view files are exceptionally simple to make real customisation as easy as possible, while still supporting useful Zen Cart admin settings.
11. nopCommerce
nopCommerce is a fully customizable shopping cart. It’s stable and highly usable. nopCommerce is an open source e-commerce solution that is ASP.NET 3.5 based with a MS SQL 2005 (or higher) backend database. Their easy-to-use shopping cart solution is uniquely suited for merchants that have outgrown existing systems, and may be hosted with your current web host or their hosting partners. It has everything you need to get started in selling physical and digital goods over the internet.
12. TomatoCart
TomatoCart is the new generation of open source shopping cart solution developed by Elootec Technology Co., Ltd. It is branched from osCommerce 3 as a separate project. Their goal is to make TomatoCart one of the best online shopping cart slotuions. As web applications become more and more sophisticated, modern web 2.0 technologies such as Ajax and Rich Internet Applications offers significant usability improvements and makes interacting with the web interfaces faster and more efficient. We’ve compared a lot of frameworks and come to the conclusion that ExtJS is the best framework for TomatoCart.
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h3>13. <a href=”http://www.digistore.co.nz/” title=”Digistore” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>Digistore
Digistore Ecommerce 4.0 is a fully featured open source ecommerce solution based on the popular osCommerce engine. Boasting improvements both to the administration and the end user experience – Digistore has quickly become a popular choice for people wishing to market products online.
14. Spree Commerce
Based on the popular Ruby on Rails platform with support for the latest releases. Powerful extension system which allows for simple and rapid site customization. Supports customized logic for taxation, shipping, discounts and coupons. Open Source – Completely free to use.
15. Zeuscart
Zeus Cart is an incredibly stable & richly-interfaced, open source shopping cart and it’s a simple E-commerce software package which allows, even a non-technical person to open an online store on the Internet, with minimal efforts. ZeusCart is a web-based PHP/My SQL shopping cart which is simple, powerful and easy to use.
16. Jadasite
JadaSite is an open sourced content management and e-commerce system. JadaSite is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) V3. The GPL v3 is a popular license and we believe this license will ensure greatest interoperability with other code in the open source community. Contributors and developers can includes existing code into JadaSite without fears that the new code may be incompatible with JadaSite.
17. Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software is a free shopping cart software solution enabling small businesses to sell online using a reliable, easily customizable, feature packed, high performance online shopping cart with no coding required. The Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software program is an easy to install and easy to use ecommerce solution. Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software has the following features inside the shopping cart system.
18. VirtueMart
VirtueMart is an Open Source E-Commerce solution to be used together with a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla!. Joomla! and VirtueMart are written in PHP and can be used in typical PHP/MySQL environments. With it’s a fully-featured eCommerce Engine VirtueMart is perfect to sell your Goods online and drive your Business to new Heights. Despite being Open Source Software it powers large Online Shops providing the Performance, Usability and Security you expect from professional Software.
19. jCart
jCart is a free Ajax shopping cart that’s easy to install and customize. Based on jQuery and PHP, jCart handles visitor input without reloading the page and is fully functional even without javascript. No complicated manual or new syntax to learn. Easy integration with existing storefront.
20. CF Shopkart
CF Shopkart is a free e-commerce solution for Coldfusion developers and online store owners. This Coldfusion shopping cart is absolutely free. This doesn’t mean it is poorly made. In fact, I have spent more than 5 years developing it, and working to improve on it. CF Shopkart is perfect for anyone that just needs an affordable solution. You never have to pay a dime for CF Shopkart if you don’t want to.
21. dashCommerce
dashCommerce is an ASP.NET Open Source e-Commerce Application. Built using some of the latest technologies, dashCommerce is focused on providing a robust e-commercce application that is stable and highly usable. In addition, the dashCommerce community is one of the most active communities in the open source / .NET space, so take a look around. PayPal & a simple weight-shipping calculation provider are integrated by default.
22. Idut Shop
Idut Shop is a simple and elegant open source PHP shopping cart for Google Checkout. It can be easily customized and incorporated into an existing website. Written in PHP, you can add products from the easy to use control panel this includes adding images and setting prices. Idut Shop for Google Checkout is simple to install and uses a MySQL database. Idut is focused on creating quality websites and graphics. Idut write both commercial website software and free, open source website scripts.
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The way I would pick the open source shopping cart, is by checking how active the development/release cycles are. This will indicate if you can trust that in the future you will be having updates. eCommerce industry actively changes and you do not want end up with outdated software that is barely supported
I would not pick oscommerce or zencart for instance. Both are very old and based on our customers not requested any longer. I would add abantecart though. It is a new gig and we get many inquiries for development with abantecart
If you’re not a (strong) developer and don’t want to find and pay for a strong developer:
Save yourself a headache and use a hosted solution like Shopify, Big Cartel, Magento Go, Amazon Marketplace, Ebay, etc.
If you’re already a developer
or
you want to become a developer and have a lot of free time (years), and are smart and have a good coach or are extremely smart and are an autodidact:
I’d recommend installing each shopping cart and spending a good while (weeks or months) getting to know them. You’ll find out which one is best for your needs.
But don’t go editing the code until you fully understand the concept and implications of ‘forking’.
And for the sake of your customers, don’t go putting an e-commerce website live without a decent understanding of website security (SSL encryption, session security, SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, etc., etc. See OWASP for a starter), PCI DSS compliance and fraud prevention.
Of course there are some very good paid for solutions that are well worth the money – managed and focused development team, vendor support, commercial reputation to uphold, etc. Some of these paid -for carts will take care of things like security so you don’t have to worry so much about it. Until you edit the code or take control of the hosting that is.
…but we’re talking about open source here. Which could be because of the open-source concept and/or due to a lack of funds.
If you don’t want to pay for a developer or a hosted solution, and don’t have the ability or time to learn, how will you market your business?
Do you understand Google PPC, affiliate networks, email marketing, web analytics?
Don’t assume that having a website means that the money automatically starts pouring in. SEO is not the same as it was (eg. keyword stuffing and artificial link building can get you penalised very quickly by search engines) and if you don’t know how to defend yourself (eg. webmaster tools, disavow files, canonical links, etc.), you can be attacked with bad links by competitors seeking to harm your search ranking.
If your product is highly unique then you may still have a chance of being found in search engines with minimal marketing.
(Otherwise my advice would be that you should plan for your monthly spend on marketing to be more per month than what you’d pay a pro developer to build you a site in the first place. And unless you know what you’re doing then that spend may well be wasted. A single click on a Google ad can cost you $10 easily depending on how competitive the keyword is.)
If I’ve just put a few people off setting up a web shop, perhaps it’s for the best. Hopefully anyone still reading and still determined is a little better informed.
But for those looking for a simple and free way to set up shop, why not try this simple recipe:
WordPress.com + PayPal buttons.
This is probably the quickest and easiest way for a non-developer to start selling online, oh, and it’s completely free:
1. Get a WordPress.com page set up with a picture and description of your item or items.
2. Get a Paypal account set up with seller status
3. Copy a little snippet of code from your paypal account (see the section about Paypal buttons in Paypal) and paste into your page on WordPress.com.
Great info! 😀 My favourite is Magneto so nice and freeeeee
I think time to update this list. I noticed that Abantecart is getting ground and it beats many on this list
Just an observation 😉
I like magentocommerce site which has modules described in a right manner.
Hi Pradeep,
This is very useful. Thanks you so much. I like Open Cart. It is very easy to customize. 🙂
OpenCart is the best without doubt. We use it on three of our e-commerce sites, after trying many others. The sites we use them are tmart.in teestee.com and totecottonbags.com. I would highly recommend OpenCart.
Hi; Thanks for the information, it is really helpfull, now, I want an advice: I have almost 2,000 products and more that shopping cart I need a wish list with pictures, Google friendly because the final price I will give it according to the amount. Can you help me?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Pepe Hernández, México.
Did you try “Magento” or “OpenCart” mate? You can also try Shopify self-hosted shopping cart. 🙂
Hi Pepe, Go for Opencart without doubts. You can have 20,000 products also. It is very stable and easy interface also. You can do it all yourself. Lots of themes are also available and most of them are free too!
I’ve been using oscommerce. I’m unahppy with it. The download feature won’t work and now people can’t login correctly. They keep getting kicked out and kicked back. I’m thinking of scrapping it. I don’t mind paying for something if it’s really good, but I don’t want to pay for more headaches either.
I have about 200 products and a customer base. Will I be able to move my sql to any of these new carts? I would hate to have to input everything again and I don’t want customers to have to re-create all new accounts, if I can help it.
I also want to have options for add-ons before check-out, multiple pictures, etc. Will any of these work? If not, what would be the best paid one for the job. Ease of import matters quite a bit. I’ve been online a long time and don’t want to lose customers.
Thanks.
Yes Ken, since these are Open Source am sure it’ll satisfy your needs and you’ll be able to move.
i very happy to get a long list all shopping cart but i want which one is best one for beginner.
Really a nice list.
I have a customer who says he wants mostly everything in his shopping website of artificial jewellery. To help him decide I had listed main modules such as:
– category > subcategorywise product listing
– discount coupons
– affiliate : banner and text based
– facebook connect
– refer a friend : import contacts from gmail, hotmail, outlook, yahoo etc. and send emails
– Previlige club to earn shopping pts and its redemption for gifts or product purchase
– COD payment method
– Slabwise shipping
Which opensource cart would you suggest me to implement for him which can cover all the above. My fear is that I should choose an opensource shopping cart, which has most of the above features , if not all.
If anyone can guide, I would highly appreciate.
thanks in advance.
Vikram
What Make TomatoCart 2.0 innovative?
Based on codeigniter – Developed as a flexible and solid ecommerce framework utilizing mvc pattern.
Modularized Framework – Add and override core features without touching the core source code.
Easy and rapid to uprade – The framework allows for a fast upgrade without breaking compatibility.
New Template Engine – Design the template engine as the engine in the wordpress.
Pad & mobile device – Integrate the sencha touch to support the pad and mobile device.
Override the base views – Perform modifications and override base views in a separate template for the specific device.
Hello Pradeep,
This is an interesting and helpful post for many of us. You seemed to have worked hard to gather this list and post it here. Open source shopping carts are really great.
Thanks and Regards
Sanjib
I was wondering if any (or all) of these shops can be used for a simple payment service. I have this website that has only one ‘product’, or better one ‘fee’ that has to be payed before customers can fill in the rest of the form. So, the customer fills in a few fields,like name and e-mailaddress, then pays, then gets redirected to another form to collect all the other information needed.
In short, the shop, like in many other websites with shops, is mostly invisible. I just need the payment part. Any suggestions for a simple way to include this in my WordPress based site?
You can see the site here: http://www.bt10.nl
A very nice list of shopping cards, sadly I wasn’t aware of all of them, though I’ve sampled osCommerce, I think I’ll give a few others a try, thanks to your recommendations.
I’d never ever use Magento again.
BUGGY as hell
Coding is … almost as bad as osCommerce
4x-5X more work (and more complicated) to change/create design templates
shall I go on?
Then they are smart, surely, offering MEGA BUCKS EXPENSIVE “professional service!
Excuse me. You create such a pile of crap and then you ask for money to fix it? I don;t buy crap stuff only to pay mega buck so you can continue play around with, for me you are just a bunch of learners losers. Do your job right from the beginning – then when i need something else, i am happy to pay “professionals” but not you cheeky kids.
Great list. I think AbanteCart can make to to 20. Very nice shopping cart.
Looks good collections, Thanks..
I was searching for the Open Source frameworks and found this.I like opencart and am using it now.Thanks for sharing.
I didn't know Magneto does shopping cart. They should introduce his new skill in next up coming X-Men movie.
Great resource! Nice to see Prestashop right up on top since it's the only cart we're willing to work with (and we have experience with most of them!) Such a big community, constant upgrades, light/fast/flexible/scalable architecture.. I predict that it's going to take over and put some of these other carts that have been around a bit longer in their place!
hehehe
first time i have evaluated carts and tell you what…. with a fresh unbiased mind because i didnt know what to expect many carts ARE USING A WRONG APPROACH and copying each other when competing for features! in other words they are misleading each other the wrong direction- more like copying your friends exam and your friend is not right.
I am thinking of my customer. Why bombard him/her with all those rich features of an item they have already chosen or know about??? what a mess! simplest there can be put is a link or links showing things like packaging/features etc. Not download info to a customer who already knows.
imagine any of these carts is a point of sale at cashier register in supermarket. The cashier will look at you like you have gone nutters! The guy in the office IS THE CASHIER when the cart is open.
the wrong approach especially is when clicking on an item is opening another page- and did i see one cart emediately asking for checkout on click.
but i must say with alittle adjustment agora is headed right direction of my thinking.
thank you kumar. my respect
peter you are mistaking an E-commerce application for an automation application, th e-commerce aplication presented (saved ofbiz) are not mean to be used as a storefront for a retail store, they are meant to sell online without a human interaction like on amazon
I have an ecommerce site presently using magento for over 3 years now and am not very satisfied with the restrictions it has on the admin side. it has very limited capability when it comes to editing invoicing, resending invoices to customers, changing product items on invoice to name a few. other issues with magento is that its very resource heavy thus has higher demands when it comes to hosting. However, what i like about magento is it has great selection for template design and layouts. so the look and feel of the front page is extremely and utmost important. I am looking to change to a different shopping cart, whether its open source or a paid one, if some one can give me an honest advice i appreciate it. i will have an independent developer and designer complete the site because I do not know how or have the time to. Based on reviewing through the internet, I see that prestashop would be a good choice for me. Please give me some feedback on which cart I can consider. My product quantity is less than 100. I need this platform to be seo friendly as well. to me, oscommerce and zen cart, looks very generic in terms of layout. so right now, i have my eyes on prestashop. thanks for the advice.
i think you real problem was choice, magento is THE most flexible plataform nowdays, anyone saying otherwise is just a bad professional , but it requires a really good knowledge to modify the store, if you are looking for simplicity go opencart or prestashop
Questions from a non programmer
One of the best paid versions is BigCommerce.
In the demo they show drag and dropping page elements to design unique pages, no coding necessary.
Do any of these free versions do that?
Reading articles about SEO they talk about adding links to pages and other customization beyond what the software does for SEO. do any of these free carts allow you to do that?
Which ones really are the easiest to use if you don't know much about html or css, but still want to look like you do. I got the impression, BigCommerce does just that with their integrated web design user interface.
Mate, these are possible in the above mentioned shopping carts. 🙂
Thanks for sharing. A good reference with a summary of features really saves time for the ecommerce website designer
Thanks for the tips!
However i have confidence on Prestashop – probablly the best open source open cart!
It's very pratical and complete. It's very secure, also, trough constant updates!
20+ Best Free Open Source Shopping Carts
I had used 3th Magneto and 5th zen cart
which is the best shopping cart ?
Magneto is quite good. 🙂
You shouldn’t get a shopping cart for your online business‚ they’ll never do enough. Plus installing the scripts are very confusing and not to mention, they all need to be installed each time there is an update (AT LEAST twice a year to stay current). And of course, if you don’t understand the coding and scripts, you’ll have to pay your web developer each time to do this for you. The free solutions out there may be “free”, but really end up costing you plenty down the road. I’ve been there!
You should look into a total online business platform such as http://www.haikuob.com which handles shopping cart, website, customer database and marketing features. It’s a hosted solution so you don’t have to worry about the technical stuff. All the other bases are also integrated, such as the payment gateways, shipping modules etc.
Do any of these ecarts offer immediate support via phone or email? I'm looking for an ecart that will provide support even if there's a monthly fee. The closest thing I've found is http://www.shopify.com but looking for others.
I have items for the upload 40,000.00
Which is easy to use shopping cart
I really hope
thank you
This is a very helpful post since I’m looking for a good open source shopping cart. I lol’d when I saw “Magneto” (Magento) though.
Thanks!
Note to Admin: Please delete my previous post. I ploaced it wrongly. Please use this instead….
The guy who set up my OSCommerce site is no longer available and my site is a mess.
I find OS commerce very complicated to use.
Please not: This is not an advert for experts to contact me with offers.
I want to build the site myself
I have a limited knowledge of HTML
Out of all the ecommerce sites that are listed here could anyone advise me which is the most suitable and easy to use for a novice like me?
I need multi currency and international shipping options and need it to work with Paypal.
Thanks
I think you can try OpenCart & Magneto. 🙂
Every parking lot is filled with shopping carts because people won’t bring them back to the corral. Why is this? Is it really that hard to do? I can understand elderly and disabled people not being able to do this, but why are regular people unable to do something so simple?!
Wow. This is an amazing list you have here. Like what Mark said on the thread, “Just don’t make the mistake that free = better…”, do you also have plans of making a follow up about their customer support? Thanks.
Hey pradeep! I just arrived to your page while searching for free open source shopping carts 🙂 nice to see a lot of alternatives here
i ve use os commerce, opencart and wordpress cart. but to me more easy to use cubecart.for free version its ok. but not secure from attackers huhu. but it dont have a user to comment to any product review. you need to pay for it. about usd130. huuu…
This is a good list. How can this be downloaded? And which one do you recommend?
Zeuscart is my favorite shopping cart software.
This is only for php ? For java developers, you need to try shopizer http://www.shopizer.com, it creates nice store fronts. Also contains online invoicing
I would definitely go for OpenCart, a fantastic and easy free ecommerce solution. Been creating my own store with it (moving from Magento) and I’m already in love with it. Very easy to install, setup and manage.
The only problem is the templating system which is a bit hard to take (that MVCL model), so I bought myself one at opencarter.com and the result is… amazing!!! Now I can say I have a very very professional store for a few bucks.
Anyway, just give OpenCart a try. I’m sure you will love it.
Greetings from Germany!!!
Open Cart is updated way too often, and is a pain to update without losing data. Currently getting the ‘page does not exist’ for any new entry. Very painful program.
Just don’t make the mistake that free = better. If you are running a business, being productive and decreasing time to market is much more important than saving a few $100 up front. If you budget is THAT tight you are probably under financed to make a successful business.
Thank you for your support and plz forget my silly mistake.
By the way, is it possible to include TomatoCart here? Thank you!
Angela, I think I already mentioned TomatoCart here! See #12 🙂
Nice and useful list. Thank you. Do you know TomatoCart then? It is a free open source shopping cart too.
you are a great help.
I’ve used opencart and would definitely recommend it for someone trying to get something up and running quickly and easily
I didn’t know of such shopping cart systems .These can be very helpful if you don’t know web programming languages.I am now thinking of starting this business too.
Having worked with Zen cart for a client I can vouch for them. Awesome cart to integrate if you are a developer and building a shopping site.
good list buddy, some of i know and some is new for me.
Wow what a great list of OpenSource shopping carts. Well I would be implementing and checking some of them to make it approved on my internation client site.
…yes being open source shopping is an added advantage, you will be able to customised the art to your taste. It is one of the things you have to look for in a shopping cart.
Really very nice list to choose the best. I am Using zeuscart which is best open source php based shopping cart software.
Great list. Though many are new to me. 😀 lol !!
I have used magneto !! its good … but spree is just awful i had really bad time at that site !!!
Maximum of PHP Shopping carts… 🙂 I tried 4 of these before with my clients and OS Commerce always stands top in the list.
Robin
DailyTUT
Good information dude, well I have not learned ye how to integrate shopping card with my blog.
Very handy! I've always like Zen cart, but I'll check out the others. 🙂
this is a good list, some of the popular ones i know, i have even tested a few of those and they are good. though, personally i never looked beyond paypal’s carts for my own needs 🙂 but its good to know some free alternatives,
Hey thanks for the usefull Info. But I wanted to know all these are free for lifetime?
Open Source and Free! ^_^
Great collections. Important for the web developer 🙂
Magneto is good, oscommerce is popular.
All are great and some are new for me. Is in above list, all carts in order of its popularity?
For the 1st 10 Carts, Yes! 😀
wow.. that’s really Awesome dude.. !!
well.. is it possible to pay these shopping carts using pay pal ha..?? dude…
This is a good compilation dude, really nice
i ve used dashcommerce it s pretty good i guess 🙂
Great list – unfortunately only some of them are worth of our attention. i hope there will be more precise comparison. We often encounter the problem of shopping cart switch. Now it’s easier to do with cart2cart online service. It automates data migration http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com