3 awesome small business ecommerce options.

Thanks to the open source movement, small businesses now have a gaggle of options for running an online store. However, the volume of options usually manifests a decision-overflow that results in complete paralysis. So in efforts to help make your decision easier, here are 3 e-commerce platforms that I would recommend to any small business who:

1. Wants to host their own e-commerce – for the greatest control AND
2. Have a technical friend, or the ability to Install Software on a hosted environment

If you are looking for a hosted solution, e.g. one that doesn’t require any setup and is hosted on someone else’s servers – then check out BigCartel or Shopify.

All 3 of these e-commerce platforms offer multiple payment methods (PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net), full user and order management, customizable themes and run on almost any webserver with PHP, Apache and MySQL.  If you still want more options, check out this list of even more open source ecommerce platforms.

Magento

Megento Open Source eCommerce is a powerful and flexible PHP/MySQL shopping cart platform. In fact, after my months of searching, I decided that I would use  Magento to power my own little experiment Memecard.com.  Don’t be fooled by its price (or lack there of), Magento can compete feature-for-feature with the huge enterprise ecommerce platforms. In addition to all the features a retailer needs and a plugin architecture that developers can build custom modules for, Magento’s shopper experience is (in my humble opinion) more thought out and complete than the runners-up. That being said, Magento is a MOOSE! It’s huge and if you plan on running it  getting yourself  a beefy server.

Magento Store Front Demo

Sites Running Magento

• http://homedics.com
• http://www.tcho.com/store/
• http://memecard.com

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is another very popular e-commerce platform powered by PHP and MySQL. ZenCart offers many of the same features of Magento – but looks significantly uglier. Finding Zen Cart powered e-commerce sites that are beautiful is an almost impossible task. However, Zen Cart might be ugly, but its fast, lightweight and can run on a small web server without much trouble.

Sites Powered by Zen Cart

• http://ecigchina.com/
• http://www.iconzart.net/

WP-eCommerce

WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging engine available today. The WP-Commerce plugin turns a WordPress blog in to a almost-full blown e-commerce platform for FREE.  I say “almost”, because some of the nicer features can only be obtained by purchasing the upgrade package. However, If your already familiar with WordPress, then you will feel right at home with WP-Commerce.

Thanks to Bill Burleigh for this WP-eCommerce Demo

Sites Powered by WP-eCommerce

• http://icondock.com/
• http://central.wordcamp.org/
• So easy my daughter can use it – http://moiart.com

One Response to “3 awesome small business ecommerce options.”

1. http://www.processusa.com/ says:

   February 12, 2010 at 12:16 pm

   Great Post! If we want to compete in business we will have to start accepting online payments at some point. It pays to do research and find the best solution for your business. Thanks for sharing.

   Reply