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:
- Wants to host their own e-commerce – for the greatest control AND
- 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
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
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
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.
Magento is very popular among both small and large companies. I think that the combination of stability and functionality which it offers is a great buy for the price. If a company is serious about their website, going for the cheap alternatives should never be an option.