Avactis Shopping Cart is an easy to use ecommerce software that allows you to open an online store on the Internet. Compared to other similar software, Avactis offers a unique advantage of very simple integration of the online store into your existing site.
Avactis has just released Avactis 2, with a brand new Visual CSS editor and Visual layout editor. Using the visual CSS editor you will be able to easily and quickly change the store design. You can check out this video tutorial which shows how easy to modify the theme using CSS editor. Visual layout editor allows you to move page elements in drag-n-drop mode.
Avactis 2 also supports Price-based discounting, Affiliate tracking of orders, Advanced newsletter management, Quick checkout, Wish List and Gift Certificates. Avactis 2 is not free, but you can try out their free shopping cart with limited features.
When it comes to open source ecommerce platforms, there are plenty to choose from. Here, we take a close look at the 15 best available, which should help guide you in the right direction. I’m not going to lie- finding the perfect platform is not easy.
Each one has its own set of pros and cons and has been designed with a slightly different user in mind. Uploading products and customising your store can be very time consuming, so make sure you have given several platforms a try before you make that final decision and integrate one into your site.
You’ve only got to look at Magento’s client list to realise what an excellent piece of open-source software it is. Samsung, The North Face, Stussy and Nespresso all use it to power their online stores. It’s used by 30,000 merchants and is the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform. You have to pay for the Enterprise Edition, which is packed full of extremely useful features, but the Community Edition, meant for developers only, is free to download and use.
osCommerce is absolutely free under the GNU General Public License and caters very well to most people’s needs. Unsurprisingly, considering how easy it is to set up and run, it’s extremely popular, powering over 228,700 online stores. Such popularity does come with a significant downside however- it makes it harder for you to differentiate your store from the thousands of others out there. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you’re going to need to use some of the 5,800 add-ons available, some of which cost money. Read the rest of this entry »
TomatoCart is the new generation of open source shopping cart solution. It is branched from osCommerce 3 as a separate project. As web applications become more and more sophisticated, modern web 2.0 technology such as Ajax and Rich Internet Applications offers significant usability improvements and makes interacting with the web interfaces faster and more efficient. They have compared a lot of frameworks and come to the conclusion that ExtJS is the best framework for TomatoCart.
They completely rewrite osCommerce 3 administration site based on the qWikiOffice project which is a web desktop implementation of the ExtJS RIA framework. Web desktop application mimics user experience of desktop Operating System, offering features and applications similar to a PC environment. So that users can easily start to work with TomatoCart without any difficulty.
One of the core features of TomatoCart is that it allows users to keep several windows open simultaneously, to enable users to work with several modules such as products, customers and orders at the same time.
Requirements: PHP v5.1.6+ (with MySQLi), MySQL v4.1.13+ or v5.0.7+
Demo: http://www.tomatocart.com/index.php/products/store-demo
License: GPL License
Ecwid is an Ajax e-commerce platforms, which offers the performance and flexibility you need, with no hassles at all. it is well designed and provides a smooth experience for store owners and end users alike. Ecwid provides a lightning-fast interface, drag and drop functionality, and ease of integration.
Sign up with Ecwid, and immediately after you paste three simple lines of HTML into your website’s source code, your site will have full online selling capabilities. The code will render a web store inside your existing pages, using AJAX. Use the Ecwid Control Panel to add your products and to manage the settings of your online store. All changes will be reflected on your website right away.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://www.ecwid.com/
License: License Free
Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby progamming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms.
Spree is maintained by an active team of developers who continue to refine the code based on lessons learned from the challenges of real world deployments. Best of all, Spree is completely free, the open source code is freely available and is licensed under the New BSD License.
Requirements: Ruby on Rails
Demo: http://spreecommerce.com/demo
License: New BSD License
JoobsBox is an extensible open source job board. The goal is to have the JoobsBox as a framework, light and fast and let the community to expand this, limited only by their desires and imagination. Plugins can extend JoobsBox to do almost anything with their job board.
Themes allows the community to share their templates and find the right look for their job board. JoobsBox focus will be towards standards, usability and users needs. You are free to use it for anything from your job section of your blog to a job board that will surpasse Yahoo HotJobs. You might want to look at alternative open source job board solution: JobberBase as well.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://demo.joobsbox.com/
License: New BSD License
Long time ago, we have featured SimpleCart(js) on WebAppers. Recently, SimpleCart(js) 2.0 has released and it was completely rewritten from scratch to bring you a more flexible and simple API to get a custom shopping cart up and running quicker than ever.
SimpleCart(js) 2.0 is no longer only for Paypal. It now works with Google Checkout as well. You can now add increment, decrement, and remove buttons to your cart. You can also rearrange items, change the HTML tags, do whatever you like to display your cart how you want.
No databases, no programming, no headaches. A simple javascript shopping cart in under 20kb that you can setup in minutes. It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and completely customizable. All you need to know is basic HTML.
Requirements: –
Demo: http://demo.simplecartjs.com/
License: MIT License
Magento is a very Powerful Open Source eCommerce System, which offers offering unprecedented flexibility and control.
Nettus has written a tutorial: “Easy E-Commerce With Magento” which demonstrates how to download and install Magento to a local host, configure some of the site options, and create simple and configurable products and categories for your e-commerce site. You can learn most of the basics of Magento from the tutorial.
Source: http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/screencasts/easy-e-commerce…
You can find lots of outstanding Open Source Shopping Carts on WebAppers. However, we have just found out that we have missed Ubercart in our free online shopping cart collection.
Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal. It was designed to take advantage of Drupal’s major core and contributed systems, providing users with shopping cart functionality that seamlessly integrates with other parts of your company or community website.
One of the key strengths of Ubercart is its design that allows official and third party developers to add to or alter its features to accommodate virtually any e-commerce need. This means you’ll never have to change the source code to add new features, so you’ll have an easy upgrade path when the core gets improved or bugfixes are released.
Could you tell us your favourite one from our Shopping Cart Collection? Ubercart, Magento, PrestaShop, VirtueMart, OsCommerce or Zen Cart?
Requirements: –
Demo: http://www.ubercart.org/
License: GPL License
VirtueMart is an Open Source E-Commerce solution to be used together with a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla! (and Mambo). Joomla! and VirtueMart are written in PHP and made easy for use in a PHP/MySQL environment.
All you need is to download the latest Joomla distribution from www.joomla.org and the VirtueMart package from this site. Joomla provides the Core System and the Framework, which VirtueMart can use. So you can easily use a complete Shopping Cart Solution within your own dynamic Website (“Portal”), together with many other Plug-Ins, called Components and Modules, like Forums, FAQ, Guestbooks and Galleries.
VirtueMart is free software released under the GNU General Public License. No limitations exist for VirtueMart. You can create and maintain a site with an unlimited number of categories, products, orders, customers, etc.
Requirements: Joomla! Framework
Demo: http://virtuemart.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view…
License: GPL License
