15 Open Source Solutions To Setup Your Ecommerce Business

In the past few years, there is a rapid growth in the online sales. According to a survey, more than 40% people are now shifted to online stores and majorly buying products from their smartphones and tablets.

With the expeditious rise in the online marketplace, more business introducing online stores. For the big fishes in the industry, the expenses of setting up an online store is like spending peanuts, but for the small or startups, it appears to be a fortune.

The smart move could be open source platforms, to begin with as they are not only free also reliable and scalable. One can set up the online store not only quickly as well as, in future if you want to add some of the functionalities, which are available with only premium, can be done by paying quite a small amount.

For coders some of the platforms like Ruby on Rails available to play with scripts and codes, while for others a plenty of options available. Before you dive into the internet space and start hunting for the best one, we made it easy for you by accommodating the best and most suited solutions for different requirements; have a look.

Magento Community Edition

It is a free and open source version of the e-commerce platform, enabling merchants to access added features by installing extensions and themes from the huge Magento Connect marketplace. It comes with tons of features, many of which aren’t available on other open source platforms, for instance, one can manage multiple stores and choose from a variety of languages plus currencies.

OpenCart

The open-source PHP-based e-commerce solution has a very loyal and active community for user support, as well as a list of commercial partners for professional installation and customization. The fairly simple platform also allows you to choose from a bunch of different plugins to give your site more flexibility.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce solution, written in PHP and based on the Smarty template engine. It features cross-selling, downloadable products, product export, one-page checkout, shipping discounts, and much more.

Woo-Commerce

It is one of the most popular open source eCommerce platforms enabling vendors to sell physical and virtual goods along with downloadable and affiliate products. One can easily integrate a blog with a fully functional website.

Zen Cart

The open source platform is created with PHP framework featuring more than 1,800 add-ons in 16 categories. Zen Cart’s support community has approximately 150,000 members and 200,000 threads.

CubeCart

With the quick and easy setup, CubeCart lets you customize your website. It comes with Brute Force Protection for added security plus allows bulk product price updates and bulk product category management.

Spree Commerce

Based on Ruby on Rails, Spree Commerce is the modular platform with a quite intuitive user interface. It lets you setup the store quickly with easy to configure and upgrade functionality. With extended flexibility and scalability, one can customize the store as per his/her liking.

osCommerce

osCommerce is one of the first open-source e-commerce applications. More than 7,000 free add-ons have been uploaded by its community to customize an online store. osCommerce facilitates direct communication with other community members through the Live Chat room.

Digi Store

Digistore lets you set up the store and start selling the merchandise online within a few minutes. It is a content management system with inbuilt General Public License (GPL) open source eCommerce software.

Zeuscart

The best thing about Zeuscart is its user interface, which is rich, attractive, user-friendly and generally less boring than most of the open-source UIs. It is designed for small and medium businesses in mind. Users can make the most of SEO friendly URLs, gift cards, discounts, email templates and tier-pricing, which makes it possible to decrease prices for bulk orders.

Ubercart

For the Drupal users, it is among the top eCommerce stores with the best open source content management system. One can easily build communities surrounding products and the store owners can sell premium content with exclusive access.

Afcommerce

If you want to keep your e-commerce platform really, really simple, then Afcommerce could be the option for you. It has a speedy one-page checkout, customer help pop-up windows and customer accounts are generated automatically from orders.

SimpleCart (js)

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 on your shopping cart and how you want. It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and completely customizable.

Tomato Cart

TomatoCart eCommerce solution is a web desktop application that mimics the user experience of a desktop Operating System, offering features and applications similar to a PC environment so that users can easily start work.

StoreSprite

StoreSprite eCommerce offers many features that you’d expect to find only in paid-for and more popular platforms. These include loyalty points, customer ratings and reviews, status notifications, order tracking, special offers, best sellers and shopper accounts.