Despite the deepest recession for decades ecommerce is still growing. Although the rate of growth has slowed to 8%, according to drapers online, business is booming for online stores. But if you’ve considered building an online store where do you start? Sitepoint writer Sean Aune has compiled 18 great shopping carts to power your online store. His article features 11 free and 7 paid shopping carts.
How do you choose which shopping cart to use? Should you choose free or paid? The free carts are usually open source, so they just as good as the paid versions. So why pay. Well, you will get support with paid software. And shopping cart software can be complicated, especially if you need to integrate it into an existing website. That said, oscommerce is open source shopping cart software and is installed on 224,000 online stores worldwide. As it’s so popular, there is a thriving community and professional developers who can integrate it into your website and provide support. In today’s video Steve Braithwaite shows you how to build an ecommerce webstore, step-by-step.
Prestashop is a new breed of shopping cart software where the code is light and small, the software easy to install and it’s intuitive to set up and use. It uses AJAX powered features, so it’s quick. The look and feel is very professional and it’s open source so it’s free. It has a long list of features for both front-end (the store) and back-end (maintaining the store), which impresses me. The prestashop community currently has 30,000 members with 136 live shops they showcase.
I have found a web store using prestashop that sells custom built computers. Sentient is a good example of prestashop in action. The webstore looks professionally designed, yet the owner has simply populated the site with products, added some custom text and menus, and created a fully functioning online store.
Are you going to choose a shopping cart and join the ecommerce boom?
