37 Shopping Cart Options for Developers
Published March 2nd, 2009 in Web DevelopmentIf you’re building an e-commerce website or adding a small store to an existing website, you have plenty of options to choose from. With so many different options and so much variety from one to another, there is no right or wrong solution, just different choices that may work best for you in different situations.
You may want to choose an open source option that you can learn well in order to build a number of different client websites. Or, your client may want to go with a hosted or licensed option that can be up and running quickly. In this post we’ll look at more than 30 different options, provide some basic details, and point you in the right direction for getting more information to make a good decision.
If you don’t already have a preferred e-commerce system to work with, be sure to do some homework or experimentation before making any important decisions that could be difficult to change later.
If you work on a lot of e-commerce websites, you may be interested in our new gallery site CartFrenzy, which showcases well-designed e-commerce sites.
Open Source Shopping Carts and E-Commerce Options:
There are a number of open source options that are popular with developers.
Magento is a leading open source solution. It is a full-featured e-commerce platform with lots of options for users.
For further reading:
- Magento Commerce – A First Look
- Magento eCommerce Review: Platform Perils and Impressions, Three Months In
- The PeC Review: Magento is the Open Source Powerhouse
osCommerce is one of the most popular open source shopping carts. osCommerce was started in 2000 and has a community of over 200,000 users. Others like Zen Cart and CRE Loaded are based on osCommerce.
For further reading:
- osCommerce Review
- osCommerce vs. Zen Cart
- osCommerce vs. Magento
- eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce
Zen Cart is a popular free, open source shopping cart.
For further reading:
PrestaShop is a free, open source shopping cart (PHP).
For further reading:
Other Open Source Options:
Free Shopping Carts:
In addition to the open source options, these shopping carts will keep costs to a minimum.
PayPal provides a very popular free shopping cart system (they take a percentage of sales with no monthly fees). You can create “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons and accept payments from credit cards as well as payments from PayPal balances.
For further reading:
Google Checkout is payment processing system (can be used with other shopping carts or with their own) that is free to use for AdWords users. There are small per-transaction fees for those who aren’t using AdWords.
For further reading:
Websites and blogs powered by WordPress can download the e-commerce plugin. It doesn’t offer all of the features of a complete e-commerce solution (although it does have quite an impressive feature list for a plugin), but it may be ideal for smaller stores.
For further reading:
- 10 Powerful Shopping/E-Commerce Plugin Solutions for WordPress
- WordPress eCommerce Plugins: Shopp vs. WP e-Commerce
eShop is another option for WordPress users.
For further reading:
FatFreeCart is a free option from the makers of E-Junkie. It works with PayPal and Google checkout and does not require installing anything.
Other Free Shopping Carts:
Virtue Mart (for Joomla and Mambo)
Hosted and Licensed E-Commerce Options:
Many clients may not want to go with a free or open source option. Here are some of the leading choices for hosted and licensed e-commerce.
Network Solutions standard costs $50 per month, and the pro version costs $100 per month.
For further reading:
Yahoo! Small Business’s starter e-commerce plan costs $40 per month.
For further reading:
Shopify is a hosted solution with prices that start at $24 per month. There are tons of features and ease of use is emphasized.
For further reading:
CRE Loaded pricing starts at $50 per month, or you can download and host it yourself for a one-time fee of $295.
E-Junkie provides shopping carts and buy now buttons for selling downloads and tangible goods. They automate the transfer of files and codes if you are selling downloads. Prices start at $5 per month.
For further reading:
CubeCart is a feature-rich PHP and MySQL shopping cart. The price ranges from free to $180.
For further reading:
3DCart’s prices range from $20 to $100 per month for its hosted shopping cart.
For further reading:
Interspire costs $295, $995 or $1,795, depending on which edition you want.
For further reading:
X-Cart is a PHP and MySQL shopping cart. X-Cart gold costs $229 and X-Cart Pro costs $575.
For further reading:
FoxyCart is free during development and then $15 per month. It aims to make the process of designing and developing an e-commerce site easy.
For further reading:
Other Hosted and Licensed Options:
If you’re interested in seeing some well-designed e-commerce sites, please see:
100 Responses to “37 Shopping Cart Options for Developers”
great article thanks for the useful list..
Great list, but what about Shopify? I can’t believe it’s not on your list:
http://www.shopify.com
Highly recommended!
I’ve worked with a few of these, oscommerce being one of my favorites. I’ve worked a lot with virtuemart as well, but only because of it’s support for Joomla, it tends to be pretty buggy.
Thanks! this is very important for my job… i try Magento, Prestashop, oScommerce… i will try the new options
I might actually need one of these soon. Thanks for the list!
Avoid OSCommerce at all costs. I haven’t looked at Zen Cart, but the underlying code in OSC is remarkably amateurish. Last time I checked, it was storing CC numbers in clear text…
I worked on a zen cart site for a client once. It’s a bitch to theme, but even worse to upgrade, they actually suggest using a diff program. We ended up just dropping it because it was limited in other ways as well.
So which is the best?
If you’re starting out, I think this list will prove helpful. Agreed with Brandon, Shopify should have been listed into the list. It’s really easy to set-up, the default themes are attractive enough and practically fast to start selling very soon.
Another good one is GoodBarry. It’s a ecommerce CMS with CRM, email marketing and analytics all rolled into one. Essential if you wish to have everything under one box for easy control and accountability.
We uses Zen Cart and happy with the features so far. It has great forum support from developers and users alike.
I don’t even do web design / development and I’m bookmarking this. Thanks, Steven.
There’s no doubt I’ll pass this on in the not-too-distant future, and the fact that recommendations are coming via comments is even better.
Bradon,
Thanks, I just added Shopify. I meant to include it originally, but obviously I forgot it.
I’d love to see a poll on this to see which is the most common (translated: easy to learn) as there are a lot more shopping carts out there than i realised.
Yep. Shopify is my favourite. They’re always refining the system and adding new features. They’ve also focused on making the admin easy to use.
OS Commerce – Lose modifications when upgrading. Easy to skin with STS template system
ZenCart – Easy to upgrade, mods aren’t lost. Much more configurable than most. Easy to wrap with header and footer.
I’ve been using OSCommerce for years and I’m sorry to say it’s days are numbered. It takes forever to do alot of the things that only take a few seconds with Magento and it needs many addons to look somewhat respectable.
We’re in the process of switching to Magento and I must say it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. Design wise and architecturally it’s the best thing we’ve ever done for our business (assaultshirts.com)
Should only take me a few weeks what took me months with OSCommerce. Big ups to bigcartel too, they’ve got a great thing going there.
-T
Another interesting shopping cart worth looking into is http://www.pinnaclecart.com. I’ve used it for a few sites and have enjoyed working with it.
This is a great article. Thanks Steven! You are the man.
Did you already had a look at OXID eshop? It’s a very developer-friendly Shopping Cart system available also Open Source since a few months. Shops like menessentials.com are based on it: http://www.oxid-esales.com/en
Frank,
No, I had never heard of OXID. Thanks, I’ll check it out.
A great option for Java developers is SoftSlate Commerce. You can use the free version to start out with and for a very reasonable fee you can get the full source code.
I go for the open source such as Magento, osCommerce, CRE Loaded, and ZenCart.
It is very cost effective and easy to work with.
I can’t beleive! It is really a very nice list as given with details and very useful to me and i will recommend to many of my friends and colleagues, thanks a lot!
So far Paypal is the best. But for a wordpress e-commerce blog of course you will choose that wp plugin.
I’ve been testing with OpenCart. I noticed that its not listed here, but not a bad system to work with and its open source as well.
i just saw they add UTF-8 support in the next release:
http://www.oxid-esales.com/de/news/blog/road-map-next-major-oxid-eshop-release-4100
With so many to choose from, you are bound to find one which works for the desired purpose. I’ve done some work with osCommerce and ZenCart as well as Big Cartel and Paypal. All have their problems, but on the whole I haven’t really been tearing my hair out on any of them. I hear excellent things about Magento so, I know I need to check it out at some point.
Thanks for the list, it is a really great resource.
Okay thanks alot, now i really don’t no what to choose. Who thought there were so many! Still using OScommerce and i think i like it. Cheers! Betty
Thanks – some great suggestions here.
Another one that should be on the list is Trading Eye. XHTML/CSS with PHP/MySQL and accessible.
Great thing about Trading Eye is it’s very easy to mod for those products that aren’t quite as simple as ‘apples and pears’.
Andrew
oh.. I don’t know about magento. I should try that one. So far, I only used zencart and oscommerce on my e-commerce web projects. I never knew that there are so many options to create an ecommerce website in a snap!
Thanks once again for this useful list. This post is really bookmark-sticky. yay!
Thank you for this very usefull list…
Even if I still thing that sometimes it’s easier to code something byourself instead of integrating a premade CMS+Cart within proprietary architecture
if you wanna use social web in a shop you can’t live without ubercart. i tried almost all the other ones.
We have been using OScommerce for long but We’re in the process of switching to Magento and I must say it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.
Want something super-simple? I have used VirtualCart http://www.vcart.com/ for the last three or four years without any major glitches.
Thanks everyone for additional suggestions. It’s appreciated.
I have done a test run with a few of these and ended up with the MIVA cart. The main drawback with MIVA is that it needs lots of modules to really customize your site, however, most of the modules are really inexpensive.
FreeWay is another that is open source, and it puts an emphasis on event, booking, and service purchases that other options don’t have. http://www.openfreeway.org
Great list, was looking around for this exact thing.
I get the impression that Shopify is the best? Does it integrate in to Wordpress easily?
Put my vote in for Magento. An excellent product with lots of promise. Not the easiest to learn but once you do the possibilities are endless.
ChargeWell.com is a unique shopping cart system. There’s no software to install on your server, and no developer required. Just paste 5 lines of JavaScript into your website, and you’ll have a full working shopping cart. Includes Google Checkout and Paypal support.
Look at the forums for all. Count the posts. For the open source products you’ll be needing as much background as you can get. For the paid software, you are at the mercy of ’support’.
Magento is definitely very feature-rich (perhaps a bit too overloaded if you’re after something simple). Will take a look at some of the others listed.
Great list thank you, another option is WOSCI
We just started testing out Viart (http://www.viart.com). We were attracted to it because of the plethora of excellent marketing features it offers and so far we’re pretty happy. Any reason it’s not on this list?
Great list, very usefull!
We work with Magento. Simple and powerful.
Great list. I wished GoodBarry was on that list though
I highly recommend CS-Cart (www.cs-cart.com). Great price, responsive Devs and a great community. Free trial available. You can get it for a discount at my reseller site (www.auscart.com.au)
I’ve just discovered citymax.com and absolutely love it. It’s a must include in your next review.
Although I’m dismayed I didn’t know about Wordpress’ opportunities. I’ll have to employ them when I need a second store that allows me to sell nudes that citymax will not.
Interesting list of cart options! I don’t know about many of this.
Ya, you have a choice there. From simple wordpress plugin to powerful commercial solutions.
New Australian based hosted cart solution:
http://www.cowcommand.com.au
i think eshop, a plugin for wordpress is quite powerful for ecommerce and they are (currently) total open source unlike wp-commerce that limit some extend to get people buy the upgrade.
we created a theme using eshop, and its quite satisfying
Another commercial option, which also has a limited free one is the Cart32 cart.
Available as both a hosted or licensed solution, it is fairly easy to use and PCI compliant. The hosted version is hosted in a fully PCI environment.
Note, I do work for Cart32 but this is my personal opinion / suggestion and I have not been asked to post this by Cart32.
I hate shopping around for e-commerce solutions. I still have not found one that I love. I’m interested in seeing how the WordPress related plugins develop this year though.
Great list and is nice to know what all is out there in the shopping cart world.
You have a very nice list, i also personally recommend Crown Cart. the shopping cart software is very simple to use and they also offer a free website design to each customer which is unbelievable.
I have actually already saved hundreds if not thousands with them since they offer free site designs and not just any designs but very good looking ones.
Anyone have an opinion on ecommerce templates? i.e., the shopping cart behind the templates, not the templates themselves. http://www.ecommercetemplates.com
Hi, has anyone used Magento lately? I messed around with it a while back and it was so cumbersome and slow that I couldn’t stand it. The platform had amazing functionality but was like 18mb of PHP files just to install and run.
We are about to launch another ecommerce site and have used nothing but Yahoo Stores until 2007. Then we started to develop sites in osCommerce for sites with high-priced items that wanted to avoid Yahoo’s revenue share.
Now, Smashing Magazine’s recent article on Magento has us stopped in our tracks wondering if we should give it a try. The server requirements are a concern, plus I not keen on having to “get up to speed” with something new and am trying to decide whether it’s worth the ramp up time.
thanks for the shopping cart list. however it would be better if you would tell what is the best specially for newbies. i think oscommerce is the easiest specially for new comers. what you think?
I think it’s an ideal site for making own e-commerce website or an online store. Most wonderful thing is of this site is to make choices,where is no wrong or right exists, only different choices.
Vandelay, you’ve got a nice thing going here. How about posting a poll? Or better, how about a big comparison grid listing features, degree of difficulty, server requirements, etc.?
There’s really what to choose from!!! New shopping carts appear on the market constantly. More and more often we switch shopping carts in search of better platform. For those of you guys who are in search of smth new and want to switch – there’s new tool, web service cart2cart. It automates data migration from shopping cart to shopping cart (http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com)
Hope it’s helpful for anybody
WebDeveloper22,
That would be nice, but it would take a ton of time that I don’t have right now. But thanks for the suggestion.
Awesome..All are in one place..Great work Steven!!
This list is the best and most comprehensive I have seen so far. Thanks a lot!
That is quite a list of Shopping Carts…Developers definitely have a large selection, the only thing that I found to be annoying (when I was at one point looking for one for a website I was making) was that all of them require you to have a full catalog listing of products — which isn’t always needed…which is why I developed my own Shopping Cart that allows the developer to create the Add-to-Cart buttons themselves and simply embed a simple HTML form into pages they wish to sell their products, and now I’ve made it available to others as well, because I’m sure I’m not the only developer who has come across this same problem.
Anyone tried to access magneto website today – does not load X_X.
Tried installing it last night – went ok until it downloaded more files during install – then when i went to click on continue button it threw up an error page. So i checked file permissions and server requirment. Still nothing.
So im Downloading opencart trying that out. Also having a look at Ubercart too.
Os Commerce is ok. Lots of support many mods.
Virtuemart isn’t all that great.
ZenCart crashed on me last week.
Some one start a poll and link it or i’ll start one up!
Which of these allows a non-developer to update the cart products themselves? Looking for something similar to Adobe Contribute. I have been told Ubercart can do this. What are other carts that can be updated easily by laymen? Thank you.
tiger commerce seems to work well, and it’s low cost. http://www.tigercommerce.co.uk
this is really great i never knew it.. i always wanted the listing of the small stores.. but i always ended up with the some not so useful search results thanks for it
OpenCart is definitly a worthwhile addition to your list – it’s a great little cart!
You can also review popular nopCommerce shopping cart – http://www.nopCommerce.com . nopCommerce is an open source e-commerce solution that is ASP.NET 3.5 based with a MS SQL 2005 (or higher) backend database.
I use Avactis.com shopping cart for my projects, it is great shopping cart for developers and web designers. It is SEO friendly, secure and easy to upgrade.
One of my favorite features in the Avactis is that I can really easy and fast integrate it into an existing website or blog.
Avactis is integrated into your website design!
It is great feature for me.
Great e-commerce news, trends and reviews
http://twitter.com/bestecommerce
Welcome!
We have a client that wants to build a new site to sell their antique furniture. One of the main purposes of the site will be to display their products and prompt customers to come in or call. They will probably only have 50 or less items at a time and the products will never repeat. Once they sell it, it’s gone forever. There’s no such thing as a quantity over one.
I’m accustomed to working with osCommerce and Yahoo Store but don’t think something that big would be necessary. Can anyone recommend another way to approach this? Thanks!
Thank you so much for this great list! I was looking for something like this…
Excellent article on different type of shopping cart at one place. We deal with x-cart, magento and Zencart. After read your article i will try to get expertise in others shopping cart solutions.
Hi, I have tried many, many shopping carts before and must say one:
I love CS-Cart, I moved to X-Cart 2 moths ago but have recently decided to go back to CS-Cart after much reviewing of another scripts.
Interspire SC was my second choice, and there are still a couple of features that I would love to see in CS Cart.
1. (and I know this is a big mod) proper order management and partial shipping of orders/individual item shipping. This would then allow for proper back orders, part payment of orders, etc etc.
2. The order process in the admin is excellent. Select customer or new customer or anon customer first, then on same page add products using ajax seach on SKU or description. Very clean process, very fast (important when you have a customer on the phone).
3. Tracking numbers for all orders (haven’t found this yet in CS).
4. Allow customer to buy product? Checkbox. When unticked, an option becomes available to display price or message to customer (useful as sometimes there are products available offline only but still want them in the store).
If you want to make a business then must have a little bit of money for begin. My experience with the all free open source carts is not the best. Sure they cost nothing, but if you need a help…. Yes your help desk is the Google only. I have a few online business sites and my last (and must say the best) choice was CS Cart. The price is full acceptable and you get all features, the best support with 20 free points or 30 days(the Interspire is a nightmare) and 1 year free upgrades, all what a online store need. I buyed it from a reseller page CS Cart, they sell it for $217, the CS Cart price is $265, and they have often a special prices, you can get $20 off the price.
Yes guys, the TIME is money and if you want a free cart, then must spend 100+++ hours with setup, design, bugs, and, and, and….
I am very satisfied with my CS Cart and trust me, if you want to make a serious business and want many of customers and visitors, then you need a serious tools to do it.
Does anyone have experience with ‘Business Catalyst’? Their DIY version was ‘GoodBarry’. The company was bought by Adobe. We are about to develop a site using BC because our client wants to be able to update their products themselves with a very easy interface. Does anyone have an opinion about BC? Thanks.
Thank you so much for this great list! I was looking for something like this…
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