6 of the Best Free Open Source eCommerce Software Solutions

These free ecommerce platforms can help you start an online store without a massive investment. The market size of eCommerce has grown rapidly in the recent years. The size of global eCommerce market is expected to exceed $3 trillion by 2019. Given the size of the markets and evolving customer expectations, it is imperative for a lot of businesses to have an online store to sell their products. Own store gives much more flexibility and control over the customer experience compared to third-party stores. You can also save on the hefty commissions charged by third parties. Setting up an ecommerce website and maintaining an eCommerce site can sound intimidating. However, there are a lot of eCommerce platforms available which can be deployed easily. These platforms can be used to easily set up an online store without the need for a large team of web developers. Typically you would think that some of these platforms cost thousands of dollars. But there are some free and open source solutions which work very well and are also very widely used. Let us take a look at a few such platforms.

Magento Open Source

Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms and is used by hundreds of thousands of clients, some handling millions of orders daily. The flagship product offered by Magento is a paid licensed product, but they also offer an open source version with fewer features and lack of dedicated support. Even so, the features it offers are still much more comprehensive than other open source solutions and more than enough for a small to medium business. The platform has an active community of thousands of other users which can be a useful source for getting questions answered or for basic troubleshooting help.

WooCommerce

WordPress is the most widely used content management system, and WooCommerce is built right on top of it. If you already have a WordPress website, the WooCommerce platform can be very easily deployed as a plugin on top of it. It is quite simple to deploy if you already have a WordPress site, but the downside is that it cannot work if you don’t have WordPress. WooCommerce is open source and is quite easy to customize and get up and running.

VirtueMart

VirtueMart is based on the Joomla content management system. This plugin makes it very easy to get a store up and running quickly. It also has plenty of features to manage invoices and inventory. It has a comprehensive multi-language support, making it useful to reach a regional audience. It is also very SEO friendly, thus making it easy for your potential customers to find your store.

OpenCart

OpenCart is a very simple and barebones open source platform. It requires little web development expertise and hence can be managed by small-sized companies themselves. However, this simplicity also means that it is light on features. If it is missing any feature that you need, then you will need to rely on plugins. Too many plugins can quickly negate the advantages of low footprint and simplicity.

osCommerce

osCommerce is an older eCommerce platform. Thus, there are plenty of plugins available for this platform. However, the store pages may have a dated look right out of the box. You will need to put in some work to make the pages look modern, but the underlying platform itself is perfectly capable and has most of the necessary features.

PrestaShop

Due to its simplicity and ease of use, PrestaShop is a platform that is growing in popularity. You can tinker with it, or you can download the ready to host package and get going quickly. It is quite customisable, with about 1500 free templates and 500 paid ones.

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