Design Vitality

Let’s face it: Owning a website for your business is pretty much a requirement in this day and age. What good is a website that only shows customers what your company sells? Why not actually sell to them while they are there?

Use any of these 20 open source shopping carts to maximize your sales potential. Some of these aren’t open source, but they are all free. Create an online store and increase your revenue.

1. WP e-Commerce at Instinct Entertainment
   WP e-Commerce is a very powerful e-commerce cart for WordPress. It uses your WordPress database to keep track of customers. You can do pretty much anything you can with other carts, while integrating with WordPress.
2. CubeCart
   This shopping cart is very popular. It’s entirely free for version 3, with the exception that you leave their copyright notice in your footer. CubeCart has a large amount of payment gateways (Google Checkout, Paypal) and a very active community. Their support forums are lively and many people contribute plugins to the cart. Version 4 is pay-only, but has SEO out of the box.
3. Magento
   Magento is currently in beta (it’s only up to version 0.6!) but is already shaping up to be one of the best e-commerce carts out there. Magento features clean urls and SEO from the start. Everything is designed in a clean and simple way. The code it outputs is semantic, which is very rare for e-commerce carts, even commercial ones.
4. osCommerce Online Merchant
   osCommerce is a very popular online shopping cart. osCommerce supports multiple currencies, allows customers to print invoices from the order screen, and has an easy database backup system. Transactions are also carried out in SSL, making them more secure.
5. osCMax
   osCMax is a branch of osCommerce. It gives you unlimited products and categories, multiple payment gateways, multiple shipping gateways and separate customer groups. Because osCMax is so similar to osCommerce, you can use many of the plugins that were made for osCommerce inside osCMax.
6. OpenCart
   OpenCart feels lightweight but is full of great features. The backend is very simple to use. On really great feature is that customers can write their own reviews of the products listed. The latest version has also moved towards xhtml/css for the frontend.
7. Zen Cart
   Zen Cart has been around for a while and recently moved to xhtml for templates. Zen Cart also supports multiple payment and shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons. The support forums are very active and most people on them are friendly and helpful. The newest version has added support for PayPal Express Checkout.
8. cpCommerce
   cpCommerce is an easy to customize shopping cart. It’s template based so you never have to edit more than 5 files to change its look. You can view your store’s history, specify manufacturers and hold sales.
9. Digistore Free Ecommerce
   Do you like a lot of options with your ecommerce carts? Good, because Digistore allows you to run your store in SSL, have express checkout, let guests check out without registering and more. Digistore supports Authorize.net and PayPal for checkout.
10. VirtueMart
    VirtueMart is a free ecommerce web design plugin for both Joomla and Mambo. It can be used to display a catalog, or can be used as a full fledged shopping cart. You can assign products to multiple categories, sell downloadable goods and notify customers when an out of stock item is back in stock.
11. Boss Cart
    Boss Cart is a fairly new shopping cart. It has support for PayPal gateways, it’s template driven, it has search engine friendly pages and is easy to set up. You can even embed flash movies in product pages. Work on version 2.0 has recently started too.
12. PHP Shop
    PHP Shop is an ecommerce cart built on PHP. It uses CSS-based themes so it is very easy to customize. The product descriptions are edited with a WYSIWYG editor. PHP Shop supports SSL and can process credit cards live, depending on the payment gateway.
13. PayPal Shopping Cart
    Did you know that PayPal offers a shopping cart that can be integrated with your current site? There is no cost for setting this up and it allows you to process credit cards and bank account payments immediately.
14. BakeSale - Simply Shopping Cart
    BakeSale is quite a unique shopping cart. It is a “no-frills-get-only-what-you-need-and-nothing-more” cart. There are no ratings for products and no customer reviews. This also means that there is not bloat. You use the cart for one purpose only, to sell your products to a person who wants to buy them.
15. Mal’s e-commerce
    This is a full featured ecommerce shopping cart completely free of charge. The only thing not included is credit card processing. Credit cards must be processed manually or you can buy a third-party payment gateway. It does support PayPal however.
16. Ubercart
    Ubercart is a full featured ecommerce cart add-on for Drupal. It features single page checkout, anonymous checkout and integrated payment systems for multiple payment gateways. Ubercart is PayPal certified.
17. Fat Free Cart
    Fat Free Cart is the simplest shopping cart I have ever seen. All you do is copy and paste some code and viola! You have a store on your website. Checking out is handled by either Paypal or Google Checkout. You do not have to sign up for this code, you simply copy and paste it.
18. AgoraCart
    AgoraCart is a very popular online shopping cart. It features a css manager so you can edit the look of your cart online, unlimited product options, up to 4 different tax zones at the same time, lots of shipping options and tons of payment gateways. AgoraCart gives you many options for your store.
19. Cart97
    Cart97 has a lot of great features. It’s easy to set up and very, very easy to run. Customers can submit reviews, when viewing item details it suggests other items for sale, it supports wishlists and even has sale options. The item detail pages work similar to Amazon so customers feel comfortable shopping. The only downside is that it isn’t the easiest cart to customize.
20. storesprite
    storesprite’s motto is “free certainly does not mean basic”. Their cart has many features including automatic tax calculation, automatic delivery cost calculations, customer ratings and reviews and featured products. That backend panel is designed to be easy to use, even for someone who has never worked with ecommerce before.