Top Five Open Source eCommerce Shopping Carts

eCommerce market is on the boom. Most of the small and medium size business want there online shop. In such conditions developers and businesses must have idea about the eCommerce platforms. The first question is, what is eCommerce?

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, is a type of industry where buying and selling of product or service is conducted over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction's life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices social media, and telephones as well.

Following are the worlds leading open source eCommerce platforms:

1. Magento

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Magento is the market leading open source eCommerce platform. Developed on PHP and Mysql.Magento has free as well as paid versons, its community edition is free of cost.

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc.. Magento was built using the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data.

2. Prestashop

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PrestaShop is a full-featured, cross-platform eCommerce shopping cart application for the Web 2.0 era. Open-source and Web-based (PHP5), PrestaShop is customizable, stable, and "weighs" only fews MB for a quick and easy installation.

PrestaShop is used freely by more than 120,000 online stores worldwide. It comes with over 275 features being carefully developed in order to increase business owners’ sales with minimal efforts required. All the software features are absolutely free.

PrestaShop is free software as it’s specified in the GNU General Public License and officially started in August 2007 for small and medium-size businesses. The software, based on the Smartly template engine.

3. Opencart

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OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. OpenCart is designed feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface.

4. VirtueMart

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VirtueMart (formerly known as mambo-phpShop) is an open source e-commerce solution designed as an extension of the Mambo or Joomla! content management systems (CMS). VirtueMart is written in PHP and requires the MySQL database environment for storage. It is best suited for low to medium level traffic web-sites.

5. osCommerce

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Open Source Commerce as known as osCommerce is an e-commerce tool. E-commerce is a growing domain and more people and companies are turning towards it due to which the e-commerce software is getting more advanced with each passing day. osCommerce is also e-commerce software that is why developers try to integrate more and more functions in it, and it is not simple software. In fact this software is a complete store management software program that helps in managing the whole store management work of an online site. This software is used on web servers that have PHP and MySQL.