How to Select the Finest Open Source Buying Cart Software

Open source Application has taken the marketplace by storm. Small line of work owners and multinational institutions alike are using open source Application to run their regular business operations. Today, open source Application can meet the needs of several industries and market segments including those demanding an application server, web server, productivity suite, CRM tool, project management, integrated development environment (IDE), point-of-sale Application, enterprise resource planning (ERP) Application and ecommerce Shopping cart Software just to name a few.

Community developed Application provides a low cost alternative to orthodox proprietary Software. Merchants have the ability to customize community founded goods to meet their specific business requirement. Once trying to Choose a Shopping cart system, to run your on the web store, business owners must evaluate and assign economic value to the technical and operational specifications before deploying to production. Because one size does not fit all; merchants must pick out the Finest product based on their unique requirements.

So how do you buy the Best open source Purchasing cart Application? First we'll start by listing the major players in the small line of work market. In order to get my list the open source Buying cart must meet the 10 minimal requirements listed below.

Required Features:

ONE. Centrally controlled source code
2. An active developer community
3. Mature third party extensions (including PCI Compliant payment gateway extensions)
4. Support Linux and Microsoft Windows hosting environments
5. Application download must consider all features identified on internet site (e.g. not crippleware or demoware)
6. Well written installation guide and user guide. Documentation could be in the open as a PDF document or as an HTML file.
7. Installs on a standard SSL certificate
8. Provides a custom notification email to the merchant and customer
9. Provides timely bug fixes and safe upgrade path
10. Installs in a dedicated and shared hosting environment

Now that we have our minimal requirements list we can begin to look at the greatest free Shopping cart programs. In my opinion, the greatest free Shopping carts for the small line of work market are:

o Magento Commerce
o VirtueMart
o osCommerce
o ZenCart
o CubeCart
o UberCart
o AbleCommerce

All of the free Buying carts listed above can be downloaded, installed and configured at no cost to the merchant. However, Because most community founded product installations come with a standard (non commercial quality) user interface most merchants will need to upgrade the GUI (graphical user interface). In order to upgrade the GUI and improve the end user experience merchants can buy to hire a web developer or plainly purchase a custom template from sites like templatemonster. Template Monster (and others) provides thousands of affordable custom templates so merchants can easy deploy great search online stores.

In order to ensure you're selecting the Finest Purchasing cart for your business merchants must consider the keeping up with:

Capacity - The merchant must know and understand the product capacity limitation. For instance, if you have a product catalog of 1000 goods but the Purchasing cart has a 900 product limitation then that solution is not for you. Note: All of the open source merchandises numbered above have an unlimited product catalog.

Performance - If your ecommerce web store is slow clients will plainly shop someplace else. Therefore, you must make sure performance with high user loads and with increased data loads. Each scenarios can bring a web store to its knees.

Community Support - Verify a strong development community exist. Review the online forums to find if the product has an existing community of developers. Look for online questions then learn how long it took for the user to get a response.

Technical Support - Ensure technical support is out in the market via an active developer community or as a rate paid contract. There is nothing worse than having a production issue and waiting 5 days or more to get an answer.

Payment Gateway Support - In order to accept and procedure credit card payments the open source Shopping cart must give third party payment gateway extensions. The leading payment gateway employment give secure payment modules for a lot of open source Shopping cart programs.

Lookup Engine Friendly URL - Once you deploy your ecommerce web store you must submit your web store to the top Lookup engines. In order to be indexed by the Search engines your on the web store must have Search engine friendly URLs.