Today there are a lot of companies that offer to build a custom shopping cart solution. But why would you want to pay for such a thing when you can get good, reliable and free open source shopping cart applications? The best free ecommerce carts are those that have been built with the goal of making an online store that sells products directly off the Internet.
A store without a cart that lets you create, publish and sell is like a race car with four flat tires. You can have the best racing car, but if it doesn’t get you moving, it’s as good as garbage. Online shopping sites need to be effective, solid and clear. The problem is: not all of them are free.
There are plenty of free tools on the market, but there are some that are superior to others. The top three platforms for this purpose include OpenCart, AbanteCart, and Magento 2. Use this guide to understand how to use each of these platforms and which is best for your business.
If you want to know about Best free ecommerce carts, this article is for you. We have tested and reviewed some of the most popular free ecommerce platforms in the market, which are currently live on our website and other top clients’ websites. These free ecommerce store templates not only look incredibly professional, but they offer a ton of functionality and flexibility.
Is A Free Ecommerce Platform Right for You?
It all depends on your precise needs and the corresponding ecommerce platform you select.
While the bulk of free ecommerce platforms are only capable of building and running basic online stores, there are still free open-source solutions like Magento and WooCommerce, which can be coded to support complex sites.
PrestaShop
If you ask people who have been selling online for a while now which open-source cart they can recommend to you, 9 out of 10 will mention PrestaShop. And rightly so because PrestaShop is one of the leading open-source ecommerce software right now.
As of writing this, there are nearly over 300,000 online stores actively using it. It’s an all-in-one CMS for eCommerce businesses – offering analytics, an intuitive admin dashboard, a really well-designed UI, and a bunch of other features that would benefit free users.
The only downside is, if you want to customize your store and you’re not a web developer, chances are you’ll need to hire one. Aside from that, I think everything checks out for PrestaShop!
Pros:
- An abundance of modules and templates for free.
- Easy to setup.
- Great UI and UX.
Cons:
- No abandoned cart saver.
- A lot of templates are messily built (code-wise).
- A lot of functions and templates are paid.
CubeCart
CubeCart is one of the most powerful shopping carts out there that businesses of all sizes can use. It’s open-source so it’s free, but unlike other open-source shopping carts, CubeCart offers support to all of its users.
The best thing about CubeCart is its integrations. It natively supports MailChimp, eBay, Amazon, Xero, QuickBooks, and a bunch of other applications that are necessary for an online business.
And since it’s free and open-source, you can customize it to your heart’s content. Also, if you’re not sure what you are doing, you can always ask the thousands of active users (both casual and developers) for help.
Pros:
- Tons of free features that are not free in other ecommerce platforms.
- Has a very intuitive interface.
- API integration.
Cons:
- Templates could use more work.
- Official support channels may lag behind compared to others.
LiteCart
LiteCart is a simple but fully-featured open-source shopping cart that is used by thousands of businesses. At its default state, it features a well-designed interface, unlimited products, categories, customers, and the like. It allows users to add and customize product options, manage stocks, and many more.
The advantage of using LiteCart is that it is very easy to use and install. Unlike other shopping carts that require you to have a bit of knowledge in servers and coding, LiteCart can be installed automatically on your server. If you have cPanel, just look for Softaculous and you can find it featured there.
LiteCart also claims that it is faster than 99% of all websites, especially online stores. It has been continuously optimized to reduce the page load, server load, bandwidth usage, and power consumption — and these variables are also important for SEO, in case you didn’t know.
Pros:
- Perfect for beginners and small businesses.
- It’s an all-in-one solution for beginners in the ecommerce scene.
- Admin dashboard and site speed is fast.
Cons:
- There is a glaring lack of public review from its users and other review sites, which is odd.
- Support quality is just average.
- Probably not the best platform for medium to large size businesses.
WooCommerce
Launched in 2011 by WooThemes developers, WooCommerce is a free open-source plugin for WordPress designed to quickly turn an existing WordPress website into a functioning online store. Developed by a very respectable company and backed by huge developer communities, WooCommerce possesses a various set of powerful built-in features & tools that help you deliver an engaging shopping experience to customers.
Its popularity is blossoming with each passing day. Up to now, WooCommerce is widely regarded as one of the most popular eCommerce solutions with 3,252,126 live sites, taking approximately 26% market share.
What are the strengths of WooCommerce?
- Easy installation
As WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress, you can simply install it just like any other plugins.
It’s easy as a piece of cake to install WooCommerce. Simply head to “Plugins” in the left sidebar, search for “WooCommerce”, and click “Install Now”. Having activated the plugin, you’ll be then led to the setup wizard which will request you to fill in some basic information about your store. Once it completes, you’ll be navigated to your online store.
- Integration with WordPress
The integration with WordPress is very earthshaking to the success of WooCommerce. Besides its own resources, WooCommerce can reap the benefits from 56,640 robust plugins, 32,100 well-designed themes, tutorials, and values being constantly developed by the WordPress community. WordPress themes and plugins support the same PHP structure as WooCommerce, which means in most cases, WordPress themes or plugins can work with WooCommerce.
Moreover, WordPress has a huge developer and store owner community, therefore, WooCommerce users can ask for help there. You can visit the WordPress forum, or in the Facebook group “WooCommerce Help & Share” to see how they considerately give each other a helping hand.
- Powerful SEO
URLs in WooCommerce are flexible, which means you can always make URLs edits to optimize SEO. Go ahead and enable WordPress permalink to make sure your URLs are accessible to visitors and search engines alike. If you’re good at coding, you can also add alt text to images to boost SEO.
Besides, if you want to better crush the competition with your Google rankings, WooCommerce will have you covered. There are tons of extensions and plugins you can take advantage of to experience a variety of SEO functionalities. For example, WooCommerce’s users are able to experience Yoast SEO – the #1 SEO plugin, which assembles more than five million site users.
- REST API
If you’re confident with your technical skills, then you can turn WooCommerce REST API into a powerful tool for customization. The REST API provides a deeper level of customization than what you would get by just adding extensions. You can access the REST API via the settings tab, then read and write different parts of WooCommerce data, such as shipping zones, products, orders and coupons.
What are the weaknesses of WooCommerce?
- Speed performance
According to an insightful study conducted by Quanta, WooCommerce is bad at loading speed. The average page load time takes up to 776 milliseconds, and the average cart page loads in 1.32 second, which is a lot higher than the ideal response time recommended by Google
“There have been studies by Akamai who found that two seconds is actually the threshold for e-commerce site acceptability. Meaning that that’s what users like to shop with. At Google, we aim for under a half second.” (Maile Ohye, Google, 2010).
Remember that customers nowadays are impatient, so the more sluggish your website, the higher the chance that they will leave your site.
- Associated cost
Although WooCommerce is a free open-source solution, you still need to pay attention to the additional costs when getting a complete store running, such as hosting ($5-100 per month), a domain name (from $10 per year), an SSL certificate (free to more than $1000/year) and any additional extensions as your store grows.
- Potential coding conflicts
It’s awesome that there are tens of thousands of plugins that can serve different purposes. That said, there is nothing that guarantees that what one developer has created won’t conflict with something else on your site. These conflicts usually come about as a result of a conflict between two plugins, a conflict between your theme and a new or updated plugin, or a conflict between a plugin and your site’s current WordPress version
Resolving the problem requires a little patience and technical knowledge to identify the source of it. Thus, if you’re incapable of doing that on your own, you may pay for hiring someone to solve the problem.
Who should use WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is the right solution for you if you want to kick-start your business with a breeze. It is also a great option if you are a seasoned techie who would unhesitatingly do extra research to discover WooCommerce’s elaborate features and customization options. A lot of both free and paid extensions & plugins backed by a hugely supportive community will definitely help you effectively run your business.
However, always stay alert to stop yourself from falling indulgently in using too many plugins, otherwise, your site will slow down and that’s the last thing you’d want. Am I right or am I right? An alternative to a WordPress plugin is StoreKit, a free mobile ordering platform that you can link to your WordPress website via a URL. It’s easy to set up and has a fast load speed, and you can get started risk-free
Magento
Magento holds the second rank in the eCommerce market share in 2017. Magento is an open source eCommerce platform with tons of exciting features. One of the benefits of open source eCommerce platforms is – you get tons of exciting themes. Although, you might need Magento developers to set up your online store, as coding is an integral part.
With Magento, there are endless possibilities when it comes to customization. That’s why big brands usually go for Magento as they have money and resources to build the best eCommerce store. If you have enough funds and time to create a feature-rich online store, Magento is the answer. You can hire a good Magento Development Company, and create a store with endless features.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of Magento you should know:
Advantages
- Magento has a vast community that continually helps in developing the platform and fixing the bugs.
- Magento has many templates to choose from and Magento add-ons & widgets are updating and evolving.
- Magento stores perform very well in terms of SEO.
- The online stores are mobile friendly.
Disadvantages
- Magento requires a very powerful hosting environment.
- You need ample space and memory to perform your site well.
- You need Magento developers to customize your store at the complex level.
How Long Does it Take to Build an Ecommerce Website?
Fact is- it might take you five minutes, ten minutes, hours, or even days. It all depends on your skills, the type of online store you’re building, its overall complexity, plus the website building functionalities offered by the platform you choose to leverage.
That said, it’s always advisable to select a platform that combines a user-friendly website editor with dynamic customization features.
A good example is Shopify, which provides favorable functionalities for creating an ecommerce website in less than 15 minutes. You can go ahead and check out our guide to learn the tricks.
Conclusion
For small business owners, starting an online store may not seem like the most prudent investment. After all, it requires time and effort to set up a website and an ecommerce platform. There are also maintenance and upgrades to consider. You would have to shell out money for high-end hosting services, online payment gateways, SSL certificates, and the list goes on.
Ecommerce carts aren’t just shopping carts. They’re the engine of your online store. Your product catalog, inventory, secure checkouts, and shipping are all part of what the right ecommerce software must do well. Most platforms make selling online easy. But only the best free ecommerce carts will grow with you and help you serve customers in a way that builds loyalty and sales while reducing friction and costs.