It is not you may know that an E-commerce platform is an online platform for business transaction or any business trade online. This online trading can be done in many ways like “Online Shop”, “Crowdfunding”, “Affiliate Marketing” etc. one of the aspect of the e-commerce is open source e-commerce platform, it is simply a software to build your own shop and keep your data secure and easy to use. There are huge numbers of open source and free e-commerce platforms are available today.
There are several free platforms available for you if you are looking to start your eCommerce website. Before selecting the best platform, you should consider the features that you need out of your open source e-commerce system. For instance, if you want to sell products internationally, you need to limit your search to open source platforms that support global transactions.
Ecommerce is growing at a rapid pace, and businesses are constantly looking to broaden their reach. If you’re looking to join the e-commerce bandwagon but don’t have the resources to build a storefront of your own, an open source ecommerce platform could be a viable solution. Today, I’ll share with you some of the best open source e-commerce platforms available today.
Our Best Free Open Source eCommerce Platform puts you in control over your store’s look and feel, content, and functionality. Create a unique, customized storefront that makes your brand stand out. Sell on all the major social channels with built-in integrations. Get faster load times with caching and compression.
Square Online – Best Overall Free Ecommerce Platform
If you’re not particularly eager to join the Wix premium plan bandwagon, you might want to try out Square Online.
Now, for a long time, Square had fundamentally existed as a versatile payment solution. Until it finally decided to spread its wings by setting up a multi-faceted business ecosystem. You can read our full Square Online review.
So far, quite a number of people are aware that Square increasingly facilitates merchants dealing with physical businesses restaurants, coffee shops, and so forth. While that’s fairly accurate, it turns out that Square has now grown to be much more than that.
In essence, the platform offers a myriad of extensive features plus integrations that not only support brick and mortar businesses, but also ecommerce websites.
And no, we’re not only talking about digital payments here. But rather, the entire ecommerce framework. Square offers tools for pretty much all the critical online store functions- from inventory management and sales, to marketing and team coordination.
All things considered, the most outstanding feature here is the ability to set up a fully-functional ecommerce website for free.
You don’t need to pay anything to build an online store. Not even for hosting. In fact, you can proceed without the slightest bit of knowledge about coding.
Creating free ecommerce websites with Square is as easy as 1-2-3. After you select an ideal theme from the array of predesigned customizable options, just make some tweaks, and voila!
Ultimately, you’ll achieve the full online store experience. And in case the default features happen to be inadequate, you can leverage Square’s integrations to link your free ecommerce website with third-party apps for booking and scheduling, employee and inventory management, accounting, plus much more.
But that’s not all. If you have some coding tricks up your sleeve, you can consider capitalizing on the Square Connect API to build your own specialized integrations. Otherwise, it’s also possible to link free ecommerce sites with their corresponding offline brick and mortar counterparts. This feature alone is particularly handy for streamlined multi-store selling and product management.
That said, I can guess what you might be wondering at this point. How the heck does Square generate revenue from this?
Well, interestingly, there are no ecommerce web monthly plans on this platform. Not even one. Instead, it basically charges a fixed rate of 2.9% plus 30¢ for each online transaction. Therefore, ecommerce sites are genuinely free on a permanent basis.
Ecwid
Ecwid essentially translates to “ecommerce widgets”. And just like the name suggests, this is not a distinctive ecommerce platform. Check out the detailed Ecwid review.
Instead, it’s a shopping cart that you can integrate with any site to transform it into a fully-fledged online store. However, as you might have guessed already, you need some lines of code to achieve that.
While Ecwid offers three paid packages, it also provides a free option- which, unlike Jimdo, comes with decent ecommerce capabilities. Apart from unlimited bandwidth, you get a mobile responsive design, two product categories, and support for 10 items.
Sadly, you won’t be able to sell digital products at that level. Plus, your online store functionalities will be limited to a one-page ecommerce website. The only way to escape from that, of course, is subscribing to one of the premium plans, which start at $15 per month.
X Cart Ecommerce Platform
X-Cart is a solid open source platform. This PHP shopping cart offers something you won’t find in most freemium carts. A lifetime license. Built on solid source code with an extensive feature set available for paid plans, X Cart offers hosted and self-install options.
Although the feature list is impressive, upgrading can be expensive – we’re talking $495+. For a store that’s performing well, it’s a decent option and considering the license is a lifetime one, it’s not a bad deal.
You’ll need to manually code and use HTML to get the most out of this ecommerce option, but there’s ample room to customize if you’ve got the time or staff.
They do have great design and development support along with hosting to make things easier for the less technical. Their enterprise edition is also worth a look. Theres also no transaction fees.
Who’s Using X Cart?
- OrthoticShop
- O-cha.com
- La Mer Collections
- Goat Milk Stuff
WooCommerce (WordPress)
Proud to power over 37% of online stores, WooCommerce has been downloaded 14,095,679 times. It is by far the most popular open source ecommerce solution available. Built to help users turn any WordPress site into an ecommerce store, this ecommerce solution was created by the equally popular WooThemes. When it comes to content, WooCommerce is the best cms for ecommerce.
Unfortunately, as you start looking at more complex features with WooCommerce, you’ll see a price tag attached. The same is true of support – it comes in the form of a purchased product for this solution. On the flip side, WooCommerce scales beautifully and as a result is a frequent ecommerce platform choice for large enterprises, although it works just as well for small and medium shops.
Who’s Using WooCommerce?
- Mystery Chocolate Box
- Le Marzocco
- Subaru
- Airstream
- New Balance
Magento Open Source
Magento is an Adobe-owned open-source eCommerce platform, and many merchants think it is the best open source eСommerce platform. It holds a large share of the e-commerce market and has been an industry leader for years. Magento and open source are still at the very core of our beings, and it’s clear that Magento is the best solution with the most feature set and robustness for B2B and B2C merchants. We have worked with clients from almost all continents who needed Magento development services of the highest quality. All of them decided to trust us in delivering great business results from their eCommerce projects.
The most notable features are using different currencies and supporting languages, managing multiple stores, and customs modules.
Another benefit of using Magento is a wide range of plugins and add-ons. It’s strong extension provider community already solved most of the merchant’s needs with different extensions available on the Marketplace. Magento is also a multi-store eCommerce platform. That way, this platform provides users with flexibility and infinite scalability.
And this comes with a price, though, especially around making sure merchants can manage their solution on an ongoing basis and ensure it is kept upgraded and secure. With Magento 2, the days of operating a relatively inexpensive website on this platform are long gone. Magento 2 has been live since December 2015, and many merchants are still considering whether or not they should take the leap. Many still hesitate and, even though we were previously also very cautious about recommending the move (mainly because of the early issues Magento 2 versions had), now is the time to plan it!
nopCommerce
nopCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform, developed on ASP.NET technology and powering more than 60,000 live stores. The platform has been downloaded more than 3,000,000 times. Due to its flexible architecture it is easy to develop custom functionality and follow any business requirements. For those who don’t have much technical knowledge, there exists a pre-installed version.
nopCommerce offers powerful sales and marketing tools for both B2B and B2C such as multi-store or multi-vendor out-of-the-box. The platform is absolutely free, hence there is a $250 white-label fee to remove the “Powered by nopCommerce” link from the footer of the site.
Who’s Using nopCommerce?
- Volvo Cars Collection
- Harman / Kardon
- Turkish airlines
Spree Commerce
This online store platform was developed on Ruby on Rails. With many online business owners, Spree Commerce platform is growing very fast. Why is it so popular? Users say this platform is easy to learn and has rich functionality.
The platform also provides many ready-made extensions so users do not need to use a third party for improving feature list.
Spree Commerce has advantages of scalability and flexibility. Online retailers can add any custom feature to their website. Such advantages make this e-commerce solution one of the top eCommerce platforms in 2022.
VirtueMart (Joomla)
(Image Source: VirtueMart)
This eCommerce extension allows the retailers to set up and run an eCommerce store quickly. This open source platform is ideal for those merchants who want to sell overseas since it supports multi-language capabilities. There are currently over 68,000 websites using VirtueMart, of which 795 websites are in the top 1 million sites. Furthermore, VirtueMart is SEO friendly, which means it can help the store merchants drive more organic traffic to their eCommerce store when leveraged rightly.
Launch Year: 2005
Services: Free eCommerce software features
Some of the top features include:
- Allows merchants to greet customers in their native language
- Guest checkout option available
- Enables store merchants to add unlimited products and categories
- Multi-language and multi-currency support
- Supports dynamical calculator for discounts and taxes
- Easy for online buyers to create accounts, make purchases, track orders, and access the order history
- Shop statistics option to help store merchants analyze sales information by month, by day, by products, etc.
Some downsides of using VirtueMart:
- It works with Joomla only. Those who are not familiar with Joomla may face difficulty in running an eCommerce store on VirtueMart.
- It doesn’t offer plenty of features like other open source eCommerce platforms.
- It has a complicated payment process. Also, there are not many options on payment gateways too.
Few users of VirtueMart
Stand Up Paddle Sports| Straight Razor Designs
Zen Cart
(Image Source: Zen Cart)
This open source eCommerce platform has been around for years and Zen Cart powers today over 285,000 live websites. The best part of choosing the Zen Cart software is that it is ideal for product management. Using this platform, retailers can do almost everything from managing inventory to creating sales and special discounts. Furthermore, this open source platform has strong community support of over 150,000 members. However, this eCommerce software solution does tend to slow when someone adds hundreds of new products. In other words, this eCommerce platform may not be ideal for businesses that sell millions of products online.
Launch Year: 2003
Services: Free eCommerce software features
Some of the top features include:
- Allows merchants to modify the source code
- Freedom to choose any hosting service provider
- Ready to run quickly
- Built-in popular payment gateways to accept payment quickly across the world
- Supports a significant number of add-ons
- Easy to update
- Secured and scalable
Some downsides of using ZenCart:
- Users should be familiar with PHP.
- It doesn’t provide any official support. The only way to get technical support is by hiring experienced developers.
- Average templates and no good layout, which means, store retailers have to customize it.
- Fewer additional modules.
- On adding hundreds of products, a ZenCart powered store will be slowed down.
- Though it comes with an SEO tool, it is limited to certain features. For advanced SEO features like custom creation of Meta tags, URL, and sitemap, store merchants have to shell out some extra money.
- Complex and stressful upgrade. In the past, many store merchants have complained that they’ve lost some of the custom features on upgrade.
Next Steps
That was a lot of productivity tools to consider. Take a deep breath, and bookmark this post. You might need to come back and compare the tools again.
Before you decide which tools are best for you, take these steps:
- Use a time tracker to identify inefficiencies. Where are you spending the most time and getting the least results? These are your best opportunities. Using the right tool will make the biggest difference here.
- Get feedback from your team. Every leader has blind spots. Ask your team what you can do to make their jobs easier. You might get more honest feedback if you use a survey tool like Google Forms, where people can answer anonymously.
- Take advantage of free trials. Many tools come with a 14-day free trial. Try it out. Does it mesh with your team’s workflow? Is it easy to use? Is there less frustration and improved results?
Conclusion
If you’re looking for an eCommerce platform that you can use for free, and the code is open source, you can choose open-source eCommerce solutions. . These solutions are customizable to the highest degree and perfect for those who have experience with coding, or a team of developers who can customize it.
Ecommerce Platform is a software application for merchants and sellers to sell products online. Evidently, ecommerce is the most preferred online business model today. It makes up for more than half of all online sales worldwide. This can be attributed to its benefits such as low startup cost, self-directed work, and flexibility in work timings.