Popular E-commerce Software Solutions

Paid e-commerce software solutions

Let us have a closer look at three popular e-commerce solutions: Bitrix, Shop-Script and PHP-shop. The two latter content management systems have two editions: one of them is paid, and the other is available for free usage.

Bitrix CMS is developed by a Russian company, but there exists an English version of the CMS, therefore you will experience no difficulties with the language. Bitrix offers an e-commerce solution “Bitrix: Online Shop” which is a part of the following editions of Bitrix Site Manager: Small Business, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition. This solution includes ready-to-use elements: mobile online shop (beta), commercial catalog, CRM integration, currency adjustment and other features.

Shop-Script CMD was developed by WebAsyst. It is a ready-made online shop script that can be installed on the hosting concurrently with the already existing website. The distinctive feature of WebAsyst Shop-Script is its integration with social networking services (namely Facebook and VK.com) and its ability to exchange data with a popular solution “Bitrix Trade Management”.

Onу more CMS for online stores is PHP-Shop. It positions itself as a business level solution. Online shop owners are offered both commercial and free licenses. It is a ready-to-use solution, i. e. you do not have to adjust it to a particular project. But the CMS has several editions (Start, Enterprise, Pro1C) which differ from one another in a number of available features. The appropriate version of PHP-Shop should be chosen according to the needs of a particular online store.

Free e-commerce software solutions

There are a lot of free content management systems and other solutions designed for e-commerce websites. Let us have a closer look at three of them: osCommerce, Magento, OpenCart. One more popular open source e-commerce solution is VirtueMart – an extension of the Joomla! CMS which extends the standard functional of this popular open source content management system.

osCommerce (“open source Commerce”) has been used for development of online stores for quite a long time as this e-commerce and online store-management software program is one of the first free e-commerce solutions. osCommerce is written in PHP, and it uses MySQL DBMS for user data storage and management. Today osCommerce is available with a minimal set of functional features only, and if you need to extend its functional, you should use modules created by third-party developers.

The Magento CMS has the only one free version available – the Magento Community Edition. This edition includes all necessary basic functions for e-commerce. The company that owns Magento formerly used to work with osCommerce, and Magento was supposed to be a fork of osCommerce. The Magento Community Edition is unsupported and has no guarantee.

OpenCart is one of the newest e-commerce solutions. Its main distinctive feature is active usage of modern web development technologies, such as AJAX. As many other content management systems, it is written in PHP. OpenCart can boast of a lot of functional features that allow to build online shops without any necessity to use additional modules or extensions created by third-party developers.

VirtueMart is one of the most popular open source e-commerce solutions. This script is an extension to the Joomla! content management system. It allows to create full-function online shops to suite any taste. As VirtueMart is an open source solution, developers can make changes into its source code in order to create custom solutions for every particular project.