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Best Open-Source Shopping Carts and Online Catalogs

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Did you know that there are hundreds of options for open-source shopping carts and online catalogs? I didn’t. It almost seems like there are too many options.

Since we are talking open source, there is little competition or cooperation across programming languages. You can also build your shopping cart on top of various CMS. This yields a lot of variety, and since nobody wants to learn a new language or framework to work on a project without revenue, there is no incentive to consolidate.

I am one of the rare programmers that knows a little bit of a lot of languages, but has not committed to one yet. I want to help out with a great project and make it better, and at this point all options are open. The ideal project would have a wide, but solid foundation, designed with growth in mind.

So now I am calling out into open space to ask anyone that knows a shopping cart, online catalog, e-commerce, etc. project well to contact me and pitch why I should join the project. If you are building or using open source software in this category that you can honestly say is best of class, please let me know.

Here is what I have found so far. You will notice several of these work with WordPress. I started here because WordPress is the definition of a great open-source project, but I am open.

I have also found a few blogs etc. discussing choice of shopping carts.

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December 10th, 2008 | Category: Technology for Dummies and for Geeks | 18 comments
  1. OutsourceAccounting posted the following on December 24, 2008 at 2:53 am.

    Thanks for the info

  2. Jedz Titan Koffer posted the following on December 28, 2008 at 10:29 am.

    This is a good list. I’m just not sure if a paid plugin or free is better…

  3. London Tours posted the following on December 31, 2008 at 9:17 am.

    This is a great list… but you are missing oscommerce which is also a great, free open source shopping cart system.

  4. shopping online posted the following on January 6, 2009 at 11:17 pm.

    I used to use oscommerce easy but look difficult for me. I mean difficult to customize (or may be I’m not expert in CMS)

    I think for the new trend it should be wp shopping because wp is the best for seo blog. It should be help to get traffic and get sale in the long term.

  5. Paul Bauer posted the following on January 15, 2009 at 7:18 pm.

    That is good to know if I decide to open my online store. I like anything open source

  6. Silke posted the following on January 22, 2009 at 7:16 am.

    thank you for that tip! I

  7. oscommerce posted the following on January 25, 2009 at 8:19 am.

    Oscommerce…..I love it….plenty of modules and easy to program too.

  8. Website Optimisation posted the following on February 1, 2009 at 3:33 pm.

    Thanks for this useful article. I’ve used OSCommerce and Zen-Cart before but actually prefer sites that are built from scratch and then link into a free online cart system such as Mals E-commerce (www.mals-e.com) as this gives complete freedom of design.

  9. Karl Cook posted the following on February 5, 2009 at 2:59 am.

    I’m using Zen Cart and OS Commerce. They are one of the best shopping cart I found on the web.

  10. Secure Online Shop posted the following on February 5, 2009 at 4:31 am.

    And there was me about to sign up for another paid version of Roman Cart. Can anyone with a bit of techy know-how recommend which of these is the easiest to set-up if you don’t have the aforementioned know-how? And also if any of them will work with WebPlus 10?

  11. Shop Magnetarmband posted the following on February 22, 2009 at 3:22 pm.

    These blogs are really good sources if you want to compare diiferent open source shopping carts. I’ve been using zen cart and i can say I am definitely satisfied with it.

  12. Really Easy Ecommerce Shopping Cart posted the following on February 23, 2009 at 4:10 pm.

    Fantastic selection of carts here.
    Really Easy Cart is another great shopping cart system that also offers an amazingly simple CMS

  13. herry posted the following on February 27, 2009 at 9:13 am.

    thx for the best open source link bro… it was very useful for me….

  14. Jason R Briggs posted the following on March 2, 2009 at 3:06 pm.

    Minor correction for you: the link to my site (http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/projects/yak-for-wordpress/) is not a discussion about “a choice of shopping cart” — rather it’s the project page for the YAK shopping cart for WordPress. So perhaps belongs in the first list.

  15. Antonie Potgieter posted the following on March 4, 2009 at 5:26 am.

    Hi there. Thank you for listing the Tribulant WordPress shopping cart plugin! Best, Antonie

  16. Lesya posted the following on June 26, 2009 at 10:07 am.

    Another great open-source shopping cart is cubecart – it’s worth mentioning. If you want to use this shopping cart you can easily switch to it with cart2cart web service. It automates data migration to cubecart http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com

  17. Online Shopping posted the following on July 18, 2009 at 6:39 pm.

    Great article,

    We use Zen cart, but have thought about swapping our shopping cart for a while now,

    Thanks

  18. Louis Vuitton Handbags and Wallets posted the following on July 20, 2009 at 2:06 pm.

    Keep working, great job, I love it!

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