As security becomes more refined and customer prejudices are overcome and consumer confidence established, many developers and designers are finding their clients and employers want to explore ecommerce opportunities.There’s a lot involved. The online buying and selling of products and services can demand expertise with in fields including electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, electronic data interchange (EDI), online transaction processing, client-side and server-side validation, mobile commerce, Internet marketing, automated-data collection systems, and inventory management systems.It’s not surprising that the provision of ecommerce software itself drives an enthusiastic and sometimes aggressive market. Some long term providers have sustained themselves, some newer providers draw on new technology and smart marketing, and there are always one or two that are flavor of the month.
Let’s take a brief look at who’s doing what.
Here’s a quick guide to 15 of the most widely used ecommerce frameworks, platforms and solutions.
While they all come with amazing sets of features and options facilitating the easy creation of an online store, they do also each have particular strengths.
Have a look and find the one that suits your needs the best.
Magento is the undoubtedly the most popular and arguably the best open-source shopping cart framework, with advanced stats, customer groups’ management, a nice admin interface, and loads of payment gateways for seamless shopping experience.
This robust, professional open-source e-commerce framework comes with loads of features and an appealing admin interface that can be easily downloaded, installed and used free of cost. Prestashop on the back end comes with a fully-featured back-office application that can help manage your online business (including inventory, orders, shipping, and customers) in real-time. Here, you can easily send your customer’s payments directly to your commercial bank account using the latest security technology.
This open-source shopping cart is really easy to install, customise and manage install. Besides, it comes with a newsletter manager, discount coupons, gift certificates and all the basic features that make it a great ecommerce platform.
This is an extremely scalable and attractive e-commerce framework that will help you use multiple languages, accept multiple currencies, create an unlimited number of categories, sell an unlimited number of products, and choose from over 20 payment and 8 shipping methods. Besides it is user-friendly as well as SEO-friendly, which will help you gain prominence in the search engine.
This framework allows the selling of products on Facebook and eBay, or on your own store. If you want to get the option of selling unlimited products on your website, you may opt for a Platinum Plan for $149.95/month. There is also a free 15-day trial option in case you wish to explore the possibilities with BigCommerce, before making the actual purchase.
This all-in-one hosted e-commerce platform offers a fairly competitive pricing and 14-day free trial as well. It also offers value-added services like 24×7 support too.
This open source e-commerce solution designed to work alongside Joomla! integrates well with the CMS and takes advantage of the Ajax technology. This neat cart besides allowing customers to buy things makes them comfortable by letting them create an account, add addresses and access their order history. It also supports multiple currencies and languages, including unlimited products and categories.
This framework that comes with reasonable pricing and a free trial allows you to create templates quickly from scratch for your own online store. It offers great features like safe shopping carts, e-commerce templates, plus web hosting.
So, which is your favorite e-commerce framework?