Currently there are some mainstream open source shopping carts there: magento, oscommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen-cart, Opencart, Prestashop, and two CMS+shopping carts: joomla & virtuemart, and drupal & ecommerce.
It is important to know when selecting your shopping cart what features you need. All the shopping carts below feature the following:
· Customer management
· Product management
· Variety of payment and shipping modules
· Order receipt emails
· Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process
However the shopping carts vary when it comes to:
· Time it takes to modify the cart to look like a current web design
· WYSIWYG ability to modify product descriptions using different fonts, colors, etc.
· Ability to import/export from Excel spreadsheet
· Wholesale/Reseller Pricing
Before choosing the right one, you need to do a competition analysis to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your business, current competitors and potential competitors. The analysis helps a business assess opportunities and threats as well as providing help creating business strategies, including the implementation and monitoring of them, to select the right tool, shopping cart, to enhance your online business.
Make sure you know your targeted features of shopping carts before beginning a competition analysis. The solid base of information that comes from a strong competitive analysis can provide insights to your product and positioning, and help you determine which areas in your market you can succeed the most as well as what places you shouldn’t worry about. And that is one of the best ways to successfully choose a suitable shopping cart.
