22 ecommerce platforms to sell your products online
So you are looking to sell some products on the Internet and you don’t know where to start? Then this article is for you, but also for designers looking for the best ecommerce technology solution to offer their clients. Let me know in the comments if I forgot something.
Simple e-Commerce solutions
Are you only going to sell a few downloads? Then you shouldn’t install heavy ecommerce scripts, just go with one of the following platforms that allows you to sell online (but keep in mind that these solutions are limited).
E-junkie
For anyone willing to sell a few digital downloads, E-junkie is the perfect solution. Their service takes care of handling all the hard of shopping cart and sales handling. You can also sell tangible good and then they’ll take care of handling things like taxes, shipping or handling calculation. E-junkie also make it easy to create affiliate programs for your products.
FatFreeCart
Developed by the E-junkie team, FatFreeCart is simple free cart to sell stuff using PayPal and Google Checkout. Simply copy-paste their code and modify it with your products, that’s it!
Big Cartel
The solution for designers and artists willing to extend their business by selling their art, it’s quite cheap and worth a look.
Adding a shop to your WordPress blog
You run a popular blog using WordPress and you want to extend it by adding a small shop, this is fairly easy since there is several solutions to do so.
WordPress e-Commerce plugin
The most famous e-Commerce solution for WordPress, free for most with the possibility to extend functionalities with the Golden Cart solution. A good solution that integrates well into WordPress.
eShop
Accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, coming with a lot of interesting features such as statistics, order handling or configurable email templates. It is also compatible with WordPress MU and Google Base.
Shopp
Not free but great and easy, Shopp has some great features, is powerfuly easy to manage and has a great set of promotional tools. It also integrates perfectly with WordPress and provides well-documented templates tags.
WordPress MiniCart
The solution for very light-weight commerce in WordPress, it’s a mini-shopping-cart for your blog. You can add items from the admin side and embed the cart into posts. This can also be used as a donation plugin.
Adding a shopping cart to popular CMS and frameworks
These solutions are for those of you who are using one of the popular CMS and would like to improve it with a shop.
Drupal & e-Commerce
Drupal basically has two e-Commerce module that are developed for it: Ubercart & Drupal e-Commerce.
- Ubercart
The most user-friendly of the two, with a dynamic community and lots of features. - Drupal e-Commerce
Create your online store with this configurable set of Drupal modules.
E-Commerce for Joomla
VirtueMart is an Open Source E-Commerce solution to be used together with Joomla! (and Mambo). It integrates well with the CMS and takes advantage of the Ajax technology, product feeds and much more…
SilverStripe
Good news, SilverStripe doesn’t need to install any modules to do e-commerce, it’s built-in. Definitly a good reason to give a try to that popular CMS. It does have modules available if you want to extend the e-commerce capabilities though.
Django webshop with Satchmo
Although Django is probably more used by programmers than designers, you could be interested to know about Satchmo, its shopping cart. It is a flexible and robust application that will be perfect to go with your Django-based website.
E-Commerce with Ruby On Rails
Coming with gorgeous default shop template and admin template, Spree uses the power of Ruby On Rails to create a flexible and powerful shopping cart. It has built-in Google Analytics integration and support over 50 payment gateways.
Open source e-Commerce scripts
These are probably the best solutions for a complete e-commerce website wit a lot of features, all you’ll need is to spend time and have some coding knowledge.
Magento
In my humble opinion, Magento is the best open-source shopping cart script out there. It has advanced stats, customer groups management, tons of payment gateways, a nice admin interface, and much more… On the downside you could say that the theming learning curve is quite steep.
PrestaShop
PretsaShop is a professional open-source e-commerce software with tons of features and a good-looking admin interface. Translatable, disgressive pricing options, SMS alerts and much more…
ZenCart
Open-source shopping cart maintained by an active community of developers. It is really easy to install and design, and lets you create newsletters, coupons or gift certificates. Definitely worth a try despite its not so good-looking user interface.
Paid e-Commerce platforms
If you are not willing or unable to spend a lot of time on tweaking and customizing an open-source script, these solutions may be the right ones for you.
Shopify
With a reasonable pricing and free trial, it’s not to risky to give a try to Shopify. They let you create templates for scratch and take care of all the heavy work, good solution for the non tech-saavy designers out there.
Foxycart
Just like Shopify, Foxycart will take care of the backend of your ecommerce website and give you all the promotional tools and payment handling options you need (or almost). It is built to integrate to any CMS you may be using.
Selling on other platforms
If you just want to focus on your work and not bother with any kind of technical setup, you should be happy with some of these solutions.
CafePress!
If you are looking to sell T-shirts or other items like mugs or calendars, CafePress is the right place. All you have to do is design, they’ll take care of all the printing, shipping and the rest.
Lulu
Are you looking to publish your own book or calendar, Lulu should be the right solution. It allows you to be a self-publisher, letting you create gifts or selling calendars and other goods.
CreateSpace
CreateSpace is Amazon’s service to let you sell your books, music or films online. It does pretty much the same as Lulu, but the advantage is that your stuff will be available from Amazon.
DeviantArt
At last but not least, DeviantArt is a social network for designers and artists with a gigantic community. If you create artworks or photography, it lets you sell it as fine art prints or others.
Thanks for the list, its good to know what alternatives there are in e-commerce.
Magento does work wonders. Like you said though its a steep learning curve.
What about CubeCart.com ? They offer both free and paid solutions.
I love Magento. It’s working wonderful.
Thanks
Sankar
Have you ever seen Ecwid? http://www.ecwid.com
Very simple and free though it’s not an open source platform.
You should all check out Venda for Small Business platform. The best thing with that platform is that you can create a completely customised template for your sites look and feel and its completely Software as a Service, which is the future of software provision.
The webiste is: http://www.shop.venda.com, baby brother platform of the Platform that hosts Tesco cloting, TK Maxx, Laura Ashley, Monsoon, Sharp, JVC….the list goes on and on!
What are each of the options here like in terms of keeping user details secure? Are there any that should be avoided due to poor security?
Nice collection of carts, but you should have put Cube Cart on your list. It’s a very competent solution.
Missed htp://www.biencommerce.com and didn’t know silverstripe had one. Will have to look.
oops http://www.biencommerce.com – always miss that t…
Great writeup on ecommerce platforms Mirko. I’m glad to see that you covered a wide variety of different software/platforms and didn’t list the “typical” carts like Yahoo, ProStores, etc. There’s some really innovative systems out there so it’s more important than ever to know exactly what you need and where you’re headed before you decide on a shopping cart platform to use. Thanks again, look forward to more great posts like this.
Also check out http://www.phpurchase.com – It’s an easy to use wordpress ecommerce plugin with great support.
http://www.opencart.com/ is also a good open source solution
You missed my favorite cart: http://www.ecommercetemplates.com, and I’m going to checkout some of the others that others have mentioned.
That’s an awesome article, I was actually looking for an e-commerce platform and now it’s great I can review each one on this list. Thanks for sharing.
It’s launching pretty soon – http://www.getkout.com – perfect if you don’t want a front end store and want a checkout that actually looks good.
Magento is awesome though, but it does have a pretty steep learning curve.
Social Shopping Cart!
http://storenvy.com
You could also include tradebit.com and payfilez.com for selling digital products online. Also, if your product is designs, then you can sell designs on bigstockdesign.com
There is one very used, FREE, with tons of plugins, OSCommerce:
http://www.oscommerce.com/
There is one very used, FREE, with tons of plugins, OSCommerce:
http://www.oscommerce.com/
OS Commerce is missing – ithink the solution deserves to be on the list.
I found a company called paypro (www.payproglobal.com) after reading on them in one fo the blogs out there, they ware very helpful so far and responded quickly even to the dumb questions I had as a newbie
the list is not full
I do not see the avactis
Hey… guys are we missing zazzle.com in this list
I take it nobody likes Clickbank? Me either
My problem was recurring order, I used Ultracart and it provided me a very easy way to handle recurring order or payment in installment
We’ve got an ecommerce/cart feature built into our platform Boss which has been 9 years in the making and is available to Graphic Designers as part of our PSD to HTML to Build, Deploy & Maintain with life long support for you & your clients service.
See our portfolio: http://www.verb.co.nz/showcase/
Please, add yesoptions.com or masopciones.com (spanish version) to the list.
Thanks in advance.
Mark Thompson.
You can add OpenForCommerce to ‘Paid e-commerce platforms’. It’s a powerful SaaS that let you distribute not only physical products but digital contents too. It is a very good option: easy-to-use application and affordable.
http://www.microgenesis.es/en/node/254
You can share reviews to your shop at http://www.peryskop.pl/ They have 1.2 mln reviews for 30.000 products.
What about http://www.volusion.com ?
We saw the demo of Shopp for wordpress at NYC Wordcamp. That’s been at the top of our list ever since.
My favourite ecommerce software is http://www.bigcommerce.com. Has anyone else used it?
If you are just selling a few simple downloads, a good option is a
1. low cost hosted model
2. with good design templates and some
3. download functionlity.
You can defintely do this for around the $20-$30 per month.
Regards Jon
http://www.jonhos.com
Independent eCommerce Platform Selection Consultancy.
so,it’s usefull
Nice list. Nowadays many people love Magento but it requires a very good hosting.
We partner with a couple of different solutions. We love Volusion for basic startup sites. We can select a template, change the graphic design, and deploy in a very short period of time. Great flexibility – robust pricing and promotions, great affiliate marketing / seo support, ready made merchant services.
For more hardcore solutions that require lots of customization we like znode.
That’s nice , great post about ecommerce
yes, my site are made from zencart, it’s so cool. Thank you for the information!
Greetings,
I am just starting to build my site/blog over at Tumblr … is there a way to add a ‘buy now’ ‘add to cart’, etc button with a photo.
I have tried with paypal, I got he code and pasted in the HTML section but it just won’t appear.
How else can I sell items from my Tumblr page???
Please help, thanks in advance.