Most Popular Open Source eCommerce Platforms of the Year 2016

1. Most Popular Open Source eCommerce Platforms of the Year 2016 • One of the most vital things when starting up an e-com venture is to choose the right e-commerce engine. One of the common options chosen by the e-com owners is Magentoand PrestaShop as they are considered to be good systems that cater the best bases for many thousands of online stores. Apart from the two, there are other open source ecommerce engines, which make choosing the best one for your e-com venture a difficult task. After all, these have both the strengths and weaknesses. Nevertheless, no need to worry, as the post will help you giving a comprehensive list of these e-com engines along with its pros and cons, which will help you to find the right one as under: • Magento • Magento is among the dominant engines in the list of open source ecommerce platformsand is popular both in the big and mid-size businesses. It has the capability to manage a huge amount of traffic and products and other asset of this platform is it can integrate to a wide range of software programs and apps. It comes in two editions – enterprise edition or EE and the Community Edition (CE). The former is designed for big businesses and have loads of features including marketing solution, training, support and consulting services. However, it can cost you around 18,000 dollars per year, which is not the case with the other edition (CE). The latter is free and come along with open source code that helps you to build your online store. • Pros • Majority of developers are well versed with Magento • It is scalable

2. It has loads of integrations or extensions Cons • It is expensive (for business online stores) • It demands additional skills and developers WooCommerce It is for sure another big player in the open source ecommerce engine game. What really makes it different from the others is that it is actually a WordPress plugin instead of an independent system. WP is one of the most common CMS used in it, which means that there are loads of website based based on it. If you are the user of WordPress, it becomes simple to start using WooCommerce and in case if you are not, you need to download WP and start using it. • Pros • It is inexpensive • It is simple to start with • Plugin Cons • It is not scalable • Locked to the given features • Lack of documentation & • Poor customer support PrestaShop It is yet another commonly used open source ecommerce engines. It has one of the biggest and most active communities that keep on contributing the systems along with adding a wide range of extensions. The community also helps in finding quick solutions for various technical issues and challenges. It is found in both the free software download and cloud service in which you would require to set up your own hosting. For more changes and possibility via access to the code you would be keen to use the self-hosted version. Pros • Free Core • Very Large and Active Community • Loads of Extensions or Integrations • Cloud and Self Hosted Versions

3. PrestaShop Cons • You Need Developers/Skills for Self-Hosted • It has Expensive Extensions/Integrations • It is also Slow OpenCart The other most common open source ecommerce engine is OpenCart developemnt, which we see a huge number of online stores using it. Unlike the above discussed PrestaShop, it is also known to have a huge community supporting the developers who are keen to improve the platform. Like the Magento, it also runs on the PHP code and can help you in finding out the best system you need for programming or while adding other things with it. Pros • It has a Large and Active Community • It is simple to Setup and Use • It has loads of Extensions/Integrations • It gives you a Good Customer Service Cons • OpenCart works very well for small to medium sized stores, but it lacks some scalability aspects for enterprise level stores. • Support for SEO is basic, and it can be enhanced with extensions. • Caching is not provided by OpenCart, and must be added using an extension for improving performance. Conclusion You can further explore the above and other open source ecommerce engines and further compare the same with other. This will certainly help you in finding the best for you. The above are some of the common ones, which will give you a good idea about choosing the right open source platform for your ecommerce store.