Many of our clients run e-commerce businesses and need a reliable shopping cart platform to not only manage their inventory, but allow for easy use and purchase ability for customers.

Sometimes they come to us with the shopping cart solution they want already in mind, or paid for and ready to go. And sometimes they come to us just with questions about what they should use, and preferably one they will not have to pay for.

 

Well the good news is that there are shopping cart solutions that are free, and in my opinion they are better then ones that cost money.

First off let me show you the free shopping cart solutions:

Zen Cart - Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The e commerce web site design program is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e commerce web design could be and should be done differently.

OSCommerce - OSCommerce is an Open Source based online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.

OpenCart - OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.

Now that you know the free solutions, which ones is the best you ask? Well it is hard to determine the best one when it all really depends on what you want it to do, but in my experience Zen Cart is the best, most reliable shopping cart solution that doesn’t cost a dime to use.

Zen Cart works on a template system that allows you to easily control the look of your website, and if you already have a template made up, you can just apply it to the index dot php page and it will surround your entire store with your template. You will have to tweak the header information, like the meta tags and style sheets, so it only appears once and not twice inside of the template, but besides that it should only take a few minutes.

Installing Your Free Shopping Cart

Many business owners think “Ok, it’s free but installing and maintaining it must be a pain in the butt!” Well the fact of the matter is, Zen cart, and the others have an easy self install process, and practically maintain themselves. All you need to really make sure is that you backup your website files and the MySQL database used for your shopping cart, at least once a week.

This ensures that if your cart software ever becomes corrupted, or hacked into, you just change the passwords for the website and databases, then just re upload your backup to your web sites server (host).

Setting Up Payment Processing

After you install your shopping cart, and have products added for people to buy, you need to setup your payment processing. With those free shopping carts I mentioned above, the setup process for this is really easy and requires you to just input your information for your credit card processor or PayPal.

You are also allowed to let your customers pay you by check or money order, so you can enable that too and just input the business address that you want to receive the check or money order. When setting this up, you also want to make sure you input your local and tax information, along with your shipping rates.

Important Reminders

One thing to keep in mind about shopping carts is that if you want to process the transactions on your actual website, you will need a dedicated secure connection, along with a security certificate for it. This basically means that when your customers are checking out, they will be at your secure domain, which would look like this: https://www.yourwebsite.com

Now of course you are not required to have a secure connection or certificate, but you are going to have a hard time gaining your visitors trust if you don’t. Plus they only cost around two hundred dollars this day in age, so it really is not that big of deal to buy one.

There are a few cheap ways around it though, for example buying a cheap shared hosting account, and having your secure connection shared, not dedicated. This basically means instead of having it say “www.yourwebsite.com” in the address bar, it will usually display your web servers directory structure, which is usually something like “/username/public_html/subfolder”.

Another way is to just use a third party payment processor like PayPal to process your transactions. This means whenever the customer is about to pay for your product or service on your website, they will be taken to a secure PayPal page to pay.

Either way is fine really for new businesses, but in the long run it is almost a must to have a secure domain and certificate for your shopping cart.

Paid For Shopping Cart Solution

If you would still feel better about paying for shopping cart software, or just don’t want to deal with installing and maintaining it, then I recommend you go with the 3DCart shopping cart software.