In the world of technology that we thrive in today, starting a successful online business is not just a dream anymore. Reality is better today than it ever was. There are dozens of ways one can start their online store and start earning.
There are online clients that provide completely automated setup to build an online store, where you do not require any prior coding knowledge or programming skills. On the other hand, there are numerous open source e-commerce platforms that offer businesses an inexpensive and customizable option for launching an online store.
There are many open source platforms providing active support communities and scalability, for growth.
Here are 20 open source e-commerce platforms, both new and established, that contain core features and also contribute to add-ons. Most of these open source community solutions have enterprise platforms for larger players in the industry also.
WP eCommerce:- WP eCommerce is one popular e-commerce platform that has been around for a long time and made for WordPress. You get to choose from free gateways such as ProPay, PayPal, and Worldpay, or choose premium payment gateways such as Stripe and Authorize.Net. With WP eCommerce, you get a wide variety of features, including built-in marketing tools, multi-tier pricing, built-in shipping tools, and integration with popular couriers.
Drupal Commerce:- Drupal Commerce, an open source, flexible e-commerce platform built on Drupal 7, a content management system, offers its users a complete product administration system, shopping cart, and checkout form. There is in-built support for multiple languages and currencies out of the box, with additional e-commerce features and usability enhancements provided by contributed modules.
WooCommerce:- Another more such popular platform when it comes to building an online store is WooCommerce. It is the most popular e-commerce platform, with nearly 31 million downloads powering approximately one-fourth of all online stores. It was originally a developer of WordPress themes. The entire platform is built on WordPress framework. WooCommerce is highly customizable, containing more than 400 official extensions and similar plugins.
Reaction Commerce:- Not many people might have heard about Reaction Commerce. It is a fast, scalable, real-time reactive, and open source e-commerce platform built on Node.js framework. You can heavily customize your store with the help from a Node.js development company in order to get complete control over your store. It is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can create personal experiences for each user with real-time analytics from the admin panel, either by yourself or you can simply hire Node.js developer to help you with the necessary tweaks.
Sylius:- Sylius was initially a family company selling cosmetics that began its operations around 2010. Unfortunately, the company went out of business. However, the e-commerce component survived and it managed to gather a strong following of developers. The first beta release was in 2016, and today the project now has over 400 contributors with more than 4 million downloads.
nopCommerce:- nopCommerce powers corporate and small business sites, selling physical and digital goods. nopCommerce provides a variety of checkout options — one-page checkout, anonymous checkout, the addition of checkout attributes, and more. Featuring an active community of users and developers, nopCommerce is used by over 27,000 storeowners and has been downloaded nearly 2 million times.
OroCommerce:- Another open source B2B e-commerce platform that helps drive online business growth, improve customer experience, and reduce total cost of ownership. OroCommerce has a community edition and an enterprise edition. The features on this platform includes shopping list management, buyer-seller interaction, multiple currencies, multiple warehouse management, scalability, Elasticsearch, forums, and more.
Conclusion
Starting an online business today is easy. Sustaining what you started in exactly the same way as your customers desire is where the real catch is. And this is where platforms like these come in. They not only help you build an online store, but also help you in maintaining it.