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According to Statista, revenue in the e-commerce market is predicted to reach US$2,723,991 m in 2021. An e-commerce platform allows you to run a business by creating an online store. Some people think owning an e-commerce business would be very expensive, but this is not the reality.
Many e-commerce frameworks are inexpensive and free, and open-source platforms are managed and developed by expert people around the world. If you want to make your e-commerce website, then you are at the right place. Here, I will be discussing several open-source e-commerce platforms for building an e-commerce website.
Why people choose an open-source E-commerce platform? Because it is free, filled with many unique features, and most importantly, it’s e-commerce developers-friendly.
Let’s discuss the best open-source e-commerce platforms in 2021:
Magento Commerce
Magento Commerce is a PHP-based one of the best e-commerce platforms for developing an e-commerce site. It has two versions Magento 1 and Magento 2. The user needs to have good hands-on experience in PHP language for creating an e-commerce website.
Magento offers several tools to promote your brand, like SEO, user content, communication, etc. There are several other benefits of using Magento like:
- Inventory Management
- Mobile Commerce and B2B commerce
- Page Builder
- Instant Purchase
- Open & Customizable
- Cloud Deployment
- Security & Trust
- Performance & Scale
- Order Management & Customer Service
These are some important features of Magento, and these features are the reason why people choose Magento. If you face problems in developing an e-commerce site using Magento, you can hire Magento e-commerce developers from esteemed companies.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is another one of the best open-source e-commerce platforms. WooCommerce is a WordPress-based site, and those who know how to work with WordPress will not consume much time in making a great WooCommerce website.
According to Statista, WooCommerce was the worldwide leading e-commerce software platform in 2020, with a market share of 28.24 percent.
As WooCommerce is built on WordPress, the development of WooCommerce has become easy. Let’s see how it became easy for development?
- Built on WordPress
- Rest API
- Documentation
- Completely open-source and managed on GitHub
WooCommerce is known for its beautiful Store where people can find anything they want without facing any trouble. The Store is equipped with these features:
- Colorful themes
- Unrestricted customization
- Sorting and Filtering of product
- Built-in Blogging
- Unlimited images and galleries
- Unlimited Products
These are just a few features that give WooCommerce enough reputation so that people who are looking to build an e-commerce site can choose WooCommerce without a doubt. If still finding difficulties in creating a website, you can hire WooCommerce developers to help you in making a unique e-commerce website.
PrestaShop
Adding another one to the list, PrestaShop is an open-source and free platform for managing an e-commerce site. PrestaShop can fit into small, middle, or large enterprises. If you lack any certain functionality, you can directly go for extensions or plugins at the PrestaShop marketplace that gives an extensive selection, both paid and free.
Some important features of PrestaShop:
- Create categories & subcategories
- Track the inventory of each product
- Configure your internal search engine
- Inform your customers about your Store
- SEO Friendly
- Highlight your most popular product
- Activate / Deactivate iFrames & HTML purifier
- Run caches
- Create a set of API keys and configure the permissions
- Create SQL queries
PrestaShop is among the best open-source e-commerce platform. If you see it challenging to develop an e-commerce website, you can take help from a custom e-commerce software development company.
Related Blog: Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms for Start-ups, Enterprises, and Small Business
nopCommerce
nopCommerce is yet another open-source e-Commerce platform for building online stores. This platform is based on the Microsoft ASP.NET language, and every 6-7 months, nopCommerce releases an update so that the software keeps up with the latest technologies and development trends.
In nopCommerce, you can upload as many products as you want, manage several stores from one admin panel, and increase sales with marketing tools.
Various features of using nopCommerce for e-commerce website:
- Mobile Commerce
- Can use Multi-store in a single installation of nopCommerce
- Stock Management
- Product Attributes
- Multi images per product
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Blogging
- Discounts & Coupons
- Multi payment methods
- Built on secure technologies
- Extremely secure and compliance
CS-Cart Software
CS-Cart software is among the most featured e-commerce platforms, which has many features to make your e-commerce website more attractive. CS-Cart Software is powering 35,000 B2C in almost 172 countries since 2005.
Why should you choose this platform?
- Cheap development cost
- SEO Friendly
- Super Adaptable
- Friendly Technical Support
- Secure
- Tools to boost sale
- Multiple Storefront
- Promotions, reward points, and many more.
Based on the best open source technologies, such as PHP, MySQL, Smarty template engine, and many others, all solutions are packed with the latest and most powerful tools and features to ensure only a positive e-commerce experience. CS-Cart-powered web stores are both easy to manage and control for administrators and engaging and suitable for customers.
OpenCart
Opencart is pretty easy to use and lightweight compared to other open-source platforms. It’s free, and it also has a decent community to turn to if you have problems designing your Store.
According to cloudways, Opencart has 6% of the market share in the United States.
I suggest it for startups as it doesn’t take too much time to customize the website from scratch. OpenCart is featured with more than 13000 modules and themes. Let’s check out more impressive features of OpenCart:
- Opencart has an Administrator Dashboard.
- Featured with Multi stores
- Various options & Attributes
- Upload Unlimited Products & Categories
- Multi-Currency
- Available in more than 40 languages
- Sales report
- SEO Friendly
Opencart is among the best e-commerce platform, which most of the Opencart developers suggest. With the features listed above, it surely gives the outcomes more than expected.
Drupal
Drupal is the most common open-source alternative to go with while designing any website. Drupal is a close competitor of WordPress, and it is fully open-source with no premium version of it. The new version of Drupal has improved product administration, User-driven API, and Query access filtering.
The features of Drupal make the website faster, complete, and easier to administrate. There are many options for site enhancement available to customize your e-commerce site. Let’s discuss some other Drupal’s benefits:
- Adaptable
- Continuously innovating
- Socially connected
- Very much Flexible
- Mobile Friendly
- 24*7 support
- It is integrated with payment gateways, fulfillment services, accounting applications, social networks, and much more.
With these features listed above, it becomes easy for anyone to make an e-commerce website. If you find it difficult to develop an e-commerce website, You can connect with a custom e-commerce software development company specializing in creating unique e-commerce websites.
Square Online
Square Online is an excellent open-source e-commerce platform. And So far, several people are aware that Square increasingly facilitates merchants dealing with physical businesses, restaurants, coffee shops, and so forth. While that’s pretty accurate, it turns out that Square has now grown to be much more than that.
Let’s know some benefits of Square online:
- Very easy to set up the e-commerce sites
- Square is a large selling platform that facilitates both online and offline selling.
- Inventory management and tracking
- A free URL
- Free unlimited hosting
- All-in-one payment system
- Easy to load up products
- Great for linking your POS and online Store
If you are thinking of starting an e-commerce site, you can definitely depend upon Square because it is effortless to make e-commerce websites. Still, if you want to add unique features to your website to make it more attractive, you can hire e-commerce developers.
Read More: A Comprehensive Guide To Launch eCommerce Business In 2021
Wrapping Up
With lots of options, it is always hard to choose the best one. All the open-source e-commerce platforms discussed above have unique features, which help make attractive e-commerce websites.
Some e-commerce platforms are suited more to big enterprises, while some for small shop owners or small business but the value they provide to the companies or enterprises are out of the competition. These platforms are so rich in features that they have in-built features for marketing, helping you increase your business.
Those people who don’t have a technical background always worry about developing e-commerce sites, so to help them, a custom e-commerce software development company makes their websites and guides them on how to utilize the website to make the best outcome.
You can also hire e-commerce developers from a named company like ValueCoders, which has done 4200+ projects and served more than 2500 clients.
