Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Forward is a full-featured, developer centric e-commerce platform that makes custom code easy, with powerful templates & expressive syntax. Every business needs a custom admin interface to fit its process. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding one more field to the shipment page and packing slip. Not having it leads to expensive workarounds or lost revenue.

It should be easy to build or customize your admin interface. Forward is built exactly the same way you would build a front-end store template, without complex programming. Design is important here too, so it’s developed with Twitter Bootstrap to make things easier. Combined with MongoDB by default, it’s now easier than ever to customize admin screens without complex schemas, or database migrations.

It is scheduled for public release in 2013. The code will be 100% free forever. You can also take a look at other eCommerce Solutions we mentioned some time ago.

Requirements: PHP, MongoDB
Demo: http://getfwd.com/
License: Apache License

Stripe is a simple, developer-friendly way to accept payments online. They believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, and they want to help put more websites in business. You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account.

With wrappers in Ruby, PHP, Python and more, you can get started in minutes. 2.9% + 30 cents per successful charge. No setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money. Earnings are transferred to your bank account on a 7 day rolling basis.

Stripe powers commerce for thousands of sites across the web. Their users include large companies, rapidly-growing start-ups, side projects, and everything in between. I think it could be a great alternative to PayPal. However, it’s only available to US and Canada now.

Requirements: -
Download Link: https://stripe.com/
License: License Free

Ecommerce stores have etched themselves in the heart and mind of modern consumers. They have changed the way we used to shop, and for some people they have made it easier to buy happiness. And every other day we see some ecommerce stores taking birth; we see the rise of some and the fall of some. Some, as we all know, have become apparently evergreen.

Needless to say, the future is ecommerce – whether it’s done on mobile, tablet or desktop. So, here’s to some inspirational, enviable ecommerce stores!

1. ebay

No story of ecommerce is complete without eBay. It has also given small businesses the opportunity to sell their products without creating a site of their own.

2. Nike

Nike’s is possibly the most attractive online store. It has a lot of call-to-action quotient in it. (more…)

If you are a creative person, you create a lot of content. But most of it sits, archived, on some computer somewhere for the rest of time. It’s either too hard, or too time-consuming, or it doesn’t even make sense to put in a store! Gumroad is a relatively new eCommerce platform that let you easily sell the stuff you haven’t been able to, yet.

You can price a link for as little as $1, and as much as $1,000. They support all major credit cards. That includes Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club cards. They take 5% + $0.30 of each transaction. There are no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no bandwidth fees.

You can also take a look at other Open Source Ecommerce Platforms we mentioned some time ago.

Requirements: -
Demo: https://gumroad.com/
License: License Free

PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments today. The ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account with a traditional payment gateway is probably the number one reason for its popularity, with a close second being the comprehensive API that PayPal provides for its payment services.

SmashingMagazine has published a really useful article: Getting Started With The PayPal API for building E-Commerce sites or Web Applications. In the article, they will break down some of the techniques and approaches to working with the PayPal API, in order to make integration and troubleshooting simpler and easier.

Source: Getting Started With The PayPal API

Recurly.js is an open-source Javascript library for creating great looking credit card forms to securely create subscriptions, one-time transactions, and update billing information using Recurly. The library performs in-line validation, real-time total calculations, and gracefully handles errors.

Your customer stays on your website while their billing information is securely sent to Recurly for approval. Because the cardholder data is sent directly to Recurly, your PCI compliance scope is dramatically reduced. The Recurly.js project also includes examples for updating billing information and performing one-time transactions.

Requirements: jQuery 1.5.2+
Demo: http://js.recurly.com/
License: MIT License

Avactis Shopping Cart is an easy to use ecommerce software that allows you to open an online store on the Internet. Compared to other similar software, Avactis offers a unique advantage of very simple integration of the online store into your existing site.

Avactis has just released Avactis 2, with a brand new Visual CSS editor and Visual layout editor. Using the visual CSS editor you will be able to easily and quickly change the store design. You can check out this video tutorial which shows how easy to modify the theme using CSS editor. Visual layout editor allows you to move page elements in drag-n-drop mode.

Avactis 2 also supports Price-based discounting, Affiliate tracking of orders, Advanced newsletter management, Quick checkout, Wish List and Gift Certificates. Avactis 2 is not free, but you can try out their free shopping cart with limited features.

When it comes to open source ecommerce platforms, there are plenty to choose from. Here, we take a close look at the 15 best available, which should help guide you in the right direction. I’m not going to lie- finding the perfect platform is not easy.

Each one has its own set of pros and cons and has been designed with a slightly different user in mind. Uploading products and customising your store can be very time consuming, so make sure you have given several platforms a try before you make that final decision and integrate one into your site.

1. Magento (free)

You’ve only got to look at Magento’s client list to realise what an excellent piece of open-source software it is. Samsung, The North Face, Stussy and Nespresso all use it to power their online stores. It’s used by 30,000 merchants and is the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform. You have to pay for the Enterprise Edition, which is packed full of extremely useful features, but the Community Edition, meant for developers only, is free to download and use.

2. osCommerce (free)

osCommerce is absolutely free under the GNU General Public License and caters very well to most people’s needs. Unsurprisingly, considering how easy it is to set up and run, it’s extremely popular, powering over 228,700 online stores. Such popularity does come with a significant downside however- it makes it harder for you to differentiate your store from the thousands of others out there. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you’re going to need to use some of the 5,800 add-ons available, some of which cost money. (more…)

TomatoCart is the new generation of open source shopping cart solution. It is branched from osCommerce 3 as a separate project. As web applications become more and more sophisticated, modern web 2.0 technology such as Ajax and Rich Internet Applications offers significant usability improvements and makes interacting with the web interfaces faster and more efficient. They have compared a lot of frameworks and come to the conclusion that ExtJS is the best framework for TomatoCart.

They completely rewrite osCommerce 3 administration site based on the qWikiOffice project which is a web desktop implementation of the ExtJS RIA framework. Web desktop application mimics user experience of desktop Operating System, offering features and applications similar to a PC environment. So that users can easily start to work with TomatoCart without any difficulty.

One of the core features of TomatoCart is that it allows users to keep several windows open simultaneously, to enable users to work with several modules such as products, customers and orders at the same time.

Requirements: PHP v5.1.6+ (with MySQLi), MySQL v4.1.13+ or v5.0.7+
Demo: http://www.tomatocart.com/index.php/products/store-demo
License: GPL License