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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

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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

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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.

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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.

3. OpenCart (free)

Not only does OpenCart look great, it’s extremely scalable. You can create an unlimited number of categories, sell an unlimited number of products, accept multiple currencies, use multiple languages, and choose from over 20 payment and 8 shipping methods. It’s user-friendly and search-engine-friendly too, so will help your prominence in Google. Customers can even review and rate the items you sell. It’s not as popular as osCommerce, so help and guidance is not so freely available, but it’s a darn sight better looking.

4. Spree Commerce (free)

Spree is an open-source ecommerce platform for Ruby on Rails. Using Spree’s extension system, you’ll be able to customise your store and mark yourself out from your competitors. Useful features include support for over 50 payment gateways, single page checkout and custom tax logic, which can save merchants lots of time and effort. It also comes with Google Analytics built in.

5. PrestaShop (free)

PrestaShop is another robust, professional-grade e-Commerce solution that you can download, install, and use for free. On the back end, you’ll use a full-featured back-office application to manage your online business (including inventory, orders, shipping, and customers) in real-time. Your customer’s payments are sent directly to your commerical bank account using the latest security technology.

6. VirtueMart (free)

VirtueMart, which has been designed to work alongside Joomla!, is a really neat cart which customers feel instantly comfortable with. Not only does it let customers buy things, it lets them create an account, add addresses and access their order history. Multiple languages and currencies, and unlimited products and categories are supported. 2.5 million people have downloaded VirtueMart so far and the vast majority is happy with the results.

7. Ubercart (free)

Ubercart is specifically designed for people selling things like file downloads, event registrations, website access passes and event tickets, rather than physical products. Like VirtueMart, which must be integrated with Joomla!, Ubercart must be integrated with Drupal. Drupal users will feel comfortable choosing the ideal modules and themes to customise their shop with, but if you’re not a Drupal user, I suggest choosing a platform that’s a little more straightforward.

8. Zeuscart (free)

The best thing about Zeuscart is its user interface, which is rich, attractive, user-friendly and generally less boring than most of the open-source UIs that I have to look at on a daily basis. Designed with small and medium businesses in mind, users can make the most of SEO friendly URLs, gift cards, discounts, email templates and tier-pricing, which makes it possible to decrease prices for bulk orders.

9. Afcommerce (free)

If you want to keep your ecommerce platform really, really simple, then Afcommerce could be the option for you. It’s not particularly good looking, neither on the customer nor the user side, but it works right out of the box and is ideal for beginners. It has a speedy one-page checkout, customer help pop-up windows and customer accounts are generated automatically from orders.

10. Zen Cart (free)

Easy to install, easy to customise and easy to manage, Zen Cart is perfect for those who want a straightforward ecommerce platform without the fuss. It comes with a newsletter manager, discount coupons, gift certificates and all the basic features you’d expect. Users can make the most of the numerous add-ons available to customise their store and make their admin experience a little easier. Too many add-ons, however, and the UI does get rather cluttered, which is a downside of the platform.

11. SimpleCart js (free)

SimpleCart(js) 2.0 is no longer only for Paypal. It now works with Google Checkout as well. You can now add increment, decrement, and remove buttons to your cart. You can also rearrange items, change the HTML tags, do whatever you like to display your cart how you want. No databases, no programming, no headaches. A simple javascript shopping cart in under 20kb that you can setup in minutes. It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and completely customizable. All you need to know is basic HTML.

12. Tomato Cart (free)

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.

13. CubeCart (free)

CubeCart is great. It integrates really well into all kinds of sites and looks very professional from the customers’ point of view. CubeCart 3 is free and CubeCart 4, the premium platform, costs £110. There are a number of significant differences between the two: CubeCart 3 has 3 skins, CubeCart 4 has 5; CubeCart 3 has 4 payment steps, CubeCart 4 has 2; customer registration is mandatory in CubeCart 3, but optional in CubeCart 4 etc etc etc. I recommend investing in CubeCart 4 if you’re serious about using the platform for a long time, but suggest you give 3 a go first to see if you like the feel of it.

14. RokQuickCart (free)

RokQuickCart is a very, very simple cart for Joomla!. Its simplicity, however, is both a help and a hindrance as although it can be set up in minutes, it lacks some features which you’ll find in other platforms in this list, for example, it only accepts payments through PayPal and Google Checkout. Having said that, it generally looks good and product image display is impressive.

15. StoreSprite (free)

Despite being completely free, StoreSprite offers many features that you’d expect to find only on paid-for and more popular platforms. These include loyalty points, customer ratings and reviews, status notifications, order tracking, special offers, best sellers and shopper accounts. The main drawback of the platform is that your store will come with visible StoreSprite copyright notices, unless you pay to have them removed.

James Adams is a staff writer with Cartridge Save where he reviews products such as the HP 901. He also writes about design and marketing on their blog.

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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

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Ecwid is an Ajax e-commerce platforms, which offers the performance and flexibility you need, with no hassles at all. it is well designed and provides a smooth experience for store owners and end users alike. Ecwid provides a lightning-fast interface, drag and drop functionality, and ease of integration.

Sign up with Ecwid, and immediately after you paste three simple lines of HTML into your website’s source code, your site will have full online selling capabilities. The code will render a web store inside your existing pages, using AJAX. Use the Ecwid Control Panel to add your products and to manage the settings of your online store. All changes will be reflected on your website right away.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.ecwid.com/
License: License Free

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Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby progamming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms.

Spree is maintained by an active team of developers who continue to refine the code based on lessons learned from the challenges of real world deployments. Best of all, Spree is completely free, the open source code is freely available and is licensed under the New BSD License.

Requirements: Ruby on Rails
Demo: http://spreecommerce.com/demo
License: New BSD License

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JoobsBox is an extensible open source job board. The goal is to have the JoobsBox as a framework, light and fast and let the community to expand this, limited only by their desires and imagination. Plugins can extend JoobsBox to do almost anything with their job board.

Themes allows the community to share their templates and find the right look for their job board. JoobsBox focus will be towards standards, usability and users needs. You are free to use it for anything from your job section of your blog to a job board that will surpasse Yahoo HotJobs. You might want to look at alternative open source job board solution: JobberBase as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://demo.joobsbox.com/
License: New BSD License

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Long time ago, we have featured SimpleCart(js) on WebAppers. Recently, SimpleCart(js) 2.0 has released and it was completely rewritten from scratch to bring you a more flexible and simple API to get a custom shopping cart up and running quicker than ever.

SimpleCart(js) 2.0 is no longer only for Paypal. It now works with Google Checkout as well. You can now add increment, decrement, and remove buttons to your cart. You can also rearrange items, change the HTML tags, do whatever you like to display your cart how you want.

No databases, no programming, no headaches. A simple javascript shopping cart in under 20kb that you can setup in minutes. It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and completely customizable. All you need to know is basic HTML.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://demo.simplecartjs.com/
License: MIT License

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Magento is a very Powerful Open Source eCommerce System, which offers offering unprecedented flexibility and control.

Nettus has written a tutorial: “Easy E-Commerce With Magento” which demonstrates how to download and install Magento to a local host, configure some of the site options, and create simple and configurable products and categories for your e-commerce site. You can learn most of the basics of Magento from the tutorial.

Source: http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/screencasts/easy-e-commerce…

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