Choosing Shopping Cart Software

In this article we're reviewing open source PHP-based ecommerce solutions. PHP is chosen as there are many such ecommerce solutions available and they are cheap to customize. By using an open source solution you don't have to reinvent the wheel and build everything from scratch and all these solutions can be customized to give your online store a unique look.

Statistics from odesk.com show that Magento has grown much faster than osCommerce during the past 2-3 years so it's reasonable to assume that Magento is a more popular choice among those with no prior experience of ecommerce website development, while there is a group who is sticking to osCommerce, probably because they are used to the system. Statistics from Google shows that Magento overtook osCommerce in terms of search popularity in early 2009.

Magento

Magento is a modern ecommerce solution featuring with the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:
* Table-free, div-tag-based design which is easy to modify and search engine friendly
* Built on the model-view-controller (MVC) framework Zend Framwork, which provides clear separation between presentation layer and the logic (code)
* Supported by a company and not a non-profit organization. The company owning Magento is active in fixing bugs and supporting the shopping cart
* The system is neatly designed and looks very modern
* SEO friendly URLs from the get-go
* Advanced features such as abandoned shopping cart reporting, shipping estimator without logging in, set up of multiple stores from one admin login and more