An overview of some well known Open Source & COTS packages

This list is provided just to give you and idea of some of the well known brands. Of the list provided below, Magento seems to be the most popular one in our region. Have a look on the website of those vendors, and explore their product demonstrations ! We will not use any of those packages for the classroom project, but do consider this approach in your professional life ! (we will stick to Free Public Cloud)

The key messages about this type of "open source" platforms are:

• Large community, free ride to get feature updates
• You still have too look for hosting and technical management!
• And you need ICT professional(s) (Linux, MySQL, HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, selected platform,...)
• You better look for a software maintenance contract (certified provider)
• Selecting a service provider using one of those packages prevents vendor lock-in
• You can customize, but be careful, as too much customization might make it expensive to move to the next community release

An overview with pro and contra:

osCommerce

+ Established name (sind 2000)
+ Light hosting sufficient
+ Active&large developer community
- You can’t customize much without PHP coding
- Lacks template structure – less features then Magento

Magento
+ Feature rich and flexible
+ Nice template structure
- Complex (learning curve programmer)
- Heavier hosting

VirtueMart
+ One of the best open source e-commerce packages around
+ Based upon Joomla CMS
+ Good solution if you want to combine website & e-commerce
- Less feature rich then some others

ZenCart

+ foundations = osCommerce
+ adds template system & HTML editor
+ Fancier design then osCommerce
- Can’t easily migrate osCommerce to ZenCart

Opencart
+ Modular, feature rich
+ Template based
+ User friendly administration -
+ Multilingual, multi currency

Shopp and WP e-commerce

SHOPP & WP e-commerce are examples of e-commerce plugins for WordPress
+ Good solution if you want to combine blog/website & e-commerce
- Less feature rich then some others

Prestashop

+ modern feature rich application
+ best open source business award 2011
+ strong SEO support
+ #language support
+ very customizable