35+ Online Shopping Cart Solutions for Your Business

35+ Online Shopping Cart Solutions for Your Business

October 8, 2008 – 10:08 am PDT – by Sean P. Aune 53 Comments

With the shape of the economy and ever changing gas prices, online shopping may end up growing even faster than some have predicted. If your business hasn’t added an online shopping cart yet, why not?  The technology has been around for years now, and there are solutions for just about every skill level: you can do it yourself, outsource the work, pay companies for hosting, or even turn a WordPress blog into a simple shopping cart using plugins.  Here are over 35 shopping cart solutions for your business.

Hosted Carts

AAcart.com – Offers three levels of pricing plans that come with hosting included.  Also offers customized solutions and design.

eCrater.com – A free online store builder that also allows you to enter your products into their marketplace for free, while also entering them into the Google Product Search.

Etsy.com – An online store builder and marketplace that restricts itself to products that you make.  This include all sorts of arts & crafts, buttons, clothes and so on.

GoEmerchant.com – GoEmerchant offers both fully hosted options and the ability to just add buttons to your already existing site.

Merchandizer.com – Merchandizer offers hosted packages from extremely basic all the way up to your own fully dedicated hosting.  Also offers design and logo services if you need them.

NetworkSolutions.com – The well-known domain registration company also offers online storefront hosting and setup.

SmallBusiness.Yahoo.com – While Yahoo offers you the ability to use their shopping cart on a site you build yourself, their wizard powered store is by far their most popular product.  It offers you pre-built templates for the look, but uses their own brand of HTML, which makes hiring a designer for a unique look almost a necessity.

StoreFront.net – Focuses on customized solutions that vary by store size, hosting needs and so on.

Stores.eBay.com – eBay stopped being just an auction site a long time ago and offers you the chance to set up your own storefront on their popular site.

Free Self-Hosted Carts

CubeCart – CubeCart offers version 3 of their software for free, but charges for version 4 after a free 30 day trial.  Offers bulk upload, inventory management, shipping modules and everything else you would expect from a fully operational online store.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software – A fairly new free shopping cart that puts a heavy emphasis on not having to know how to code, run databases or anything else.

IdeaCart – A free cart still in its Alpha phase, features fraud detection, newsletter support and more.

JadaSite – JadaSite is a bit unusual in that it’s Java based, as well as fully integrated with a content management system.

Magento – Launched in 2008, Magento is one the newest open source shopping carts on the market.

OpenCart – An open source PHP shopping cart.  It’s been a while since it has been updated, but everything appears to still be up and running.

osCommerce – One of the best known shopping carts out there, this open source cart enjoys a large community of plugin creators.  It has been quite a while since their last major release, v2.2 RC 2a, but they are in active development of version 3.0, which promises some major administration upgrades.

PrestaShop – An extremely new open source shopping cart that already seems fairly full-featured, and promises more to come with an area for expansion modules to be opened in the near future.

Quick.Cart.Lite – Quick.Cart.Lite is the free version of the Quick.Cart software and will allow you to build a simple online store.  Offers two more robust levels of the same program with more features.

Satchmo – Built on the Django framework, Satchmo offers highly customizable shop building with a long list of built in features such as Google Analytics incorporation, PDF invoice generation and more.

Ubercart – Ubercart is a full-featured shopping cart that also integrates with a Drupal site so that you can build a community around your store or featured products.

VirtueMart – A shopping cart built specifically for integration with the Joomla! and Mambo content management system.

Zen Cart – Zen Cart is an off branch of osCommerce that comes with several of the most popular modules built into it.

Purchasable Self-Hosted Carts

1ShoppingCart – 1ShoppingCart offers you the ability to add “Buy Now” buttons to your already existing site, while offering you many of the features you expect from complete shopping carts.

Actinic – Actinic offers multiple shopping cart solutions based on your budget.  Packages range from $499 to $3499 depending on your needs.

CS-Cart – Gives you full access to the source code so that you can customize your online store as you see fit.  Makes heavy use of AJAX to reduce server load as customers change only a portion of a product’s page.

Interspire – Offers three versions of their software, all with numerous addons. However, if your store is of any substantial size (over 500 different items), you have no choice but to go for the ultimate $1800 version.

JShop Server – A UK-focused online shopping cart system with all of the usual bells and whistles.

JustAddCommerce – A “buy button” system that will work with HTML editors such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage to add an online store to any site.

Lite Commerce – A direct competitor to X-Cart, they have a lower initial price, but charge for numerous add-ons for extra functions.

Miva Merchant – One of the oldest purchasable shopping carts seeing as it has existed since 1995.  Offers QuickBooks sync, all of the usual bells and whistles, and the company offers unique designs.

ShopSite – ShopSite offers a free starter version, but it is extremely limited.  Paid versions range from $495 to $1295, and they also offer hosting if needed.

VP-ASP – VP-ASP offers three levels of their shopping cart software, all of which include 12 free months of updates in their purchase price.  In addition to US shipping, offers options for Australian and Canadian post shipping.

WebMasterCart – Cart has been around since 1998 and has been continually upgraded. Offers licenses for 1 site for $199 or unlimited domains for $995.  Price is a one time licensing fee with 1 year of updates.

X-Cart – X-Cart offers both single merchant installations and versions capable of handling multiple merchants checking out through the same shopping cart.  Offers numerous payment and shipping module integrations.

WordPress Shopping Carts

eShop – Gives you the ability to add a PayPal powered store to your site.  Allows one item per post or page.

Quick Shop – A shopping cart for your WordPress blog’s sidebar.

WP e-Commerce – A popular shopping cart option for WordPress blogs which makes it easy to sell things like ebooks, mp3s, clothing, crafts and more.

YAK for WordPress – A simple shopping cart for WordPress that turns posts and pages into product codes and the item description.

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