Top eCommerce Shopping Cart Options for Web Developers

BySteven Snell UpdatedMay 13, 2021 Web Development

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If you’re building an e-commerce website or adding a store to an existing website, you have plenty of options to choose from. With so many shopping cart options and so much variety, there is no right or wrong solution – just different choices that work best in different situations.

You may want to choose an open-source option that you can learn in order to build enhanced features. Or your client may want to go with a hosted or licensed option that can be up and running quickly.

In this post we’ll look at more than 30 different options, provide some basic details for each one, and point you in the right direction for gathering more information to make an educated decision.

Recommended eCommerce Platforms:

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted solution with prices that start at $24 per month. There are tons of features and ease of use is emphasized. They have a number of free templates that users can choose from, or you can purchase a template instead of getting a custom design.

Highwire

(UPDATE: Highwire is no longer available.) Highwire is another hosted option. It also includes the ability to sell your products on Facebook and Ebay in addition to your own site. A free plan is available and paid plans start at $19.95.

Open Source eCommerce Options:

There are a number of open source options that are popular with developers.

Magento

Magento is a leading open source solution. It is a full-featured e-commerce platform with lots of options for users.

osCommerce

osCommerce is one of the most popular open source shopping carts. osCommerce was started in 2000 and has a community of over 200,000 users. Others like Zen Cart and CRE Loaded are based on osCommerce.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a popular free, open source shopping cart.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a free, open source shopping cart (PHP).

Agora Cart

Free Shopping Carts:

In addition to the open source options, these shopping carts will keep costs to a minimum.

e-Commerce WordPress Plugin

Websites and blogs powered by WordPress can download the e-commerce plugin. It doesn’t offer all of the features of a complete e-commerce solution (although it does have quite an impressive feature list for a plugin), but it may be ideal for smaller stores.