Category — e-commerce

A great, free plugin for wordpress is called e-commerce plugin.  It allows you to turn your wordpress blog into an  e-commerce shopping cart.

Installation

Installation is pretty easy.  You just need to download the zip file, extract it, and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory.

Once the plugin is activated, you just need to add a product, and your new shopping cart is ready to go.

Features

All of the new features of this plugin are presented under the “e-commerce” tab.  They are split up into the categories: Sales, Products, Groups, Variations, Marketing, and Settings.

Sales:

Gives you a breakdown of the total number of sales for the day

Products:

• Adding, editing, deleting products
• Fields: price, description, and additional description
• product categories
• donation (allow donations)
• stock control
• downloads/digital goods (a download URL can be specified)
• shipping rates through a flat-rate table

Groups:

Groups help your visitors find your products. If you sell t-shirts, hats, and trousers you might want to setup a new group called clothing and then add the categories t-shirts, hats, and trousers to that group.

Variations:

A variation can be anything “optional” about a product. ie: Size, Color, etc
For example: if you are selling t-shirts you might setup a variation set called size with the values small, medium, large.

Marketing:

This is where you can setup coupon codes to use on the products in your store.

Settings:

Various global shopping cart settings such as:

• Taxes (percentage)
• Currency
• Shipping (UPS,USPS, flat rate)
• Payment Modules (paypal, google checkout, and chronopay)

1) Zen cart

URL: http://www.zencart.com

Language: PHP
Features:

In terms of features and large community support , zen cart is the best open source shopping cart. It is also based on Oscommerce, an open source shopping cart writen in March 2000.

• multiple customer modes
• multiple sales and discounts
• multiple ad banner controller
• multiple shipping options/modules
• newsletter manager
• gift certificates

The one complaint I have with all of the oscommerce-based shopping carts is the lack of a proper template and module system. Because module code is not separated from template/cart code, when there are security updates, you need to manually make these changes.

2) Magento
URL: http://www.magentocommerce.com

Language: PHP
Features:

• Multi-language support
• Built-in API for easy integration with 3rd-party services
• Auto-generated Site Map
• Newsletter Management
• One-Page Checkout
• Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment

Magento is a great shopping cart. However, it doesn’t have as large of a community (or as many user contributions/modules) as some of other open source e-commerce solutions.

3) Prestashop
URL: http://www.prestashop.com/
Language: PHP

Features:

• Product Cross-selling
• Google Checkout module
• Multiple-recipient contact form
• PDF customer invoice
• RSS feed
• Affiliate program

4) Cubecart
URL:http://www.cubecart.com/
Language: PHP

Features:

• Default Templates are valid XHTML & CSS
• Customer Order History
• Product Image Gallery
• Email Marketing
• Inventory Stock Control
• Multiple Tax Classes

5) Agoracart
URL:http://www.agoracart.com/
Language: Perl

Features:

• Store-wide designs stored in main Header and Footer files
• CSS (cascading style sheets) controls over most aspects of the cart design
• Order forms are in HTML for ease of customization
• Javascript like language called AgoraScript; allowing for the use of PERL in store parsed pages (those displayed by the AgoraCart) for greater flexibility of design and function
• Supports an unlimited number of categories
• Items can be marked individually as tax exempt