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We have been experimenting with opencart and found it to be an excellent piece of open source free shopping cart. Need less to say it is available with us with just 1 click installation on Basic / Silver / Unlimited hosting plans. Before we go in depth to say why we choose this cart over many other, we would like to point out that if you are planning to start your online business and are considering opencart for as your software then you should select our silver hosting plan. The reason why silver hosting plan is better is because it will let you have your main website on the primary domain and then you can simply add-on a domain to host the cart.. all in one plan!

The reason we are all praise about opencart is because it is very simple to use and works right out of the box, it took us 1-2 hours to get to know how things work. We had tried oscommerce some years back but opencart is definitely way ahead of it. One of the best things about opencart is that it works with 2checkout. With all the paypal problems happening in India, 2checkout still offers a decent option for Indian merchants to be able to do business not just in USD but also in INR. The other highlights about the cart is the ability to add affiliates and have custom discount coupons as well as gift vouchers. The template of opencart is very good as well and you can simply change the theme with very professional high quality opencart themes.

Ecommerce in India is on the rise so if you were planning to sell online, this is the best time for that!

Read an article in Hindustan Times business section about the ecommerce and internet growth in India, very interesting statistics. While most of us have seen commercials of flipkart / snapdeals etc it is not all a bubble, all these ecommerce websites are showing exploding sales and have proven that eCommerce in India has finally arrived. Looks at the data below and you will see that the Indian ecom story will be a grand success in the time to come. All the more reason to start your website today itself. Who knows, your’s could be the next biggest internet idea.

From Magento Wiki: Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Varien’s support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

Magento is much like opencart or oscommerce but fast growing to become the top choice of companies looking to take their sales online. Unlike opencart and oscommerce, Magneto is resource intensive and does not work well on shared hosting. It is preferable to go for specialized Magento Hosting plans, a cloud VPS or a Dedicated server.

There are 3 variations of Magento: Community Edition (FREE), Professional Edition (PAID) and the Enterprise Edition (PAID)

You can take a demo on Magento on this link http://www.magentocommerce.com/demo

Among the many open-source shopping cart software available, one of the major edges that osCommerce has is it’s reputation. It’s reputation of being widely patronized giving it an image of being dependable and well-supported amidst the fact that it’s for free. What bothers most users when customizing with osCommerce is it is not easy to accomplish if you do not have much background in developing software. Thus, if you are planning to use osCommerce with some modifications in the code, make sure to ask for assistance.

Since it utilizes automatic web browser installation and upgrading, starting using osCommerce is very easy. Any changes done in the layout can be done easily and quickly. However, templates are not available, thus you can only do editing on the header and the footer and both the right and left columns. This does not sound so pleasing to people who intend to have to see a lot of variations in their layouts. Yet, incorporating changes is not difficult because it has a complete out-of-the-box solution and the backend is object oriented. Moreover, it can be used by a lot of users because it has multi-language features that are compatible with English, German, and Spanish speaking users. The software also provides multi-currency so it is also compatible with a lot of nationalities.

Although the shopping cart software has Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, the administration area does not come with a built-in password protect feature. To secure administration accounts, users have to ask the people responsible for building their sites to add a password protect feature in the admin.

The software can also do some optimization on its own. Added to the software’s features are newsletters, articles, reviews, catalogs and features about the products being advertised. These can help in boosting up your website’s advertising. However, the catalog system is not that efficient. Having a hundred or so products in the catalog would require some modifications in the elements in the product administration. Frequent modification of the information about the products would also mean needing additional modules to manage the new data. For bulkier contents in th catalog, like thousands of products, would cause some searching and browsing problems.

Neverthless, one thing that showcases osCommerce’s strength as shopping cart software is the fact that many of the open-source shopping carts we have today were derived from osCommerce. Yes, it may have some setbacks in its system but it is undeniable that it really is something.

If you are looking to host your ecommerce web store then osCommerce is a robust software you can start with, right out of the box.