Finding Free Open Source Shopping Carts and Other eCommerce News

By josh
In Five Free Open Source Shopping Carts, Matt Jackson looks at features such as ease of installation, payment integration,

category and product management, customer retention tools, and inventory management, while comparing several ...

I found some more good resources for folks looking to get a start in ecommerce:

Rating 5 Free Open Source Shopping Carts
In Five Free Open Source Shopping Carts, Matt Jackson looks at features such as ease of installation, payment integration, category and product management, customer retention tools, and inventory management, while comparing several shopping carts. The five free open source shopping carts that he compares are osCommerce (one of the most popular), ZenCart (basically osCommerce with mods), Agora Shopping Cart, NoPCart, and Commerce.Cgi. In the past, I set up both osCommerce and ZenCart, but never went live - I just wanted to see functionality. Both seemed great (they had tons of users, many mods and help forums, etc.), but finding a decent template for free was a problem back then (this was at least a year ago).

Assorted eCommerce News & Info
The four things that ecommerce site owners should focus on are 1) Copywriting, 2) improving search results pages, 3) doing more with email sign-ups and 4) co-registration says Anne Hollind, President of Research Marketing Firm, Marketing Sherpa in the following podcast.

Stephan Spencer recommends incorporating forums in your ecommerce site to encourage participation and increase site stickyness. I can attest to this technique, as forums (once momentum is reached) can really keep people around!

Does ecommerce really work? Of course it does! Ecommerce is absolutely the way to go if you are already established as a brick and mortar business, or if you just want to do business online. Startup costs are relatively low, and the world is potentially your oyster if you’ve done things correctly! I am not speaking from experience, but I’ve been around the net long enough to attest to this!

If you’re looking for a good examination of the ecommerce industry as a whole, check out three ways to build an ecommerce business to $500 million in revenues. I’m pretty sure it is not as easy as it sounds, but looking at the 3 models (1. Build up $500m in sales in a single vertical, 2. Build up $50-100m in sales across each of 10-5 verticals, 3. Build up less than $5m in sales in each of 100+ categories) makes it seem a bit more doable. Of course, there aren’t too many companies doing $500m in a single vertical, but articles like these not only give a broader view of the marketplace, but also provide some inspiration for where you can go if you do things right and get a bit of luck in your corner.




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