Best Open Source Ecommerce Platform: Top Choice Of Online Merchants

January 17, 2023

e-Commerce

Nowadays, most of our work is online; we rely upon our many ecommerce platforms or applications for daily and weekly shopping instead of visiting offline stores. According to studies, it is shown that by 2040, around 95% of all purchases will be done using ecommerce; even 93.5% of worldwide internet users have made the product purchase digitally. Hence, we can observe how the ecommerce industry is penetrating the global market through the online revolution.

As a retail merchant, you intend to expand and understand the significance of online presence to establish your brand digitally; the question arises which the best open-source ecommerce platform to choose and why. Opting suitable platform delivers righteous results, which requires the comprehension of open source ecommerce platforms, plus it is also a matter of preference.

Developing a robust ecommerce store can cost you a lot which wouldn’t be affordable by small and medium size businesses; then shifting your mindset to open source platforms can help you through unique customer experience and save many dollars from falling from your pockets. Now let’s move further to understand what exactly are open-source ecommerce platforms.

What Is Open Source Ecommerce Platforms?

Open-source softwares offer an excellent source of flexibility, and the best thing is it is available free of cost. In the software industry, “open source” refers to the access of source code by anyone from anywhere and the modification and customization as per the suitability. It gives admin control to a great extent and eliminates some limitations that exist in SaaS ecommerce platforms.

With enhanced flexibility, it is a better option for enterprises that want more control over their store. Plus, it has a longer shelf life with powerful support & maintenance, advanced functionalities, and new plugins and more. For added features, you can go for upgrade.

Why Open Source Ecommerce Platforms Are the Choice Of Many Merchants To Build Stores?

More Power To Enhance Customer Experience

The open-source platform has numerous industrial themes and templates system for different pages, including the home page, product detail page, catalogue, checkout, services and more, which reduce the need for advanced customization. However, you can create custom conversion paths for visitors with a personalized experience through accumulated data.

Thus, it removes the challenges of searching multiple websites to look for preferred themes, designs and layouts, and customization, which allows the creation of appealing designs within the same platform.

Support Omni Channel Selling Strategies

Customers now desire for more integrated shopping experience across various channels, and competitors are rapidly evolving to achieve the same. They expect their favourite brand to deliver personalized content and information throughout the sales journey. Open-source platforms ease the task of using single data sources.

It facilitates a centralized data centre to streamline sales data, customer data, product details and more across multiple channels. Plus, it supports automated marketing and personalized recommendations to customers. You can define details in regard to taxation, shipping, and location to deliver the product, show real-time inventory numbers, promote location-based pricing and many other offers.

Open Source Platforms Are Costless

Unless you don’t want full control over your ecommerce environment, open source is kind of costless. You can pick the framework and start working on it, and in the event of any issue, you can hire a professional developer. Instead, if you go for SaaS platforms, you have to pay monthly, quarterly or yearly fees with other additional functionality, support & maintenance, and third-party integrations.

However, in this category, they become similar by considering the cost of web development, hosting, security, customization and extensions for open-source platforms. So it would be better to calculate the total cost of ownership before starting to build your store.

Flexible Platform & Greater Functionality

Flexibility is a key factor when choosing a platform, as a growing business has many needs to fulfil in the long run. Modern ecommerce stores have all the capabilities when it comes to meeting the increasing demand of their customers. Best open-source ecommerce platforms stand upon industry standards and organize your store with rich features.

If required, you can take the help of existing business systems like ERP, CRM, & CMS. It can also enhance the appearance of the store with different style grids and tables, with first-class features to stand out from competitors.

Top Open Source Ecommerce Platform To Scale Your Business

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Magento, now an Adobe Commerce is an open-source ecommerce platform owned by Adobe and comes in the top 10 ecommerce platforms according to one of the reports by Pipecandy; plus, it is home to 2.3% of online stores. It gives admins numerous tools and various features to grow their business by escalating the shopping experience. This platform can be leveraged by any ecommerce industry, plus it gives the scope to non-technical for maintaining & customizing the site.

Magento 2.4.5 is the latest version in the category launched with advanced upgrades that gives businesses superiority, secure payments, a more efficient & productive business experience, highly customizable architecture and maximization of mobile shopping experience.

Key Features

SEO-friendly content management system
Third-party platforms integration
Product category management
Comprehensive customer service
Asynchronous API (to reduce server time response)
Two-factor authentication for security enhancement
Magento PWA Studio for web applications
Order & Inventory management
Multiple reports with integrated analytics

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is built on wordpress, which is empowering lakhs of businesses to sell from anywhere at any place globally. It is officially a plugin contributing to 23.43% of market share globally, and around 8.7% of all websites use woocommerce. The best thing about WooCommerce is it is easy and affordable and offers all the functionality of an ecommerce store; moreover gained popularity as it existed with WordPress.

WooCommerce is secure, open-source, highly flexible, doesn’t require coding skills, and is responsive on all devices. It increases the possibility of scaling business with free or premium plugins (some are Cartflows, Sendiblue, & Yoast SEO) and extensions. Furthermore, you can use WooCommerce short codes placed on plugins to perform certain actions.

Key Features

Integration with third-party sales channel
Multiple payment options
Thousands of extensions
Compatible theme options
Powerful SEO advantages
Integration with marketing tools (google shopping, Facebook, MailChimp, & google analytics)
Allow working on all physical & virtual products, plus work on affiliate products
Automated taxation & Shipping

Joomla

Joomla is the best open-source ecommerce platform and has won several awards globally for its responsive, accessible, multilingual, search engine optimized and user-friendly software. Joomla comes under a content management system that permits admins with different permissions to handle and manage data on the front end and back end of the website in terms of editing, reporting, publishing, distributing, and creating.

Joomla had a robust framework that helped developers to design complicated add-ons for various features. Plus, high-end templates are available on Joomla, and some are free of cost. Joomla is created through PHP and MySQL, so anyone can easily use, share and support.

Key Features

Inventory control system
Integrated ecommerce system
Data reporting tools
Reservation system
Joomla’s resource directory
Media manager to upload, organize and manage media files
Contact management tool
Over, 7500 powerful extensions
Custom product catalogues

Wix

Wix, with its design capabilities, offers a unique ecosystem to users. It’s an open-source professional website tool with great freedom of creativity. Currently, this global platform has over 200 million users worldwide through specialized features for multi-furious niche industries (photographers, restaurants, designers, product owners, and many more). Wix also enables the tools to customize logos, enable a complete set of SEO tools, video makers and such advanced web applications.

Wix is accessible in 190+ countries and has 1000+ innovative features that assist in accelerating the web development process. This tool provides diverse options for creating online stores for different levels of developers/users (Wix Editor, Wix ADI, Corvid by Wix) through drag & drop functionality and allows users to code.

Key Features

Wix’s payment & third-party payment processors
Over 500 designer-made templates
Over 100 fonts, plus user can upload their own
Design freedom to be creative and innovative
Tailor-made website content
Instant access to tips & techniques
Business & marketing tools
Unified Database Management

Ecwid

Ecwid is not a standalone ecommerce website; instead, it allows you to add an ecommerce storefront to your existing platform. It is entirely free; however, only 10 products can be sold on a free plan and based on PHP, so it requires a level of technical skill to build your online store. You can attach this plugin with WordPress or Wix through a simple process. Plus, a free plan can’t be harnessed to sell on social media platforms.

If you want to optimize your website for SEO, it would be better to go for a paid plan. Ecwid supports 85 payment gateways, so it has a more comprehensible end of the spectrum. Ecwid offers point-of-sales features that allow it to sell physically as well; it comes with a mobile app, but this option is available only in certain countries. In business and unlimited plans, you can create stores in 53 different languages. Furthermore, it offers many other features.

Key Features

Add popular sales channels (Amazon, eBay, Instagram and more)
Create a dedicated native app
Add digital products to store
Offer promotional discounts
Tax management system

OpenCart

Opencart is one of the well-known names in the ecommerce marketplace whose capabilities can be utilized freely anytime, anywhere, and reliable enough to stand out from your competitors by designing a robust store. It comes with a quick, user-friendly, and concise dashboard to monitor buyer’s sales and multiple options to go deep for comprehensive details. Comes with a huge package of 14,000 remarkable extensions to extend functionalities and stronghold to customize the store.

Opencart has, 13000+ modules and themes for multi-furious industries. Facilitate the integration of the world’s most renowned shipping methods and payment gateways. Plus, it offers community support, having 110 000 registered members and 550 000+ posts. Their dedicated team is best for getting professional technical support in any complex project. Moreover, there is no limitation to features categories & products.

Key Features

Impressive SEO extensions
Responsive for all devices
Recurring payment, sales reports, and shipping methods are available for vendors.
Filters to simplify the product search
Availability of 40+ languages including Japanese, Greek, Chinese, Arabic and more.
Subscription for official newsletter
Payment gateways integration (Amazon pay, sage pay, Paypal, Authorize.Net, and others).

Winding Up

It could be a challenging task to choose a perfect platform to build your ecommerce store; however, after in-depth research, we found the best open source ecommerce platform in 2022 for your enterprise that allows your brand image to be customized as per your taste. In other words, you must consider various factors, including features, scalability, technical expertise and the product or services you are dealing in.

If you still can’t find out or confuse about which to choose, we will be happy to help! We can give you numerous options after analysis of your business objectives and industry with all pros and cons to pick the best one.