Shopping cart platforms that retailers should take notice of

The major aspects for any online retail venture is to provide easy usability, attractive themes and generate optimal performance. Poorly designed shopping cart platforms can result to lost customers, lower average order value, and fewer repeat customers. To avoid such scenarios, more and more retailers are adopting shopping cart solution, which is a must for eCommerce sites.

Shopping cart platforms acts as an all-in-one, robust and flexible solution that allow retailers to create an ecommerce website from the scratch, avoiding costly design and development service. But, that doesn’t mean you blindly invest in any of those of leading one’s available in the market. Leading shopping cart platforms will no doubt give you results but at the same time you may end up paying more for functionalities that does not fit your business needs. Therefore, as a retailer it becomes very important that you keep a constant tab on the new and upcoming shopping cart platforms too. Because, you never know that one of those available in the market may offer functionalities exact to fit your business needs (no more no less) at a much reasonable price than the leading one you may using now.

Below are some open-source ecommerce shopping cart platforms that retailers should take a notice of:

1. Broadleaf Commerce

Overview

Broadleaf offers ideal set of solutions for enterprise ecommerce companies allowing a platform built on Java integration technologies that can easily be customized according to your business needs. Not only this, it also allows you an access to “Broadleaf Commerce community” to participate in discussions, news and events,  articles, development guides, and project API documentation. Implementing this Apache licensed solution, you’ll never feel restricted by any feature list again.

Key features

Multi solution functionalities

You are no more restricted to geographical locations, channels and even complex requirements. Broadleaf offers multi-site feature that will allow you to create and run multiple stores from one single platform. Regardless to what device your customers use to access your site – be it mobile, tablet, or even an API-based sale over smart TV, Broadleaf can cover them. Also, it offers multi-currency and multi-language feature to meet different geographical location and customer needs.

Cart and checkout functionality

Broadleaf allows an intuitive dashboard that gives you an ability to manage your cart and checkout process – and not to forget it’s ability to apply discounts and store credits to what’s in the cart.

Content Management

Broadleaf provides a WYSIWYG editor to manage blogs and other pre-defined content pages. With the ability to manage multiple stores from a single administrative system, it makes it easy to validate content. Offering the best customization solution, Broadleaf ensures that your personalized content reaches the right people.

Pricing Structure

Community Edition –  Includes multiple features + Support

Enterprise Edition – Includes all community edition features + Support + 4 Production Java Virtual Machines

Multi-Tenant Edition – Includes Multi-Tenancy and multi-site functionalities

Website: www.broadleafcommerce.org

2. Loaded commerce

Overview

LoadedCommerce will be a perfect choice to small store owners and home office store owners who are looking to add transactional functionalities to an existing website customized according to their needs.

This solution will give you a platform that is highly customizable. This way you can easily change your site’s design choosing from multiple templates, manage products, orders, customers, invoices, and much more.

Key features

Template management

Easy to install, LoadCommerce offers a wide range of website themes which you can preview before you go live. This way you can test different templates with your content and simply upload the one that best fits your business needs.

Customer management

LoadCommerce offers functionalities to enhance customer’s experience and make checkout process much easier and faster. Creating an account, your customer’ information (address for payment and shipping ) will be auto-stored which will save them much time and effort on checkout. Also, your customers passwords remain safe with one-way encryption and a powerful unique key per password.

Product management

This solution will not limit you from adding products you make or import. Once you load an image for your product, Loaded 7 will generate multiple thumbnails on-the-fly. You also have an ability to import/export products using EXCEL and make changes to thousands of SKU’s in seconds. Offering an ability to keep a track on quantities of product orders, you can set them to hide or suppress the add to cart button incase of out of stock scenarios.

Pricing Structure

Host provided

Subscription – Monthly (Includes unlimited product + 3 admin users + lifetime updates and support (15 Day trial available)

Host anywhere

Subscription – Monthly (Includes unlimited product + unlimited admin users + lifetime updates and support)

Host anywhere

Subscription – Yearly (Includes unlimited product + unlimited admin users + lifetime updates and support)

Host anywhere

Subscription – One time (Includes unlimited product + unlimited admin users + 1 Year

updates and support)

All plans at LoadedCommerce come with a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee.

Website: http://loadedcommerce.com

3. ZeusCart

Overview

ZeusCart is a web-based PHP/My SQL shopping cart that has been primarily designed for small and medium store owners that is customizable. Hence, you can use your creativity to add powerful features to meet your business needs. Even though ZeusCart is an open source ecommerce solution, it offers you beneficial software updates, regularly. It’s feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners an in-built CMS, SEO-friendly URLs, inventory management, product management, marketing and promotions, shipping options, integration with leading payment gateways, email templates and much more.

Key features

Marketing and promotion

ZeusCart offers effective marketing solution that will allow you to create special pricing arrangement bundling relevant products which make it cheaper for customers to buy products in bundle than separately. It also will give you an ability to offer volume discounts, gift card and coupons, all within a single interface that is your website.

SEO friendly

Implementing this solution you’ll automatically get in-built SEO tools that will allow you find and create quality tags, that follow search guidelines. It’s user-friendly Meta Tags tool will make it easy to generate title and meta tags for any page of your website. This feature will ensure that your website is highly ranked and visible in search engines.

Effective product detail page layout

Each time your product is sold, ZeusCart will automatically update the stock status value and displays the availability of the product. Offering a wide-range of color-theme for your listing you can easily select one that best suits you. Also, it’s “Automatic Related Products extension” will automate the process of related product creation.

Pricing Structure

Contact ZeusCart for pricing information

Website: http://zeuscart.com

If you are already using any of the above and have multiple stores to run, then managing them separately is not good idea. Orderhive a multi-channel order management and inventory management software solution will allow you integrate all your existing channel’s data that includes your existing inventory, orders, and customers into a single system, giving you a clear visibility and access to any of your channel in real-time. Also, Orderhive forays into customization service! So, if you have an access to your platform’s API and need customization service – the developers at Orderhive will help you customize your channels as per your business needs. Orderhive will help you integrate your platform, if you opt for a customized account.

In closing

The looks and usability of your store is important, so it becomes very important that you spend more time on this decision. The shopping cart platforms listed above are some of the new options that have more extensive documentation, apps, and themes to successfully run your stores.