Online shopping is the activity that consumers engage in when purchasing products or services over the internet. This activity has many distinct advantages over ‘traditional shopping’ for both consumers and the businesses.
eCommerce enables businesses to stay open all of the time, expand their customer and geographical reach, provide the potential to reduce costs, and allow for niche targeting. The consumer benefits in many ways too, including the convenience of being able to shop any time of the day (or night), avoiding queuing, travel expenses, have more transparency over prices, etc.
This feature focuses on shopping cart software, which is software used in eCommerce to enable consumers to purchase goods and services online. Anyone who wishes to run an eCommerce site has a wide range of platforms and software to choose from, many of them being proprietary. However, if you want to operate an eCommerce site, Linux makes a strong platform, with a wide selection of Open Source eCommerce software available.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 12 high quality free Linux eCommerce applications. Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart.
Click the links in the table below to learn more about each program.
| eCommerce Software | |
|---|---|
| PrestaShop | Full-featured, cross-platform eCommerce shopping cart application |
| Bagisto | eCommerce framework built on Laravel and Vue.js |
| OpenCart | Designed to be feature rich and user friendly |
| Medusa | Set of commerce modules and tools |
| WooCommerce | Customizable ecommerce platform |
| Sylius | eCommerce framework on top of Symfony |
| VirtueMart | Used with Joomla! or Mambo Web Content Management Systems |
| Zen Cart | Provides an easy-to-setup and run online store |
| thirty bees | Mature e-commerce solution which began as a fork of PrestaShop |
| CubeCart | Billed as a powerful free ecommerce solution |
| Shopware | Headless ecommerce platform |
| osCommerce | eCommerce and online store-management solution |
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
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