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 10 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 for Web 2.0 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| osCommerce | eCommerce and online store-management solution |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. Spotted a useful open source Linux program not covered on our site? Please let us know by completing this form. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |