Recently, a new web development firm I was asked to work with introduced a new eCommerce platform that I had never heard of: Volusion.
While working with another web developer on another project, they told me this other great solution Spree which uses Ruby on Rails was an awesome eCommerce platform.
So, I thought to myself “How many eCommerce platforms are there?” My old host Dreamhost had multiple eCommerce platforms, but I didn’t see these two there. They’ve been advertising CafeCommerce lately despite having ZenCart as another solution in our one click installs.
To answer the question, I searched (as I usually do).
I found 3 great posts online after typing in “ecommerce platforms“:
The most recent post was from a new friend TJ McCue who blogs about easy easy ecommerce for Squarespace and integration alternatives in paid ecommerce platforms. As identified in high school debate as a good factor in evidence, I like recency when it comes to sources. The different platforms listed were : BigCommerce, Adobe Business Catalyst, 3D Cart, Shopify, Miva Merchant, Volusion, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.
Trip Wire Magazine posted in February of last year a post titled “15 Open Source eCommerce Platforms” which showed up the highest of these posts on Google when searching “ecommerce platforms.” Maybe it was the nice little pictures? 😉 Actually, if they labeled the pictures properly, it was the SEO. 🙂
The post listed the following platforms with pricing information (nice of them!): Magento (free), osCommerce (free), Zen Cart (free), X-Cart ($115), CubeCart (free), VirtueMart (free), Ubercart (free), PrestaShop (free), LiteCommerce ($109), Spree (free), Avactis (free basic, $19.95/mo or $199 one time), AgoraCart (free), WordPress e-Commerce Plugin (free), OXID eShop (free), Digistore (free)
And finally, 22 ecommerce platforms to sell your products online which was wrote back in November 2009 provided the list identifying different categories as identified in the following:
Simple Solutions
E-junkie, FatFreeCart, Big Cartel, WordPress e-Commerce Plugin, eShop, Shopp, WordPress MiniCart
Adding a shopping cart to popular CMS and frameworks
Ubercart, Drupal e-Commerce, E-Commerce for Joomla, SilverStripe, Django webshop with Satchmo, E-Commerce with Ruby on Rails (Spree)
Open source e-Commerce scripts
Magento, PrestaShop, ZenCart
Paid e-Commerce Platforms
Shopify, Foxycart
Well, if you want the complete list of the 37 eCommerce Platforms you can use to become the next Jeff Bezos or Pierre Omidyar, here it is:
1 3D Cart 2 Adobe Business Catalyst 3 AgoraCart (free) 4 Avactis (free basic, $19.95/mo or $199 one time) 5 Big Cartel 6 BigCommerce 7 CafePress! 8 CreateSpace 9 CubeCart (free) 10 DeviantArt 11 Digistore (free) 12 Django webshop with Satchmo 13 Drupal e-Commerce 14 E-Commerce for Joomla 15 E-junkie 16 eShop 17 FatFreeCart 18 Foxycart 19 LiteCommerce ($109) 20 Lulu 21 Magento (free) 22 Miva Merchant 23 osCommerce (free) 24 OXID eShop (free) 25 PrestaShop (free) 26 Shopify 27 Shopp 28 SilverStripe 29 Spree (free) 30 Ubercart (free) 31 VirtueMart (free) 32 Volusion - powers the University of Oregon's Store 33 WordPress e-Commerce Plugin (free) 34 WordPress MiniCart 35 X-Cart ($115) 36 Yahoo! Merchant Solutions 37 Zen Cart (free)
Update: Jamie L. over at Portent Interactive pointed out a local product here in Seattle: Amazon’s Webstore as well to consider. I don’t know a lot about it, but Jamie says:
Selling online through Amazon WebStore makes it easy to advertise, receive payment, and ship your products–all backed by the power of Amazon.
First of all, thank you Brandon for collecting this information and taking the time to post it.
I’m trying to flush out an idea that would need to integrate with retail platforms so I’m looking for the platforms mostly widely used / most widely used by large retailers.
I mean… do big brand name retailers even use these platforms or is this stuff more for mom and pop e-commerce retailers?
Did you come across any information as to the percentage of total e-commerce sales that run through each of these platforms?
Thanks!
Mark
mcl(_dot_)mark(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com
Great questions Mark. I would lean towards thinking these are for smaller businesses. Amazon and Expedia when I was at each place had their own site built from many coders and didn’t use a platform from what I recall. However, I wasn’t in the engineering teams there, but interfacing with program managers for individual products and issues.
Would be interested in the answer in the 2nd question, but haven’t seen it yet. Again, a great question!
Big companies such as North Face, Toms shoes and Nordstrom use Magento Enterprise ($13k/year).
Great article Brandon. I’d like to mention Litecart.net is another one. 🙂