Today in this price sensitive market, anything that is open source and is available for free of cost is always a welcome change for the entire business community. It is not surprising to understand why platforms like Linux, Android, Apache web server and other such open source softwares are extensively used by various business organizations due to their free availability and flexibility to change the source code according to their needs and requirements. Similarly, in the world of e- commerce industry, open source e- commerce platforms have emerged as the biggest attention grabber for numerous business organizations around the world. Some of the open source platforms available are discussed below.

Magento Community Edition- It is one of the free and open source e- commerce platform of the Magento Content Management System (CMS). Different business organizations can look out for their desired features and functionalities for their e- commerce organization by installing the required e- commerce Magento extensions on their site from the Magento Connect marketplace. The huge online popularity and madness about this e- commerce platform can be easily judged by the fact that it supports more than 200, 000 different customer sites. However, Magento Community Edition does not provide any technical support for the sites based on this platform and the user have to look out for the possible answers at the user forum.

PrestaShop- It is one of the most popular open source e- commerce platform and is built on the PHP language. The CMS is driven by the Smarty template engine and has a large number of community members that are more than 600, 000 in number. This e- commerce platform is used by people in more than 160 countries and is translated into 63 world languages. One of the important feature of PrestaShop CMS is that it consists of 310 integrated features and supports 3,500 different templates and modules. Some of the features that are supported by this open source platforn are functionality of cross selling, easy downloading of the products, product exporting, single page checkout, availability of shipping discounts and other such features. It is one of the CMS that has become much more popular than its counterparts like Magento and OpenCart with a download of more than 4 million times.

OpenCart- It is another open source, PHP based e- commerce platform that is quite popular with various online merchant community. Its default downloadable version supports as much as 20 payment gateways along with more than 8 shipping methods while hundreds of payment gateways and shipping methods can be easily found on its extensions directory. PrestaShop is widely acclaimed and recognized by numerous professional partners who can provide customized features for business installations. It provides technical support to its users and more than 2,700 themes to its loyal and active member community. Apart from this, it provides a wonderful easy admin interface that helps in maintaining multiple stores through one place.

So, give your e- commerce business a desired lift and direction by choosing any of these e- commerce platform. They are all superb with certain differences in functionalities, themes and features supported by them. For more information about other e- commerce platforms, do check out this article- Top Open source E- commerce platforms for business organizations (Part 2).