We value your time and efforts – building a professional online store without additional technical skills is what we offer. Moreover, our comprehension chart aims to provide you with the easiest and most convenient way of managing your online business.

Let`s start with what is a shopping cart.

In every e-commerce web site there is a shopping cart program. The latter allows your online visitors to find and buy products and services while browsing your online shop. In short, a shopping cart allows your potential online clients to do the following: search for a product in your store catalog, add a selected product to a basket, place an order and submit a payment for it.

If you are just starting out in e-commerce, we suggest reviewing several online shopping softwares, prior to choosing the one that suits your online business. We have made an extensive research among the most preferred shopping carts on the market and we are here to offer you the top-quality ones.

After a detailed research in the shopping cart field, here is what we recommend:

Magento is a new open source ecommerce platform that handle all aspects of building and maintaining an ecommerce site including shopping carts, shipping, product reviews, and much more. Magento offers advanced catalog and shopping cart price rule systems right out of the box, allowing Store Owners to create and customize anything from store-wide markdowns to highly specific coupons tailored to specialized customer groups. View more

Additional Magento resources:

• Professional and secure Magento hosting package
• Free Magento text tutorial
• Free Magento video tutorial
• Free Magento templates

osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with absolutely no costs or license fees involved. osCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform. It contains both a catalog frontend and an administration tool backend which can be easily installed and configured over a web-based installation procedure. View more

Additional osCommerce resources:

Professional and secure osCommerce hosting package
CubeCart is a fully featured ecommerce shopping cart solution written using PHP & MySQL. CubeCart is very powerful and easy to connect to various payment gateways. CubeCart currently comes with three skins which are bundled in the download package.The demo has Google Checkout enabled in “Sandbox” mode and the “Print Order Form”. The skin can be changed using the drop down menu which is either enabled or disabled on the admin side. View more

Additional CubeCart resources:

Professional and secure CubeCart hosting package

CRE Loaded is a fully functional shopping cart for Ecommerce sites. CRELoaded is built on the framework of OSCommerce .CRE has been refined and simplified a little though, so it is easier to customize, and easier to maintain long term. It is a flexible enough cart to handle stock/inventory tracking, multiple images per item, downloadable items, combinations of product types, it tracks customers and orders, and interfaces with a wide range of payment systems. This is a software driven shopping cart. That means it installs into the hosting space – your website is made of software instead of regular pages. View more

Additional CreLoaded resources:

Professional and secure CreLoaded hosting package

Zen Cart is a open source shopping cart system. When you are using Zen Cart and a product is added to the shopping cart, secure checkout is a simple 3-step process. After providing the billing information, your customer chooses the shipping method. (multiple shipping methods) Next, a payment type is chosen from one of the popular payment modules. Last, the customer reviews the order, shipping and payment choices, and confirms the order. You are immediately notified of the order and your customer automatically receives an e-mail confirmation. View more

Additional ZenCart resources:

Professional and secure ZenCart hosting package
Cs cart is a shopping cart software solution that includes all the necessary features and functions to build a successful online business. It has easy to use functionality that allows you to immediately start to sell online, ranging from a one-product shop to a fully-featured online store. Using Cs cart you can add add products, categories, place orders and do everything you are interested in. Cs cart also includes:User Manual;Design integration guide;Installation on a local computer;Live Help manual;Store Manager manual;Knowledge Base

Additional CS Cart resources:

Professional and secure CS Cart hosting package

VirtueMart is an Open Source E-Commerce solution (a Component or Plug-in) for the Joomla! and Mambo Content Management Systems. It can be run as a Shopping Cart, or in Catalog modeIt installs fairly easy using the automatic Component and Module Installer. It’s intended for use in small / mid-sized Online Businesses / Online-Shops. So every user who wants to build up a Online Store can use this Component for selling something to Customers. View more

Additional Virtue Mart resources:

• Professional and secure Joomla hosting package
• Professional and secure Mambo hosting package
• Free Joomla Templates
• Free Joomla tutorial

The document below provides a very detailed overview of the best open source eCommerce applications. Additionally, it includes a table of all the features included in the applications in order to compare and choose which one suits your needs best.

TMDHosting Free eCommerce Applications

If you need any professional assistance in choosing your hosting or have additional questions you can always contact our experienced representatives via our live chat.

Paid or open source – that is the question

Of course, before you start you should choose the platform of your online shop that will best fit your needs and budget. You can always hire a team of developers to build your very own shopping cart but in most cases this will be an expensive solution. In case you would like to save some money you may choose between the free open source applications and the paid products on the marked.

Here comes the question why should someone pay for a shopping cart when there are plenty of open source applications available to download and use free of charge. Because of the growing need of secure and reliable platforms the open source applications became more and more stable and functional. In addition, a large number of independent contributors developed many modules, components and addons to these applications in order to fit the needs of the larger number of people who want to start their online shop.

On the other hand, this forced the developers of paid applications to bring the technical support, functionality and stability of their products to a whole new level of quality. By trying to apply all the cutting edge features that you might need from your shopping cart and providing technical support for their clients many paid products managed to keep their place on the market.

What are the benefits of choosing a paid eCommerce application rather than an open source one?

Some of the most important advantages of the paid applications are the support and better security provided by their developers.

Technical and development support

Very often during the development process of your shop based on any application you may need some special modifications which may require a development work. Usually such services are not offered by the hosting companies which provide technical support only for hosting/hosting service related issues. In such cases you will need to contact a developer which most often may be expensive even if your request is a minor modification of a basic functionality. In such case it is a major advantage to have the developers of your paid shopping cart on your side. As their customer you are entitled to receive technical support for issues related to their application and sometimes this can be a great advantage.

Furthermore, in case a bug occurs in your application you can count that it will be resolved by the developers of your application. As for the open source applications, very often it can be a real pain to find a solution for certain bugs.

Security

It is not a rule, but in most cases it is true – the paid applications have better security. In most cases the security is one of the main advantages that the developers of the paid applications are trying to point out. Not only because a hacked paid application is the worst advertisement for the product but for the fact that when you rely your business on a piece of software the very fist thing that you expect is to have security.

Some disadvantages and additional expenses

Unfortunately, in most cases the application installation support for these applications is considered by the vendors as a paid service. Having in mind that you will need a hosting for your website add some extra expenses and this might be a problem if you are just starting your online business. Most of the companies provide hosting services for their products, however, it is rather expensive or very limited to the resources required for their very own application.

Solutions and additional features

You should consider the fact that your business will need not only the shopping card but email accounts, additional space or even a forum or a blog for additional SEO optimization of your website. Very often this cannot be achieved on the limited or expensive hosting services that paid shopping cart companies offer.

As every new beginning you may come to the struggle between the expensive high quality and the cheaper solution. In order to assist you in this matter for better results we, at TMDhosting, selected some of the most popular free Open Source applications which cover almost all functionalities you may require in order to build your online shop.

One of the most preferred free open source eCommerce platforms nowadays are:

Magento is one of the most recommended eCommerce software platforms with the fastest growing communing on the market. Totally free and open source, you can take advantage of the great look, feature-rich and secure eCommerce building platform. Our Magento hosting package includes a lot of free text tutorials and video tutorials as well as unique free templates for our customers.

osCommerce is an open source, eCommerce and online store management software program. It can run on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available under the GNU General Public License and comes free of cost. This application offers an ideal online shop e-commerce solution and features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.

CubeCart is an “out of the box” ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been developed to ease you to quickly setup a powerful online store, which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world. It includes a great set of powerful features enabling your business to trade online successfully. It is easy to modify the look and feel of your store to match your company’s branding or to site comfortably beside your existing website due to CubeCart’s powerful HTML template system.

CS-Cart is a turnkey shopping cart software solution, that includes all the necessary features and functions to build a successful online business. It is an “out of the box” solution, with easy to use functionality that allows you to immediately start to sell online, ranging from a one-product shop to a fully-featured online store.

CreLoaded shopping cart program adds many new features and has a redesigned administration interface for improved efficiency, with new tabbed arrangements on the Catalog, Product Edit, Article Manager, and the new CRE Page Manager pages.

All eCommerce hosting packages includes excellent technical support assistance, free modules, components and template installation.

If you need further assistance to choose the right package for your needs, you can always contact our experienced and friendly representatives via our Live Chat.