nopCommerce is an open source shopping cart software that is built with ASP.NET & uses MSSQL for storing the data.

It comes with a powerful backend & highly customizable frontend.

nopCommerce has all the features of a standard e-commerce websites & offers more like:

• support for kit products (e.g. build your own computer)
• real-time currency exchange rates
• multilingual interface
• compare selected products
• highly flexible shipping calculation (integrated providers, width/height/order total based & more)
• tax calculations by country/state/product & more
• built-in forum & polls
• wishlist

One of the most impressive parts of the software is the integrated marketing capabilities it has. You can customize the design of a product or category page, create any type of discounts & even activate an affiliate system.

nopCommerce supports most of the popular payment gateways & with its pluggable modular/layered architecture, new ones can be added with ease (some are already created).

Tutorialzine is sharing a beautiful tutorial (with source) on creating an Ajaxed drag’n drop shopping cart with jQuery & PHP.

It uses MySQL for storing the data & simpleTip plugin for displaying information about the products with style.

It takes advantage of the jQuery UI’s draggable & droppable behaviours to accomplish the flawless experience.

The shopping cart is not a ready-to-go one for an e-commerce website but it is a nice base for creating one by improving the features.

Tip: Tutorialzine provides other nice tutorials which you may be interested in like:

• A Stylish Navigation Menu With jQuery
• Creating a Facebook-like Registration Form with jQuery

BigCommerce is an easy-to-use hosted e-commerce software which makes your store up & running so quickly.

It can be totally customized as you have full access to HTML/CSS via FTP & there are 50+ ready-to-use store designs that can be applied with few clicks.

BigCommerce is integrated with almost every payment, shipping & accounting system you can think of. Optionally, it offers its own merchant account system with under-the-market rates.

The software is fully optimized for SEO from valid W3C templates to automatically generated sitemap XML file & SEO-firendly links.

Besides the products, it is possible to create & share any content (like return policies, promotion details) with its CMS functionality.

The software offers a quality usability experience to customers with features like:

• one-click adding to cart
• ability to compare products
• tracking orders
• wishlists (public & private)
• single page & guest checkout
• powerful search system (suggestions, filtering by price/availability, etc.)
• & many more

It has everything to market the products easily like

• trackable coupon codes
• bulk discounts per product
• ability to create custom discount rules
• free shipping for purchases over $x
• affiliate system
• & more..

As BigCommerce is a hosted software, it comes with an included premium hosting with daily offsite backups, unlimited e-mails & top-notch security.

To sum up, the software offers more than anything a store owner can expect. It is a great choice for anyone who wants to run their stores without any technical hassle & get official support.

P.S. This post is a sponsored review.

simpleCart(js), a very simple but smart shopping cart that was shared on WRD, now has a new version with more features.

The application is an upload & use shopping cart where no database is required and can be integrated into any website so easily.

It works by including a JavaScript file into the webpages and usage of special classes. As an example:

<div class="simpleCart_items"></div>

will display the full cart, no other code needed.

With the V2, it supports both PayPal + Google Checkout as the payment providers & multiple currencies/tax rates can be used.

CRE Loaded PCI CE is an open source e-commerce software which is the lighter, but still strong, version of a paid solution.

It is designed to run on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server and offers lots of features which you can add more as it comes with the source.

The application has an unlimited category system, comes with several shipping provider (free shipping logic is integrated) & payment modules.

It is possible to define "special products" on the main page & per category. Products can be sorted by price, manufacturer, etc.

Some features of CRE Loaded PCI CE:

• article manager
• faq manager
• banner manager
• multilanguage support
• wishlists
• ability to checkout without registration
• cross-selling
• & more

It also has a strong admin interface where the store can be managed easily (by multiple admins when needed with the access-level based user system).

A very significant feature of the product is the importance it gives to the security. CRE Loaded PCI CE is compliant with all PCI data security standards (& has a "order fraud screen" in the backend).

With this 5th & last post of the "WRD E-Commerce Week" we will be modifying "our Ajaxed shopping cart" to create a one which is very ideal for designs with limited spaces.

The shopping cart will:

• be hidden at the top of the page that can be displayed with a show/hide link
• open when an item is added to the basket & auto-close
• require a manual "hide" click if opened manually
• enable us to delete products

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E-commerce has its own dynamics when compared to the standard shopping experiences. It:

• is faster
• requires collection of data
• includes shipping more frequently
• has different ways of supporting users
• & more..

If the product sold is not something unique, then it probably exists in 100s of other e-commerce websites. So, to differentiate your stores from others, here are 13 tips for a better e-commerce website:

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In this 3rd day of the "WRD E-Commerce Week", we will be adding a chic fly-to-basket effect to our previously created Ajaxed shopping cart using jQuery.

Rather than the complete HTML structure & PHP code that adds/removes the products, we’ll be focusing on the details related with  the effect.

To findout the details of the complete HTML structure & PHP code, please check our post: Creating A Slick Ajaxed Add-To-Basket With jQuery And PHP. And, a full working example can be found in the download package.

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Using icons in e-commerce websites is almost a standard as users generally search for a shopping cart icon to view the items in the basket or credit card icons to findout if such a payment option exists.

With this 2nd post of E-Commerce Week, here is a collection of free e-commerce icons that you can use in your projects.

WebResourcesDepot E-Commerce Icons (Vectors Included)

The free e-commerce icon set is created exclusively for WebResourcesDepot by the talented team at IconShock (like promised).

The set comes with 5 icons both in PNG & AI (Illustrator) files so, if wanted, they can be resized or modified easily.

Click here to download WebResourcesDepot E-Commerce Icons!.

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It is a clear fact that Ajaxed interfaces, if not overused, eases using websites so much.

For an e-commerce website, this can mean a better shopping experience for customers where they can concentrate more on the products which may result in better sales.

This is a detailed tutorial which shows creating an unobtrusive Ajaxed shopping cart using jQuery & PHP and can guide you to Ajaxify any e-commerce software you may already be using or coding.

The main functions of the cart will be adding/removing items to the basket without the need of refreshing the page & displaying the actions with effects.

Other Add-To-Basket Tutorials Built on This Example:

• Fly-To-Basket Effect With jQuery
• Ajaxed Sliding Shopping Cart With jQuery

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