CS-Cart is a complete shopping cart application that can quickly enable any business to start selling online whether it is a single-product shop or a complete marketplace.

The application uses Ajax in many parts to ease usage and offers an overall smart logic for a better shopping experience like one-page checkout, featured/related products for cross selling and many more.

CS-Cart is installed with the help of a web-based installer and products/categories can be defined so fast as it supports bulk uploading of products/categories/images or importing/exporting any data from CSVs.

It supports unlimited (and nested) categories where products can be assigned to more than one of them.

The product is integrated with 50+ payment gateways (from payment processors to online systems) and all major shipping providers to get real-time shipping rates.

There are many tools provided to help selling/promoting products including:

• promotions (get the 2nd product 50% off, free shipping or reward points system)
• gift certificates
• gift registry (users can create lists for weddings, birthdays, etc.)
• built-in affiliate system

SEO is also taken good care of with SEO-friendly URLS, custom meta keywords for products, categories or content pages, auto-sitemap generation and more.

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This article is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) for much cheaper prices & offers great support. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

This week was a surprise Magento week at WebResourcesDepot for getting you closer to this awesome open source e-commerce application.

2 posts are published to guide you on installing & customizing your e-store:

• The Ultimate Guide To Creating E-Commerce Websites With Magento (Part 1)
  
• The Ultimate Guide To Creating E-Commerce Websites With Magento (Part 2)
  

And here is the 3rd (last) one which will help you a lot in beautifying your shop with 20+ free Magento themes:

Foot Prints – demo

Magento Classic – demo

Modern

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This article is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) for much cheaper prices & offers great support. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

In the first part of the Ultimate Magento Guide, we covered the back-end features of this open source e-commerce software. We also created a simple product and displayed it in our e-store.

Today we will focus on "customizing the basic layout of our e-store",  "what Magento Connect is” and "how we can install themes + extensions".

Let's Turn Off The Cache

Before heading to the customization, we will turn off the cache mode of Magento so that we can see our changes. Otherwise, Magento will keep showing the cached pages.

We can turn off the cache from our back-end. Go to System>Cache Management. Choose "disable" from the drop down menu which is an option in "All Cache". Follow the screenshot below if you are having some problem.

After disabling the cache, we will now change the name of our e-store which appears on many places (like after a new user registration). We can change it by going to System> Manage Stores, click the "Default Store View" and put the actual name of the store there just like “WRD E-Store”.

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This article is sponsored by SSLmatic which sells SSL certificates (RapidSSL, Geotrust, Verisign) for much cheaper prices & offers great support. Check their site to get the cheap SSL certificates.

In the process of launching an e-store, when it comes to choosing the right solution, you will get puzzled by the hundreds of solutions available.

The options range from simple and free shopping cart systems to complex and paid e-commerce softwares which can charge you for both getting and “keeping” your shop online.

However, there are some applications which offer great features but still free.

One of the best and open source e-commerce solutions available for free is Magento.

In the following comprehensive tutorial, we will see what are the benefits and drawbacks of using Magento as your e-commerce application. We will make a demo store and take a look on some basic and intermediate features of Magento. So what are we waiting for? Let’s get started.

Why use Magento?

Pros:

• free (absolutely free, no charges at all for community version)
• open source (you can even make it better by writing your own code)
• easy upgrades (automatic upgrades without loosing your customizations)
• extensions, plugins (enhance your Magento installation with plugins just like WordPress)
• very comprehensive theming system (custom themes for your store similar to WordPress)
• downloadable goodies support

Cons:

• resource intensive (yes, Magento needs a lot of memory in order to work efficiently but don’t worry, we will also learn how to fix it up to run Magento in low cost hosting solutions.)
• latest version of PHP not supported (Magento only works with PHP 5.2)

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GetShopped is a free WordPress plugin for adding e-commerce capabilities into WordPress-powered websites.

It is a very easy-to-setup plugin which can work with any standards compliant WordPress theme (and WordPress MU).

The plugin offers a flexible pricing structure for products with features like:

• flexible coupon/discount pricing rules
• product specific sales
• quantity discounts
• free shipping options
• multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts

and supports multiple payment providers like Google Checkout, Paypal & Payment Express.

GetShopped makes it possible to complete the shopping process quickly with a one-page-checkout & optionally, guest checkouts is supported.

It is easy to manage orders with the help of a powerful admin interface, print invoices, packing slips & more.

The plugin also offers lots of other features from comments to new/featured product widgets.

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).