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.

Wix is a free web-based service for creating simple to advanced Flash websites.

It offers 100s of ready-to-use and well-categorized free Flash templates (like e-flyers, photographers, business & more) or everything can be created from scratch with a blank one.

Wix is very easy to use with its drag’n drop editor that enables anyone to add:

• any type of media (sound, video, images)
• shapes, cliparts, animations, effects
• advanced photo albums (slideshows, coverflow, carousel & more)
• & lots of widgets like Google Maps, RSS, contact forms

to their websites.

If you want to sell stuff, the application has a solution for that too. It offers PayPal buttons to be added & configured with ease.

Although Wix looks like a perfect fit for anyone who is not into or new to web design (considering it does not require any programming skills), it is also a solution for experienced users to create impressive websites very quickly.

Websites created by this free web design service are search engine friendly & hosted free. For anyone looking into getting more with Wix, check the premium upgrades.

P.S. This post is a sponsored review.

OpenCart is an open source shopping cart that is built with PHP & stores the data in MySQL.

The application has every standard feature an e-commerce website may need like:

• unlimited categories
• multiple images for products
• customer reviews
• multiple currencies & more..

OpenCart’s front & backends can be expanded with modules (there are already 30+ modules).

It has also support for:

• templating
• multiple payment gateways
• multiple languages
• various shipping methods (like weight based shipping) & more.

The system can be managed with an easy-to-use administrator panel where all the orders can be viewed, products can be defined, etc.

And, a very nice feature OpenCart offers is the "coupons" where discounts can be set on a "per product" basis.

P.S. There is also another open source e-commerce project named OpenCart Zero which is derived form OpenCart (more details can be found here.)

XtraUpload is a free file hosting script for anyone willing to create a service similar to Rapidshare.com or Megaupload.com.

It is written in PHP (CodeIgniter Framework) & uses MySQL for storing data.

The script is also an e-commerce platform as you can offer both standard-free & premium-paid plans where payments can be handled via PayPal, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, Moneybookers & more. All are integrated.

It has an e-mail validated signup system where users can:

• upload multiple files
• create & password protect folders
• rate files
• share links via e-mail & more..

And, with a powerful administrator screen, you can:

• restrict downloads with:
  • amount of allowed MB per hour
  • defining concurrent download limits
• create user groups & define limits for each user group
• add/manage servers (multi-server support)
• manage subscriptions
• enable/disable captcha & much more..

Besides being a complete file hosting platform, XtraUpload’s code is a resource for anyone into CodeIgniter Framework covering most of the features a web application have.

simpleCart(js) is a lightweight (10.5 kb) & free shopping cart application for creating a simple yet good looking e-commerce environment in minutes.

It uses cookies to store the shopping basket data, no databases required, and payment is completed via PayPal.

The application is modular with the JavaScript functions included.

An "add to basket" example:

simpleCart.add('name=Shirt','price=6.00','image=images/myImage.png'
,'quantity=5','size=XL','color=Blue');

The download package already includes the source of the demo.