17 CMS for your eCommerce project

Posted on by Elio Rivero

A list of the most popular eCommerce CMSeCommerce is not new. It is now one of the most important applications of internet along with e-mail, e-learning, chat and social networks. However, in the last few years a whole new world started in eCommerce CMS. New contenders like Magento challenge the long time champion osCommerce and even a medium CMS like WordPress and a hardcore CMS like Plone have their eCommerce plugin.

The following list doesn’t attempt to be perfect neither showcase the best CMS. It is merely a review of the most popular eCommerce specific CMS out there, both open source and paid ones. In the end, there’s a list of eCommerce plugins for some generic CMS like WordPress, Drupal or Plone.

Free eCommerce CMS

Magento

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Magento adminMagento store


PrestaShop™

http://www.prestashop.com/

Prestashop™ adminPrestashop store

Zen Cart

http://www.zen-cart.com/

zen cart

OPENCART

http://www.opencart.com/

opencart_adminopencart store

DigiStore

http://www.digistore.co.nz/

DigiStore

Freeway

http://www.openfreeway.org/

Freeway adminFreeway store

osCSS

http://www.oscss.org/

osCSS

Paid eCommerce CMS

Brandlive

http://brandlivecommerce.com/

Brandlive

GoodBarry

http://goodbarry.com/

GoodBarry

Plugins

Plone

Get Paid

http://www.plonegetpaid.com/

GetPaid

Drupal

Drupal e-Commerce

http://www.drupalecommerce.org/

Drupal eCommerce

Ubercart

http://www.ubercart.org/

Ubercart

Joomla

IXXO Cart

http://www.php-shop-system.com/

IXXO Cart

VirtueMart

http://virtuemart.net/ (also available for Mambo)

VirtueMart 1.1

WordPress

WP e-Commerce

http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

WP e-commerce

WP e-Commerce is a free plugin but if your store grows and you need more special features you can buy them as modules at a low price. You can see various screenshots of the admin interface at the Dan Milward Flickr account, it really has a lot of options for an entire post.

Market Theme

http://www.markettheme.com/

Market Theme - Adding a new post with custom fields

This is a theme as it name implies. Of course, there has to be some plugins in there but the installation is transparent to the user. You can use the new post section to add a new product with several custom metaboxes to enter information about your product.  Market Theme doesn’t have a free option but the standard license is only $ 55 USD, and you can customize it and have access to unlimited upgrades.

Niaga Kit

http://wpecommercetheme.com/

NiagaKit

Another theme to turn your blog into a full featured store. It is also only available for purchase. After you pay, they take care of setting up the site for you.

Published by Elio Rivero

Software engineer, designer and photographer.

31 thoughts on “17 CMS for your eCommerce project”

  1. Hola Elio..thank you for this cool list. I never thought that there are so much e-commerce CMS out there. So which one did you ever use before? and which one do you think is better? 🙂

    1. Halo Septi, look, I’ve briefly used Magento and it has a lot of potential. What I’d like to know, and I’m researching right now, is that if any of these cms has conectivity with enterprise databases.

  5. I need some SERIOUS help. I want to build a website where I can sell personalized products (mugs, tshirt, etc) and I don’t know where to start. I know nothing about HTML or web building or web design. Can someone please tell me how many programs I need or software packages I need to build the website, publish the website and maintain it. I need the EASIEST solution available as I am VERY new at this. Any guidance you can give me would be MOST helpful. Thanks so much.

  10. Very interesting post. Some of the CMS with e-commerce functionality are on the edge of commercial/free category. I used the free edition of Kentico CMS, but once my business growth I moved to paid one.

    1. Apparently Kentico is a good thing since it claim to be open source on the features (not free). However ASP/Windows Servers is something I wouldn’t look into as I prefer LAMP due to their stability.

  15. […] Source: https://startfunction.com/ecommerce-cms-open-source-commercial/ This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 24th, 2010 at 18:17 and posted in E-commerce cms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. « Cms links LikeBe the first to like this post. […]

  17. Well, a comprehensive and useful list for open-source e-commerce solution. But I’d say, it lacks the listing of Commercial E-commerce solutions like BigCommerce, Volusion,Shopify, 3d carts or Ashop.

  21. do I need anything else to attach database to the website if built via CMS? it may be a dumb quetion for you but I need to know..

  22. nanni, most of the times, yes, all you need is a database. Such is the case of WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla and so on.

  25. Great article, thank you for your labor.

    It would be interesting to consider separately the Open Source and SaaS solutions.

    We are using for all of our projects Zend Framework – free and reliable (framework from Zend company, creator of the PHP language).

    Best ecommerce CMS (based on ZF):
    Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com) – leading CMS, very powerful, but very slowly and heavy demands for servers
    Digitalus CMS (http://digitaluscms.com) – not bad CMS
    Cute CMS (http://cutecms.org/) – light and flexible platform that can be adapted to a wide range of sites

  26. Awesome recommendations. Thanks for sharing the useful e-commerce websites. Shopify is another great one that sticks out from the crowd.

  28. I will add Spree Commerce. Spree is an awesome 100% open source e-commerce platform powered by Ruby on Rails that provides a lot of features out of the box: Product management, order management, shipping and gateway configuration. Like RefineryCMS, it is a flexible and highly customizable platform

Leave a Reply