17 CMS for your eCommerce project

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.


“17 CMS for your eCommerce project” received 28 comments! Add yours.

  1. shape_tea March 1st, 2009

    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? :)

  2. Elliot March 1st, 2009

    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.

  3. billparker March 10th, 2009

    Love the list, I will certaily be demoing a couple new ones this next weekend.

    You can find some great zen-cart sites for your example on their site showcase here –
    http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=showcase&cat=Apparel

  4. Briana September 3rd, 2009

    Thanks for mentioning us!!!!! love your blog!!

  5. rss feed October 2nd, 2009

    Useful list! thank you

  6. Charlotte October 19th, 2009

    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.

  7. Ziad November 24th, 2009

    Where is Software Droid?

    An amazing Ecommerce CMS made just for selling Software.

  8. PremiumThemesDirectory December 17th, 2009

    Great list. Theme Market theme is great for wordpress blogers start sell products online!

  9. Zaka March 12th, 2010

    this list helped me a lot it would be better if the review of the CMS software also there

  10. website development services July 1st, 2010

    which one the best ?
    thanks

  11. Matthew Kest August 23rd, 2010

    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.

  12. Elio August 23rd, 2010

    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.

  13. DailyTechPost September 13th, 2010

    Great list, I was looking for open source cms then I found your site..thanks for sharing this :)

  14. Jason Guerra September 22nd, 2010

    Verb CMS also offers eCommerce: http://verbcms.com/ecommerce-cms

    This is a solid choice for anyone who requires high levels of customization.

  15. Brian Williams October 22nd, 2010

    Check out http://www.eSitefinity.com which offers CMS and Ecommerce. It is awesome!
    BW.

  16. Martin Lucas November 3rd, 2010

    I’d recommend eShop for WordPress – it’s free and very simple to use and style.

  17. Elio November 3rd, 2010

    Nice tip Martin, I’m adding the link for other readers
    eShop: shopping cart plugin for WordPress
    Looks promising, it is even making use of custom post types and is multisite compatible. There’s a list of sites using eShop at the author’s site.

  18. E-commerce Cms « Racex's Blog November 24th, 2010

    [...] Source: http://www.ilovecolors.com.ar/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. [...]

  19. Mark Smith April 23rd, 2011

    Great list. We’ve had good luck with http://www.solidshops.com which I found extremely easy to use and they don’t have transaction costs.

  20. Razibul Hassan July 18th, 2011

    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. Vu July 26th, 2011

    I like this article :)

  22. Tomy Gumilar August 18th, 2011

    E commerce is very popular in Indonesia. People here are looking for it.

  23. Joris September 1st, 2011

    It’s a great list, but hosted ecommerce packages like our own http://www.solidshops.com can save so much time (and thus money) for web developers, that it might make a lot of sense adding them to your list.

  24. nanni October 7th, 2011

    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..

  25. Elio October 7th, 2011

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

  26. sathia October 9th, 2011

    Great list . Thank you very much

  27. Damian Spaulding November 3rd, 2011

    can I add one?
    http://www.coremanagementsolutions.com

  28. Dan December 7th, 2011

    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

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