Portfolio of Joe Garite II

I’d like to start off this site with discussing something that can be used by either a developer, a designer, or pretty much anyone who is one the internet that is working with business – e-commerce. Not just any e-commerce, but Open Source e-commerce solutions. I’ll discuss several different solutions and then give my opinion on which one I prefer and why. Feel free to comment, I’d like to have a community base here, so I hope to here from visitors again and again. Anyway, without further ado…

1. Magento
   Magento was started by a web development firm in Los Angeles by the name Varien. The thing that impresses me the most about this shopping cart is that for an Open Source e-commerce solution, it really does have a lot of bells and whistles. Wishlists, shop by price and category, item comparison – all the things that you may expect a professional web store to have.  You can view a full list of all the features, in PDF form, here. In short, here are just a few that surprised me:
   • Multiple Images with Zoom
   • Batch Import and Export of Catalog (Love that for big stores)
   • One page checkout!
   • Product comparisons
   • Cross Sell/Up Sell
   • Filters
2. OScommerce
   OScommerce has a slew of companies (over 14,110 websites to date) that use this Open Source e-commerce solution. But what makes them different then the rest? In my personal opinion, the community. OScommerce has a great forum with thousands of users who are always helping each other out with any and all issues they run into when trying to customize their website. The range of users starts from beginners to expert coders. So what features do you get with OsCommerce? There are multiple payment Gateway’s to choose from including (but not limited to) – 2Checkout.com, Authorize.Net, ChronoPay, iPayment, PayNova, Paypal, PSIGate, SecPay and TrustCommerce.  Other features include:
   • Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
   • Object oriented PHP backend
   • Free Community Add-ons
   • Send HTML E-Mails from the Backend
   • Purchase Without an Account
   • Backup/Import/Export Features
3. Zencart
   Zencart’s website doesn’t do justice to the professionalism of the end product, and although it doesn’t not offer as many payment processing options as OScommerce and other e-commerce platforms it is a more mature product, with OScommerce often taking quite a long time to release fixes for important issues such as security. ZenCart is a fork of OScommerce so you can expect very similar sorts of features, its also easier for the newbie developer to get into than OScommerce. Payment gateways include LinkPoint, Authorize.Net and Paypal.
   • User frontend is validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional
   • Any PHP coding changes can be protected during upgrades by using the built-in override protection system
   • Integrate with phpBB
   • Meta Tags keywords and descriptions can be controlled at the per-product level

And so, these appear to be the three most popular Open Source and Free e-Commerce Solutions on the web. In my personal opinion, of the three, I prefer OScommerce over the others. With it’s large community that is still growing, the amount of add-ons that are available for beginners and experts to use, and the level of ease to set it up, it’s a sure fire win in this Open Source e-Commerce competition.

Popularity: unranked [?]