OpenCart: the Open Source Platform Suitable for E-commerce Development

E-commerce platform generally provides us a hassle-free shopping experience and is also growing rapidly in order to make our lives smoother. OpenCart is, therefore, a PHP-based online store management system using HTML components and a MySQL database to support several currencies and languages.OpenCart is also even freely accessible under the GNU General Public License.

Being an open-source as well as PHP-based E-commerce solution, OpenCart is basically for online merchants. It has a very reliable and active community for user support and also consists of a list of commercial partners for professional customization as well as installation. Moreover, OpenCart is designed to regulate multiple shops under the control of only one admin interface easily. Some of the important features of OpenCart as an open-source platform for E-commerce development are mentioned in the following.

Installations

OpenCart has a reassuringly professional installation procedure. Downloading earlier versions are quite easy but no guidance regarding installation is provided when downloading. Checking your requirements is also simple and clear, and indications are well mentioned. But OpenCart usually lacks explanatory text with no option for automatic clean up and there is no set sensible permissions.

Theme

I OpenCart utilizes PHP files for its templates and therefore are quite simple to maintain and write. Themes are usually held in folders so that many can be installed to a site together. There are about more than 1000+ themes available, both payable and free.

Extensibility

OpenCart also features about 20 or more payment gateways and near about 8 shipping methods in the case of default downloads, with thousands of additional shipping integrations and gateways in its extension directory.

Support

OpenCart has its own active forums and Communities.

Performance and hosting

OpenCart provides comparable load times out of the box and hosting requirements that work mainly on the most of the PHP hosts.

Consumers

OpenCart provides a friendly browsing experience but usually suffer from the serious lapse of category filters; overall has an excellent shopping and checkout processes. OpenCart possesses product comparison, functional wishlist, good SEO capabilities, and support for promotions on its site.

Management and development

OpenCart can easily handle multiple stores well with a basic functional permissions management system. Editing of products, orders, and categoriesare also a bit fast and simple. OpenCart commonly uses an MVC pattern and generally has great documentation. Its simplicity makes developing modules far more pleasurable in terms of the competition.