We have all witnessed how Ecommerce took the world by storm & disrupted many markets. Just 7-8 years ago, India too came to party with this cool revolution but a very few tech geeks could offer the checkout feature on their websites. Now, thanks to the Open Source community this have changed, there are plenty of available Ecommerce frameworks & solutions that are free to use & completely customisable. We are going to analyse & rate 5 of these Top Open Source Ecommerce frameworks/solutions.


5  WP Commerce

Wordpress can be credited with empowering non-geek common folks with some good Personal Wesites/Blogs. Riding on its popularity, we have WP Commerce Plugin coming at no. 5 on our list. It has been downloaded 3 million times which is huge, a lot of video tutorials & forum discussions are available to help you get started. With this plugin, beginners can easily convert their WP Blog into a webstore. Its simple & very user-friendly but only fit for making simple ecommerce sites, advanced features like Social Media Integration are effective but you have pay for them.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-e-commerce/

 4  WooCommerce

WooCommerce is hugely popular & the best recommended Ecommerce solution for WordPress sites. We are placing WooCommerce at no. 4, because the Marketplace feature is lagging a bit and better plugins are priced high. Nevertheless, this solution works wonders with its elegant themes, designs & layouts. All components like order processing & shipping integration are decent in their performance. It stands at a staggering 16 million downloads till date & powers around 37% of all online stores in the world.   

https://woocommerce.com/

3  Abante Cart

AbanteCart is a robust, free Open Source Ecommerce application positioned at no. 3 in this list. Using this you can step-up your game with free & feature-rich Marketplace integration. I've personally tried this and can vouch for this solution anytime but if your are completely new to HTML/CSS, then you will face problems in removing the AbanteCart logo. With features like order-cancellation requests, SMS notifications, Discount coupons & promotions, it scores high points although, it lags in layout customisation. Adding & removing products is a breeze and a bit of analytics adds to user experience. AbanteCart is certainly recommended despite a few flaws.    
http://www.abantecart.com/free-ecommerce-downloads


2  Open Cart

Open Cart has raised the competition among free Ecommerce platforms with its intuitive admin interface. Its Search Engine friendly and offers thousands of themes, hundreds of payment & shipping integration methods. More than 14000 additional extensions are available. It  has only 4000 active users but that is not a real measure of its applicability for scaled-up ecommerce marketplaces. The admin control panel has a fresh feel & you will not face any problems in customising the layout unlike AbanteCart. A bit of intermediate HTML/CSS & PHP coding will be required to add dynamic features, beginners can buy extensions to ease things out for them.   

http://www.opencart.com/



1  Magento

By far the best & most powerful Ecommerce framework is Magento, if you are aware of Ecommerce, then you have definitely heard of it. With $50 billion transactions are supported annually, no wonder it is ranked no.1 all over the Ecommerce world. One thing that separates other frameworks from Magento is the fact that it also offers Industry specific solutions like B2B, Fashion etc which ofcourse are not free, but the Magento Community Edition is available in that case. Having said that, Magento is also the most secure platform but biggest disadvantage is that it requires a geek with intermediate skills in web-development to customise it. Beginners will hit a wall using it.  

https://magento.com/


Note : These platforms have been rated on the basis their functionalities & required level of Web-development skills.