The best eCommerce shopping cart software, which is an integral part of any online store, will provide your customers with a hassle-free online shopping experience, letting them order and pay for products through your website and do not overpay for unnecessary intermediate transactions. You will be able to track the entire payment process without interruptions.
Keep in mind that the eCommerce shopping cart platform must work smoothly and be combined with your online catalog, customer support and payment processing gateway.
Top 12 ECommerce Shopping Cart Software
- 3dcart - The best eCommerce shopping cart software
- OpenCart - Offers adjustable templates and themes
- Shopify - Popular fully hosted eCommerce shopping cart software
- BigCommerce - For access to multiple storefronts in one place
- Square - For selling in-person and online
- Easy Store Creator - To create and manage an online store from scratch
- Yo!Kart - Standalone multi-vendor eCommerce platform
- PinnacleCart - The best eCommerce shopping cart software for beginners
- Ecwid - Best for selling on social media
- PrestaShop - The best free eCommerce shopping cart software
- X-Cart - For enterprise corporations and B2B business owners
- Magento - Free eCommerce solution for true programmers
Your web hosting for an eCommerce platform usually comes with a shopping cart. But there are a number of key options that you can set up - either configure everything yourself or pay for a ready-made solution.
If you want to install your own eCommerce shopping cart software, you will need an e-Commerce web hosting service to be able to serve your shopping site. Besides, make sure that you have added a credit card processing option to accept payments online.
1. 3dcart - Our Choice
- Customizable, scalable, adaptive themes
- Flexible rates available
- No transaction fees
- Numerous features, SEO enabled
- Multiple payment processing options
- 15-day free trial, 24/7 support
- Takes time to get familiar
Verdict: 3dcart cloud platform provides everything you need to create, manage and develop an online store out-of-the-box. Thanks to pricing and plenty of pre-defined features, 3dcart is an attractive option for a fully hosted solution to expand a ready-made business.
This online shopping cart software offers a huge number of payment gateways and a user-friendly interface with hundreds of adaptive design themes. With 200+ integrated features and pre-installed applications, the marketing tools center lets you send newsletters, communicate with customers, have an affiliate program, gift registry, and a powerful product review system. You can find what is missing in the App Store of the 3dcart shopping cart software platform.
2. OpenCart
- Open source and free
- Robust e-shop management
- Variety of extensions and themes
- Several payment gateways
- Handy administrator’s panel
- Customizing may seem confused
- Poor search engine optimization capabilities
Verdict: Offering ease of use, robust controls, and open source code, OpenCart is a great tool for managing multiple e-shops at once from a single server. Customizing the store according to your expectations and requirements is done with the help of pro extensions and a bunch of dedicated themes.
Immediately after installing the software, you can launch your online store and start taking orders. To do this, you need to choose one of the provided website templates and themes for a unique look, many of which are free.
OpenCart is designed as a responsive product that allows you to fully manage orders, products, all kinds of reports, marketing tools, and other factors of your ecommerce platform. Tracking your sales and other metrics is available on the admin panel or in the menu.
3. Shopify
- Marketing toolset, POS application
- Multiple integrations, app store
- Free attractive themes, templates
- Advanced customization, design toolset
- 14-day free trial, 24-hour support
- Transaction fee
Verdict: It is a fully hosted eCommerce platform provided at a reasonable price, with a solid feature-set and round-the-clock support, focusing on ease of use. With Shopify, you get all the tools you need to launch a startup tracking operation for an online, retail business, or other eCommerce enterprises. The platform does not contain or require knowledge of website coding.
Shopify offers a built-in top shopping cart software and supports dozens of third-party integrations. It is compatible with most web hosting providers and provides a quick checkout process through its own payment gateway Shopify Pay. The platform works with 100+ major payment systems (Apple Pay, Sage Payments, PayPal). If you are using Shopify and your Shopify store isn't able to cater your business as you wish, you might consider migrating from Shopify to Magento. Magento is considered as one of the best alternatives to Shopify by offering customization and has a wide range of apps and extensions available to expand your store in the market.
4. BigCommerce
- Numerous built-in functions, integrations
- No fees, one-page sales register
- Attractive design templates
- Unlimited products, storage, bandwidth
- 15-day free trial, 24-hour support
- Restrictions on lower tariff plans
- Doesn’t provide the store constructor
Verdict: It is the best eCommerce shopping cart software due to its flexibility, power, as well as reliable features for experienced online sellers and novices. If you wish to expand your online store to multiple platforms, BigCommerce can help you combine all your individual stores.
BigCommerce organizes transactions from all channels on the orders page by placing the related channel logo next to each order. The Storefront section on the toolbar contains your design tools: change the theme, add a logo, and add links to social networks. You can use a dozen free designs or 100+ paid themes in the BigCommerce theme store.
5. Square
- Universal eCommerce solution
- Free store builder plan
- Easy-to-use, no code required
- Ideal for small sales
- Payment processing, marketing platform
- Restrictions outside the Square system
- Not for large and international sales
- Commission from payments
Verdict: Square has created an ecosystem that manages all aspects of trading activities – from marketing to employee payments – with a single login. If you have a physical store and plan to open a business online, Square is one of the best universal eCommerce platforms. It grants easy access to products, order tracking, customer list management and sales reports.
The Square Online Checkout service for accepting personal and online payments combined in the payment processor’s control panel is also available without a store using simple links, purchase buttons or QR codes. The new online store designer uses Weebly, one of the best web design software with eCommerce functions.
6. Easy Store Creator
- Fully customizable tools
- Advanced hosting
- Automatic mailing
- Shopping cart
- Site statistics
- Free version is limited
Verdict: Easy Store Creator offers a large number of customizable tools to manage your store, including automated emails, site statistics with charts, affiliate tracking, shopping cart, and more. Moreover, this instrument will come in handy if you are looking for hosting for your commercial site, supported by a global monitoring system.
If you are building your online store from scratch, you will definitely like additional features - a website builder with some design elements, newsletter management, customer and order management.
7. Yo!Kart
- Intuitive user interface
- Individual vendor storefronts
- Ready apps & pre-integrated APIs
- Fully customizable & highly scalable
- Self-hosted & lifetime ownership
- Limited themes
Verdict: Yo!kart Multivendor eCommerce Platform is designed to deliver an online marketplace for aspiring business owners and enterprises. The platform comes with all essential eCommerce features and integrations like automated tax management, Stripe Connect for real-time split payments, abandoned cart recovery, streamlined shipping management, and more. There are 20+ payment methods and support for multilingual as well as multicurrency.
From stock photography marketplace like Shutterstock to horizontal marketplace like Amazon, Yo!Kart is an ideal solution for all such business ideas. The platform is fully customizable enabling business owners to personalize the marketplace as per their business requirements and provide a competitive advantage.
The multi-vendor marketplace is PWA compliant, GDPR compliant, and comes with native mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms. It offers 12-months of free technical support and no recurring charges or transaction fees of any kind. Yo!Kart is a trusted choice among SMBs as well as Fortune 500 firms to start an online marketplace.
8. PinnacleCart
- Great long-term deal
- One account for multiple administrators
- Well-designed professional templates
- E-marketing and SEO toolset
- 14-day free trial
- High initial cost
- No free shared SSL certificate
- No integrated sales system
Verdict: The goal of PinnacleCart is to enable users without technical knowledge to effectively manage a reliable, universal eCommerce platform that provides everything you need to create, manage and grow your online business.
PinnacleCart belongs to the list of the top eCommerce software thanks to modern templates, a simple website builder, remarkable search engine optimization (SEO) toolset and impressive e-marketing services. However, if you want to get reports on your eCommerce sales performance, you may need to use trusted third-party services and use react admin templates for easier administration.
9. Ecwid
- Easily syncs website, social media, marketplaces
- Free-forever plan, no fees
- Responsive design, mobile app
- Advanced SEO toolset
- High-security PCI DSS
- Some manual configuration is required
- Limitations of the free version
Verdict: Easily integrated into any website and leading 50+ POS systems, you can sell with mobile management and point-of-sale integration anywhere. Ecwid lets you cross-sell on different platforms, but its social media features are most outstanding.
This eCommerce software offers a start-up site that can be customized to suit your needs. You can embed a store into an existing website or manage a POS terminal from a mobile device. From a single dashboard, you have centralized access to your store on such platforms as eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, WordPress, Weebly or Wix.
10. PrestaShop
- Can be infinitely customized
- Open-source, free to download
- Customizable with numerous integrations
- Powerful user community
- Developer skills required
- Maintenance and full accommodation costs
- Limited integration with the hosted version
Verdict: It is the best open-source, free shopping cart software to help you sell goods online. You can host PrestaShop on the Google cloud platform or on your own server: the self-hosted version gives you complete control. It has a clean interface, so if you have multiple storefronts, PrestaShop lets you access all of them through a single dashboard.
There are various options for adding a new product: you can manage SEO, customize delivery information, change the quantity, set the price using convenient tabs, as well as set your online presence, accept payments and take care of delivery.
11. X-Cart
- Hosted version or self-installation
- Free plan
- Extensive and powerful feature-set
- Professional support team
- 30-day free trial with a refund guarantee
- Manual encoding and configuration required
- Difficult to configure
- May be expensive to maintain
Verdict: It is a universal eCommerce shopping cart software for fully customizable websites of any size and nature. X-Cart is aimed mainly at experienced eCommerce professionals due to the rather complex user interface compared to similar platforms, as well as the need to know HTML coding to get full functionality. However, if you have HTML support, it is worth checking out.
100% open-source software enables unlimited customization. Experienced developers of all kinds make sure that your store is running and selling 24/7.
12. Magento
- Free and open-source
- Endless customization options
- About 2000 additional products
- One of the most well-known platforms
- Difficult for non-coders
- Expensive for small businesses
- Point of sale (POS) support isn’t provided
Verdict: It is a FOS software solution for managing all aspects of virtual shopping carts. Magento Commerce, recently acquired by Adobe, is the best eCommerce platform oriented at enterprises. Although this makes it unavailable for most small operations, those with sufficient funds and fairly complex technical requirements will find its capabilities irreplaceable.
The advantage of open-source code is that Magento supports a vast array of features and can be customized to suit your store’s needs. Out-of-the-box software supports accepting manual payments, such as checks and money transfers.
