The past few years has seen a practical boom of the open source ecommerce market. One reason being, activepieces high quality and effective solutions are built on small budgets and in real quick time. The other being, people saw the success stories of major ecommerce websites like eBay and Amazon, and thus have followed the suit by bringing their businesses online and targeting a larger niche of customers. Building an online store is really simple. There are open source ecommerce software such as osCommerce and Magento which can be customized to produce a fully functional online shopping store with desirable features, look, plusiliminus and navigation. Moreover, open source ecommerce technologies like X-Cart and Zen Cart even let the use of online shopping carts to be personalized.
These online stores have lots of items that you can buy, bid for, and take them on rent. And it does not stop here, you can even put up your articles to sell, exchange, and put an auction to it on such ecommerce websites. The items may range from electronics, to clothing, jewelries, and accessories, to utilities, computers, and mobile phones, to even bizarre things such as limited edition collectibles and unheard innovations. An ecommerce website can be as versatile as you want it to be and thus you can build an online store as per your requirements and specifications. This ecommerce software gives you total control of all departments of your online business, sanidad and help enhancing merchandising and promotions. An ecommerce website automates business processing making the process even faster with more reliability; thus bring in more productivity and profits.
Now a question may creep up what is open source ecommerce and why choose it? Well, the answer is as simple – open source ecommerce is an open platform for customization that has a huge developer community that constantly updates and upgrades the software to remove glitches, add new features and functionality, sportis and round the clock technical support. All of this comes for free, well if any price tag is put on any open source developing tool it is really small and affordable. So all you have to splurge for is the production and hosting costs. This really looks a lucrative and inexpensive way to start a business online.
An ecommerce website can have any features and functionality that you wish for, businessresource yet some of the basic features of a typical ecommerce website are as follows:
o Multilingual and multi-currency support. Internet is accessible from almost any part of the world, so the scope of your ecommerce website is not limited to just your local community or a particular niche that you are targeting. People come from all countries, editorlistings cultures and ethnicities. To accommodate all, you need to have linguistic characteristics that make the customer feel at home. Furthermore, you may ease the task for the buyer by providing a support for accepting international currencies.
o Multiple payment gateways. A payment gateway is a gateway through which the customer transfers a sum for the product that he is buying. Nowadays Internet allows some strikingly easy options such as PayPal, biztrophy Authorize.net, iPayment, 2Checkout, and credit card processing. All these gateways have to be integrated into your open source ecommerce website and the money transfer has to be ensured as secure and reliable.
o Product catalogue management. The product catalogue is the list of the items sold on your ecommerce site with product details and prices. This list should be able to be manipulated by adding new items, removing, and/or editing the existing items. Your product catalogue could have an unlimited number of items and varieties.
o Order and shipping management. The buyer should be offered delivery options and the order processing pipeline should be precise and work effectively.
o Analytics and reporting. There may be functionality on the admin dashboard that lets you know the status quo of the inventory and finance. Good ecommerce websites have fantastic reporting systems that keep the managers updated of their business processing.
This is not an exhaustive list of features of an open source ecommerce website, as your online store can have any of your own customized features and functionality as there is no possible limit to creativity.
