Ubuntu Tips n Tricks

Posted: 24 Jul 2010 09:32 AM PDT

5 Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux: The buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks is called electronic commerce (commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce). Today, eCommerce is mostly done on the web and is conducted entirely electronically for buying virtual items such as access to premium content on a website and purchase of physical items using eCommerce payment gateway.

eCommerce has been beneficial to both business owners and consumers. It helps businesses cut down costs as they can sell their products or services through their website or online shop 24 hours a day without having the need to build a physical store or offices and hire additional employees. For consumers, eCommerce provides us the convenience to shop or pay for services in the comfort of our home.

For those of you who are planning to build or setup an online shop to sell goods or services, I have here a list of some of the most popular web eCommerce software for Linux. The following web eCommerce programs that I'm about to feature here are all free and open source, so try or use them as you wish:

osCommerce

OsCommerce is considered as one of the best web e-commerce and store-management software because it is loaded with excellent features and offers a basic set of functionality that meets the common needs of online businesses. It is easy to setup and use and can run on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. Aside from the basic features, osCommerce can be easily customized through add-ons or custom code.

Some of the key features of osCommerce:

* Compatible with PHP 4 and MySQL
* Compatible with all major browsers
* Automatic web-based installation.
* Unlimited number of products and categories
* Automatic setup of e-commerce payment systems: Authorize.net, Netbilling.com, 2Checkout.com, iPayment.de, PayPal.com, PsiGate.com, SECPay.com, and TrustCommerce.com; Many other add-on ecommerce payment systems, off-line (manual) credit card payments, and on-line payment processing.
* Multi-currency support via manual update from exchange rate server.
* Support for dynamic images (one image per product).
* Web-based administration module.
* Database backup and restore.
* Secure transactions with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support.

VirtueMart

VirtueMart (formerly known as mambo-phpShop) is a web e-commerce solution written in PHP and is created as an extension of the Mambo or Joomla! content management systems (CMS). It utilizes the MySQL database environment for storage. VirtueMart supports the use of unlimited number of products and categories. It allows the sale of downloadable products, and offers a catalog mode where the shopping cart features are turned off. It also supports multiple prices for a single product, based around shopper groups or a quantity range while providing different payment gateways. VirtueMart gives PHP developers freedom to view, update or customize the operation of the shopping cart. In addition, it offers simplified templates structure that allows various shopping and cart pages to be edited as standard html and css.

Ubercart

Ubercart is an e-commerce and web-based store management software that is fully integrated with one of the leading open source content management systems, Drupal. It is making use of the major core and contributed systems of Drupal, giving site users the shopping cart feature that integrates with other parts of a company or community website. Developers can easily add or alter Ubercart functionality to accommodate virtually any e-commerce need, which means you'll never have to change the source code to add new features and you'll have a trouble-free upgrade path as it keeps on advancing to meet the needs of a growing community.

Some of the key features of Ubercart:

* Configurable product catalog
* Flexible product creation system
* Flexible product attributes system
* Single page checkout
* Automatic account generation (anonymous checkout)
* Simple order processing
* Simple order creation and editing
* Integrated payment system
* Activity logging
* XML import/export

Magento

Magento is an open-source web eCommerce application created by Varien, building on components of the Zend Framework. It supports installation of modules through a web-based interface accessible through the administration area of a Magento installation. The modules are hosted on the Magento eCommerce website as a PEAR server, and community members can upload a module through the website. A paid version of Magento, the Magento Enterprise Edition, is best suited for large companies.

Batavi

Batavi is an open source webshop that is inspired by a preliminary version of osCommerce 3.0, a version that seemed to be never finished by osCommerce developers. It is developed on LAMP, specifically PHP and MySQL, and adopts a three layer model in which design objects, code, and database are strictly separated.

Some of the key features of Batavi:

* Fully flexible template system
* Full content management
* Robust architecture to process vast numbers of products, visitors, customers and orders
* Customer/group specific pricing, payment or shipping modules
* Related products for cross- and upselling
* Unlimited product segmentation to present products
* Product price rules for pricing vast numbers of products
* Fully automated integration with product content providers: *
* Open ICEcat interface available
* Interface for multi warehouse and multi supplier (including stock and purchase prices) support