Open Source E-Commerce: 12 Promising Programs
Small business owners, rejoice! Last year while the Big Three — osCommerce, Zen Cart, & CRE Loaded — open source commerce teams made mega-blunders or didn’t do anything noteworthy, dozens of smaller teams were hard at work taking advantage. The difference between open source and proprietary became almost indistinguishable except to developers, with some open source programs now selling for more money than proprietary programs.
We recap the year for the biggies and review a dozen newer, up-and-coming e-commerce programs.
The Big Three: “Our Bad”
All of the Big Three — osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded — stumbled last year. The maker of industry giant, non-progressing osCommerce disappeared for most of the year, finally to have a fresh and enthusiastic new osCommerce Project team pop up and complete the milestone their way in record time. Likewise, the Zen Cart team announced a new version for launch in February 2008 that never appeared. In December, the team dusted off the announcement and re-posted it as new news by giving it a new version number and some new features.