coverstory 10 Open Source eCommerce Platforms Building an ecommerce platform for businesses has become easier over the years. Through this article we talk about 10 free e-commerce tools you can use to build one - Raj Kumar Maurya

pen-source eCommerce platforms offer osCommerce many advantages for small businesses. osCommerce is one of the first open-source A merchant can also develop his own e-commerce applications. More than 7,000 free OeCommerce platform by using Open- add-ons have been uploaded by its community to source solutions. The support option in the open customize an online store. osCommerce facilitates source platforms is limited as compared to the direct communication with other community members premium or proprietary e-commerce platforms. But through the Live Chat room. that doesn’t mean open-source offers nothing. Open source not only minimizes the cost of building your Zeuscart e-commerce portal but also offers customizability, The best thing about Zeuscart is its user interface, scalability, and communities of developers to assist which is rich, attractive, user-friendly and generally less new merchants. boring than most of the open-source UIs. It is designed Choosing the right Opensource platform for your for small and medium businesses in mind. Users e-commerce business, where an online transaction is the can make the most of SEO friendly URLs, gift cards, most important part might be difficult. So, here is a list discounts, email templates and tier-pricing, which of ten open source e-commerce platforms that let you makes it possible to decrease prices for bulk orders. run all business transactions online. They also let you create SEO friendly URLs, gift cards, offer discounts, cre- Afcommerce ate email templates and much more… If you want to keep your e-commerce platform really, really simple, then Afcommerce could be the option for Community Edition you. It has a speedy one-page checkout, customer help Magento Community Edition is the free and open pop-up windows and customer accounts are generated source version of the e-commerce platform. Merchants automatically from orders. can access added features by installing extensions and themes from the huge Magento Connect marketplace. SimpleCart .js You can now add increment, decrement, and remove OpenCart buttons to your cart. You can also rearrange items, OpenCart is an open-source, PHP-based e-commerce change the HTML tags, do whatever you like to solution for online merchants. OpenCart has a very loyal display on your shopping cart and how you want. and active community for user support, as well as a list It’s lightweight, fast, simple to use, and completely of commercial partners for professional installation and customizable. customization. Tomato Cart PrestaShop TomatoCart is a web desktop application that mimics PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce solution, the user experience of a desktop Operating System, written in PHP and based on the Smarty template offering features and applications similar to a PC engine. It features cross-selling, downloadable products, environment so that users can easily start work. product export, one-page checkout, shipping discounts, and much more. StoreSprite StoreSprite offers many features that you’d expect to find only in paid-for and more popular platforms. These Zen Cart features more than 1,800 add-ons in 16 include loyalty points, customer ratings and reviews, categories. Zen Cart’s support community has status notifications, order tracking, special offers, best approximately 150,000 members and 200,000 threads. sellers and shopper accounts.

52 PCQuest March 2016 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] How to Install and Configure PrestaShop http:192.168.5.119/prestashop/install. Replace the on Ubuntu IP address 192.168.5.119 with your IP address then Let’s check how to install this popular eCommerce select your language and press Next and in next page platform on Ubuntu through these few simple steps. select check-box for accepting terms and conditions. PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce Press Next. solution. It supports payment gateways such as DirecPay, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, Skrill, PayPal, Step 6: In this step, it will check whether the required PayPal Payments Pro (Direct) and EBANX Checkout via suits your system for PrestaShop. If something their respective APIs. Further payment modules are is missing, it will show you the error message with offered commercially. PrestaShop uses a web template required software. Install the required package then system which allows users to customize store themes Press Next and fill-in the credentials. and add new features through add-on modules. Here we used Ubuntu server with LAMP installed and Step 7: Next, configure the database to be used by should have a static IP address. Here, I use 192.168.5.119 PrestaShop, give the values as per the database created as my IP. in step 3 or whatever you have provided while installing. After giving the values press Test your database Step 1: Download the zip file of PrestaShop and connection now. It will check the connectivity, after extract the file in the /var/www/html folder by using successful connection press Next. given commands: Step 8: It will initiate the installation. The screenshot cd /tmp shows the successful PrestaShop installation. wget http://www.prestashop.com/download/old/ prestashop_1.6.0.9.zip Step 9: Next, we need to remove the installation folder apt-get install unzip to proceed further, as follows: unzip prestashop_1.6.0.9.zip -d /var/www/html/ rm -r /var/www/html/prestashop/install/ Step 2: Change the permissions for PrestaShop, as follows: Step 10: We can access the backend admin page of chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/ PrestaShop at URL http://192.168.5.119/prestashop/ prestashop/ admin4755y8m0m/index.. Please check your admin name in PrestaShop folder at /var/www/html/ Step 3: We need to initialize a database for PrestaShop, prestashop/ directory as in my case it is “admin4755- create the database for the PrestaShop as follows: y8m0m”. Once you open admin page, put the credentials Here we are adding database=pcquestdb user= pc- as selected at the time of installation. questdbuser and password= pcquestdbpassword: Step 11: After login, it will show your default welcome -u root -p screen or dashboard. CREATE DATABASE pcquestdb; CREATE USER pcquestdbuser@localhost IDENTIFIED Step 12: Now, we are ready for the frontend. We can ac- BY ‘ pcquestdbpassword’; cess it at http://192.168.5.119/prestashop/index.php. GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on pcquestdb.* to prestashopuser@localhost FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit

Step 4: Restart services

service apache2 restart service mysql restart

Step 5: Open your browser and proceed with PrestaShop web-installation by using the link pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] March 2016 PCQuest 53