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Open source ecommerce systems are created by individuals or companies that want to give something back to the community. They are available to anyone to use for free, even for commercial use. Now just because they are free doesn’t mean they are limited or less powerful in any ways when compared to the paid packages. In fact, big companies have used them to build their ecommerce store that’s doing millions of transactions per day.

If you do a bit of search you will find many available. But the ones that worth considering are OScommerce, PrestoShop, Magento and Joomla. These are made specifically for ecommerce use, apart from the last one, therefore everything you need is there right out of the box. The most complicated thing you will do is installing the system. In simple terms, they are just php scripts. If you have installed one before then you are already 98% there. The installation process is more or less the same with all four open source ecommerce systems. So once you’ve done it once, you will be able to install the others with ease.

It’s worth spending some time playing and testing as many systems as you can to find one the suits you. Before you commit to one it’s important to consider the level support that is available for that system. This is very important for an open source application. So do visit the community area and do some search on web to see how many “fan sites” you can find, and how useful they are. Visit some forums that dedicated to each one to read about people’s issues and solutions to understand the advantages and disadvantages of them. You will also need to consider things like SEO and design customization. Even though all four of these systems have a template system in place, but not all are the same. If you have some knowledge of web programming you should dig deep into the codes and maybe even try to customize it. The truth is that no one ecommerce system is perfect, so you need to weight up and priorities your requirements and use that as a guideline when making the final decision.