Open Source Shopping Carts are important business tools that allow for businesses to display their wares and send the items to the shopping open source shopping carts for purchase all in a few easy steps.  Some common open source shopping carts include programs such as Zen Cart, Magento, VirtueMart, Satchmo, OsCommerce, Batavi and PhPepperShop. 

Such programs are available for online download or as a hard copy and, when mixed with a shop, it allows for an easy e-commerce platform that makes it simple to purchase products on the online marketplace.  Some of these shopping carts are downloadable for free and have purchased add-ons that make your site more unique or add features that make the shopping cart more user friendly.  

Open Source shopping carts allow you, as a businessperson, to put up your products and sell them via different payment methods, different shipping methods and different taxation methods that are all covered by the same program.  While there are a variety of programs available, most do roughly the same thing and can be customized to your personal needs.  Some are downloadable for free while others cost a bit of money.  Some have virtually no support if something goes wrong while others have a great deal of support, both in installation and in running the program as it is being operated by you. The difference, as you might guess, is in whether or not you paid for the program or had it downloaded for free.

You can make your site and shopping cart look the same as everyone else’s or you can use various templates that make your site look unique.  Open source shopping carts can be customized so that it looks different from other sites and some shopping cart companies will create a whole new design for you so that your site is unique and exciting.