One of the most recognized free shopping carts

osCommerce is considered by many as the granddaddy to the functional open source and free shopping carts on the web today.  In 2000, the makers of the software, backed by the open source development community, released their first stable version.

osCommerce is used by thousands of web hosts today, but the shopping cart has never been officially released as a stable/production version.  It’s always been marked as a Release Candidate and never marked as production stable.  For this reason alone, many merchants do not trust the software.  Development on the software is slow.  The last version was relased in 2009.

All that said, osCommerce has made a name for itself and is used by many people starting out in the web business as it’s a free alternative to some of the more expensive (and complicated) shopping carts on the market today.  The software is included by many web hosting companies and is easy to transfer between hosts also.

If you’re deciding on an open source and free shopping cart, we strongly encourage that you also check out CRELoaded and Magento Commerce.

Have a look at some of the features included with osCommerce:

Features

Although osCommerce is still in its development stage, the available Milestone releases are considered to be stable with the following features:

• General Functionality
  • Compatible with all PHP 4 versions
  • All features enabled by default for a complete out-of-the-box solution
  • Object oriented backend (3.0)
  • Completely multilingual with English, German, and Spanish provided by default
• Setup / Installation
  • Automatic web-browser based installation and upgrade procedure
• Design / Layout
  • Template struture implementation to:
    • allow layout changes to be adaptive, easy, and quickly to make (3.0)
    • allow easy integration into an existing site (3.0)
  • Support for dynamic images
• Administration / Backend Functionality
  • Supports unlimited products and categories
    • Products-to-categories structure
    • Categories-to-categories structure
  • Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
  • Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
  • Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation
  • Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
  • Easily backup and restore the database
  • Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
  • Statistics for products and customers
  • Multilingual support
  • Multicurrency support
    • Automatically update currency exchange rates
  • Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
  • Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics
• Customer / Frontend Functionality
  • All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
  • Customers can view their order history and order statuses
  • Customers can maintain their accounts
    • Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
  • Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
  • Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
  • Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
  • Forseen checkout procedure
  • Secure transactions with SSL
  • Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
  • Global and per-category bestseller lists
  • Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
  • Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation
• Product Functionality
  • Dynamic product attributes relationship
  • HTML based product descriptions
  • Automated display of specials
  • Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
  • Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters
• Payment Functionality
  • Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
  • Accept numerous online payment processing (PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
  • Disable certain payment services based on a zone basis
• Shipping Functionality
  • Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
  • Real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
  • Free shipping based on amount and destination
  • Disable certain shipping services based on a zone basis
• Tax Functionality
  • Flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
  • Set different tax rates for different products
  • Charge tax on shipping on a per shipping service basis