No, they are not THOSE kind of shopping carts! But they are those things that people use when they buy stuff online. You know, the script that powers the online shop you frequent so often. I guess the most famous is OSCommerce. This is the one I had used in my previous projects. It’s very easy to install and configuration is just a breeze. Of course, the design needs a little to work to make it look presentable but the base is there. And it just works. However, we should not be stuck with just one shopping cart  solution. There are plenty more shopping cart scripts out there! And here is a link to a list of Open Source Shopping Cart Scripts. These scripts are open source, which means that you don’t need to pay a cent for it.

There is no longer a need for anyone to spend thousands of dollars to setup their ecommerce site anymore. Seriously, if you know a little web programming or if you are just Internet savvy, you can simply use one of these scripts and setup your online store. It took me a few minutes to setup OSCommerce and I am not web programming guru. In fact, I have just a little basic PHP coding under my belt and nothing much else. All you have to do is to follow a few lines of instructions, setup your database and start their script installer, and you are done. And I am sure it has gotten easier now.

From the looks of it, it seems that other scripts are also making headway now. Some of them looks pretty nice compared to OSCommerce. OSCommerce still looks a bit outdated and chunky to me. The problem with shopping cart scripts is that you do need to make them look beautiful to attract customers. Unlike other websites, you really need to work on the design to appeal to your customers, that’s the reason why I am not pushing for OSCommerce. The PrestaShop e-commerce solution looks very tempting and perhaps for my next e-commerce site, I will try it out myself.