Setting up an online store to sell your products online is the first step towards success. Many latest surveys have shown that trend of shopping online is increasing by every passing day and the reason behind this is the increasing trend of using internet on the smartphones or tablets. You can find thousands of wholesalers who have their online store where they are offering their products at very low prices. Apart from the wholesalers or other big companies, you can find many people around you who are doing their business and selling the products online after purchasing products from the local market. In India and Pakistan, many housewives and girls are doing online business from home and they are making money online quite easily.
[ad#midle]
Those who have good investment and they are doing good business in the local market, they should go with custom website development as per their requirements. But people who don’t have a good budget and they don’t want to spend a lot of money on the development of their online store, they can use free Open Source eCommerce CMS. With this, they can simply setup up their first online store in low budget and invest their main capital in purchasing the products they want to sell online.
Here I will discuss top 3 open source eCommerce platforms which are free to use.
1. Setting Up WooCommerce Online Store
WooCommerce is the best option to set up your first online store in limited budget. With more than 3 million active installations, WooCommerce is one of the widely used open source software for online stores. The best thing about WooCommerce is that it is powered by WordPress, one of the widely used CMS for blogging and corporate websites. It is a powerful eCommerce solution that provides all the features you can think about. Whether you want to get the monthly reports, tax reports, setting up delivery charges according to destination and weight category or anything else, all this possible in WooCommerce.
[ad#infeed]
If you can’t find any function that you need, you can add that extra functionality by downloading different plugins. Most of the WooCommerce plugins are free to use with all premium features while some plugins can be bought from $10 to $100. Here are the 5 best and free must have WooCommerce plugins. You can also find a lot of Free and Premium Paid themes to customize your online store.
Installation of WoCommerce is very easy, you can have 1 click installation from your C-Panel, or you can download the WooCommerece from WordPress.org install it manually from FTP, just like I have mentioned how to install WordPress using FTP account.
2. Magento Open Source
Magento is another great open source eCommerce solution but it is available in 2 different versions. The basic version for most of the user which is free. The paid version is also there to support some of the more powerful features for big eCommerce stores that have tens of thousands of products. Just like WooCommerce, Magento provides easy to use dashboard from where shop owner can control the store easily. Making sales, generating reports, managing deliveries and maintaining stock, everything is easy and possible in the free version.
To add more functions to your Magento store, you can use free or paid extensions. You can find various Magento themes which can present your online store in a unique and professional way.
[ad#infeed]
3. PrestaShop
In my previous article, I write how you can start your own business by setting up a PrestaShop online store. PrestaShop is a good option to start your online store, and it is also free to use. You can find more than 1000 PrestaShop themes for your online store and more than 500 of themes are free to use. Different extensions are also available to enhance the built-in functions. PrestaShop has different versions for Europe and USA and provides different options as local laws.
Why It is Important To Add Extra Layer of Security for eCommerce Store
No matter what open source software solution you use, it is very important to add an extra layer of security to your online store. Adding website firewall is very important to make your store secure not only for you but also for your customers. Your online store has important information about your customers like their addresses and phone numbers, so it is important to secure that data from hackers.
A good and professional firewall will protect the website from SQL injection attacks, malicious login attempts and other malware protection. Adding SSL certificate is also important to win the trust of your potential customers.
[ad#bottom]
Rashid Nawaz is a professional blogger and a News report. He works for SMH News Agency in Jhang and he is a news reporter on Dunya Urdu as well.
Be First to Comment