Open Source E-Commerce Shopping Carts: Winners and Losers in 2009

I came across the following article on ecommerce-guide.com that covers the popularity of several Open Source ecommerce shopping carts. For those not familiar with the term ‘Open Source’,  it is software provided by a community of volunteers who team together to build software.   Shopping carts are one example of the type of Open Source software you can find.  But Open Source is not limited to just ecommerce.  Many of the most popular software applications (even most sold commercially) is often built on Open Source code or frameworks.

In the article, the top open source shopping cart platforms were tracked. OsCommerce and  Zen Cart still remain the most popular programs but Magento and several other newer shopping carts have been rising in popularity. At the current rate, Magento is projected to overtake osCommerce by August, 2010.

The article provides the following ranking which shows the shopping cart’s popularity for December and January 2009:

Rank     December 2009      January 2009
1               osCommerce                 osCommerce
2              Zen Cart                           Zen Cart
3              Magento                          X-Cart
4              XT:Commerce               Magento
5              Cube Cart                        XT:Commerce
6              X-Cart                               Cube Cart
7              PrestaShop                    Quick Cart
8              Quick Cart                       CRE Loaded
9              Ubercart                         Ubercart
10           CRE Loaded                   osC-Max

From the article, “Magento is far and away the winner in the page popularity contest, more than doubling the number of pages over the past year. This is a rate of nearly a half million pages added each month.”

This is one of the reasons, I have been spending a lot of my off-time researching this shopping cart. I have used Zen cart and osCommerce as well as some hosted carts like Yahoo and ProStores.     So far Magenta is my new favorite, but I am still kicking the tires on it, and do not have any sites in production using it.

From the article,  “During the last year, the popularity of osCommerce plummeted 54 percent, losing 16 million pages. However at current rates, osCommerce and Magento will each have 11 million pages next July, and by August Magento will have surpassed it. Zen Cart also steadily declined in popularity, sliding from a peak of 11 million pages down to slightly more than eight million by December 2009. This is a run rate of a quarter of a million pages lost every month this year.”

Since these rates fluctuate as new releases come out, you should not abandon any of these carts just because they are dropping in popularity. What drops this month, may rise next year. Always compare each shopping cart and evaluate them against your needs and ease of use, not what is popular.

Thanks to Kerry Watson and ecommerce-guide.com for a great article.