OpenCart vs osCommerce Comparison 2021 – Cost, Shipping Options, Product Listing

A decision between osCommerce or OpenCart should not be made in a rush, because choosing an appropriate CMS to power an online store is critically important. A proper shopping cart has something related to many things including price, kinds of functionalities and features, shipping options, product listing, payment gateways and integrations.

We have comprehensively analyzed the two systems below concentrating on those main points mentioned earlier. People may refer to the detailed information and select a better one according to personal preference and specific needs.

Requirements

osCommerce is completely free and easy to set up, the server requirements of which are within the bounds of what a hosting provider offers. People need a domain name and a hosting account that supports PHP and MySQL, and an SSL certificate for encrypting customers’ sensitive data when they submit an order through credit cards.

OpenCart, similarly, is a popular open source shopping cart solution free of charge. It aims to offer chances for people to build and manage professional online shopping stores easily. To install the software and run it without problems, users have to make sure their hosting provider has allowed the minimum system requirements with the version of PHP 5.2 or higher, MySQL and Curl, meanwhile, a hosted/online operating system.

Features

osCommerce is one of the most feature rich eCommerce platforms available. On the platform, people have access to 7,000 free add-ons which have been uploaded by the community for people to use and customize. In below, we have listed extra useful and powerful features which enable people to manage orders and customers, send newsletters, track and analyze customers’ shopping habits and much more.

• Low stock alerts, SSL support & Product reviews
• Search reports, inventory reports & Sales reports
• Unlimited categories, products & manufacturers.

OpenCart has a template system built in so people are able to change to templates that are different from the original ones. Besides, there are unlimited categories, products, manufacturers, module instance system and information pages available which enable people to build a store with attractive web presence, at the same time, to fully control the store with the following more offers.

• Design features, digital goods & edit customers
• Mobile user interface, multi-store support & site search
• Product reviews, customer registration, inventory reports & sales reports

Shipping Options

The two platforms share five shipping options which are shipping price calculator, shipping weight calculator, tax by country, tax by state and USPS price lookup. Apart from the five, osCommerce supports flat rate shipping, product specific tax rules, weight based shipping calculator and OpenCart allows FedEx price lookup and UPS price lookup.

Payment & Payment Gateways

osCommerce supports cash on demand payment, discount management, money orders and multi-currency while the other pricing per customer groups and multi-currency. Below we have worked out a list of payment gateways that are included in both carts respectively.

• osCommerce: PayPal & SagePay.
• OpenCart: Authorize.net, eWAY, PayMate, Skrill, WorldPay, PayPal & SagePay.

Third Party Integrations

In osCommerce shopping cart, Google shopping in integrated in while in the other cart, the integrations are given more with Facebook, Google analytics and Twitter.

Technical Support

osCommerce free and commercial support is available to help people at every stage of their online business. People searching answers to the problems have access to community, forum and live chat where experts are waiting there to lend a hand and millions of postings have been made by thousands of experienced store owners, developers and service providers.

On OpenCart platform, there are general support consists of community forums, which is free but limited to some assistance concerning about the knowledge of creating web sites and programming skills. If people are looking for professional installation, upgrading, customization or coding, they are allowed to contact one of the partners who specialize in OpenCart development.

Make Own Decision

Concluding from what have discussed above, we find osCommerce and OpenCart share many similarities that they are both free to be downloaded and the features are close more or less. Therefore, the choice should depend on what people’s specific needs are and whether they are experienced merchants since the support of OpenCart can be more professional than that of its competitor.

Anyway, if people want to achieve success online business, a powerful open source shopping cart solution is not enough, because it has to be hosted by a reliable hosting provider who ensures rich features and high performance so as to help boost visits and gain profits. Following are the recommended companies.