6 Reasons Why Should you Choose Opencart

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Hello readers of the «Presale Suggestios» rubric.
Our last article was about main website templates’ features — «Help list of common web design features to clarify web template’s functionality» It described what is «Responsive» or «Retina ready» and so on. Today we are planning to help you if you are thinking about Opencart as of your future project’s platform. Today’s article is devoted to CMS that is very popular between developers and websites owners. Why for? Read below.

Opencart logo image

Ok. Let’s start.
If you are on the way of your online business web shop creation, it is essential to choose CMS, which is the most suitable for you.
Tens of Content Management Systems (CMS) are available today. They have power to satisfy all online resource owner’s requirements in full measure. The only exceptions are some cases when the future store is to offer any features others don’t have. In that situation personal web development of CMS is appropriate.
Well, you have to choose between several engines presented on the market. Is the right choice so important? Yes. This is really one of the keys to success of the future project.

The essential points here are:

  • • financial part (there is no reason to spend much money for unnecessary, expensive functionality)
  • • possibility or impossibility to realize all the necessary for your store functions
  • • possible complete outfitting of the basic engine by the necessary modules (the more powerful decision may become the more simple and cheap)
  • • simplicity and intelligibility of the interface (long and pleasant work with the shop is ahead ..!)

These are only several of the main criteria for the right choice of your CMS. If you want to sink deeper into this topic, read «7 Rules for Selecting the Right Content Management System» by Dom Nicastro, prominent Staff Reporter for Cmswire. His great tutorial is a must.
Now we would like to describe the engine, which is one of the most favorite among developers and Online Stores owners — Opencart. Whether it is sufficiently justified to be chosen and why? «6 Reasons», following below, will give the answer to this question.

Read, analyze. If the characteristics and advantages of this product are compatible with what is required for you, choose Opencart and enjoy using it.

1. Why Opencart? Is this stable/reliable software?

Let’s get some information about it. According to Google Trends opencart was started in early 2007. 7 years have passed and now Opencart is one of the largest ecommerce community. OpenCart is a turn-key ready «out of the box» shopping cart solution. Wikipedia (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCart) tells that there are more than 50000 community members and 10000+ extensions. Newsletter on official opencart.com has more than 70000 followers. Those digits tells us that opencart is very popular software, huge testimonials/reviews number makes impression of stable CMS.

2. OpenSource, Community

What should you know about OpenSource software:

  • a) It is free
  • b) It is developed by group of people worldwide
  • c) It shares program code for public

Let’s look into each feature in more details

a) Free.
You can use OpenCart software under GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) absolutely for free. There is no one time fee, no monthly fees, no trial period, no features limits. Just download and use it.
You can ask natural question, why somebody create and support if for free?
Like any OpenSource software it got money from additional services, like premium support, premium extensions, premium themes, advertisement, payment system fee.
So OpenSource software make some money for it’s community. And community is interested in continuous improvements to make software better and popular.

b) Community
A lot of people involved into software development and support. The main plus is that no main person or main company, who can close the project.
Active community members use forum to discuss and solve issues- http://forum.opencart.com/

Here is forum stats (for article creation date):

  • • Total members — 75389
  • • Total topics — 105445
  • • Total posts — 465870
  • • Online users always is about 1000

Community forum is always quick for response and provide right direction to solve my problems. Of course you can’t treat forum users like your own personal workforce and you can’t require to write solution for your problems but forum users can point your in the right direction. So you can solve issue by yourself, share it and get feedback, sometimes even improved by other forum users.
If you are very busy business person with no time to communicate on forum, premium support is your option. You can find lot’s of freelancers ready to help you.

c) It shares program code for public
Anyone can read OpenCart software code, change it, improve it, create additional extensions for features that are not available in box version, create custom themes.
That is why OpenCart has so many extensions and themes developed by 3rd party developers and companies.

3. Shipment & Payment modules

What changes regular website to online store? Correct, you should accept money and deliver product to your customers.
OpenCart software includes a bunch of payment and Shipment modules out of box and has a huge number of extensions.

Lets review the numbers.

21 payment modules in box version. It includes worldwide known systems: PayPal, Authorize.Net, Moneybookers, 2Checkout, etc.
974 payment modules available as extensions if your business needs to work with non popular or local payment systems like Bitcoin, BNI Indonesia

10 shipment modules in box version. It includes worldwide known systems: Fedex, UPS, Australia Post, Royal Mail, Citylink, etc.

427 payment modules available as extensions. We are sure you will find your favorite shipment company in this list.

So with OpenCart you are not limited with couple of most popular payment systems and shipment methods. It allows you to run your store worldwide and use local payment/shipment too.

Box version

Examples

Extensions

Examples

Payment

21

PayPal, Authorize.Net, Moneybookers, 2Checkout

974

Bitcoin, BNI Indonesia

Shipment

10

Fedex, UPS, Australia Post, Royal Mail, Citylink

427

Fastway
Couriers
Shipping Uk,
DHL

 

4. Modules/Extensions

As we said earlier Opencart has a lot of extensions which can satisfy needs of any fastidious customer. Official Opencart has 13555 extensions. They are devided into few groups (http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension):

  • • Market Places (1407)
  • • Themes (2700)
  • • Languages (529)
  • • Payment Gateways (973)
  • • Shipping methods (427)
  • • Modules (3700)
  • • Order Total (207)
  • • Product Feeds (139)
  • • Reports (110)
  • • Other (816)
  • • VQMode (2544)

You can also filter extensions by license (free/commercial), by compatibility version, rating, downloads. A lot of marketplaces (besides official Opencart.com) are offering high quality opencart themes —

http://themeforest.net/category/ecommerce/opencart
http://www.tonytemplates.com/opencart

Now let’s review some modules/extensions that are essential for the best using of the product.

  • 1. Newsletter subscribe module

This extension in Front End creates form in which any customer can be subscribed to your news without logging. In Back End you see list of subscribers, you can edit them and send news directly to these mails.
Examples of FREE extensions for v. 1.5.6.4 (the latest version on moment of this article published) — here

  • 2. Youtube video on Product Page

We think that there is no necessity to say you how important is to attach video to your products in current age of multimedia. Everybody knows that images can sell much more your products than simple text. But using a video can multiply your sales in hundred times. Video extension adds different videos for each product and you can do this in your admin panel.
Example of extension — here

  • 3. Cloudzoom of main product image on Product Page

Default OpenCart used “Fancybox” script of zooming main image on Product Page. But the latest trend on most sites is placing of “cloudzoom” technology. It looks more attractive and convenient for clients.
Example of extension — here

  • 4. Extra product tabs on Product Page

Default OpenCart functionality provides restricted info tabs on Product Page. But, for sure, these tabs aren’t enough for modern site. After uploading such extension you will have as many product tabs as you need for each product. Content for tab you will be able to edit in admin area in WYSIWIG editor adding different headings, lists and other html structures.
Example of extension — here

  • 5. Blog module

Be sure that use of blogs isn’t only current tendency. Blogs are the future of online shops. As you probably heard the most common CMS for creating blogs is WordPress, Joomla etc. But these CMS aren’t so comfortable for creating online shops as OpenCart. So, there are some ways to implement blog to your shop. For example, you can create blog on WordPress and link it with your shop, e.g. create link of blog in top menu. And the other way is to use specific blog extension which is written to OpenCart.
Example of extension — here

  • 6. Custom items in Top Menu

Often you need to add some items in Top Menu: add emphasis for some category or product, add item “home”, add link to blog or some external site etc. For sure, if you have at least basic html, css and php skills you can open files and add this manually. But easier to do all this in admin panel. You add some item with your own title and it appears in Top Menu on Front End. And you don’t need to know which code is edited in vqmod file.
Example of extension — here

  • 7. Price slider module

No doubt that many customers will find Price filter on Category Page practical. Limits of prices you can set in admin panel and your customers will have opportunity to choose appropriate price range according to their budgets.
Example of extension — here

  • 8. Age restriction of some products

For sure, not all sites have products which need to be not for all customers. But maybe one day you will need to have restricted products. In such type of extensions you can manage customer submitted documents for verifying their age, set in admin period of products restriction, give users opportunity to submit their documents etc.
Example of extension — here

We’ve described the most common extensions that can be useful for most sites. At the same time we haven’t listed any extensions which are connected to payment systems, delivery etc., because they are specific for different geo zones. So, don’t give up if you have a small budget for your site and not enough skills of development -there are a huge number of FREE extensions in OpenCart community.

5. What about competitors?

Let’s analyze general summary:

Cart /Feature

Magento

Presta-

shop

Os-

commerce

Woo-

Commerce

Virtuemart

Opencart

Foundation

2006

2007

2000

2011

2005

2007

License

FREE+ Enterprise

FREE

FREE

FREE

FREE

FREE

Version

1.9

1.6

2.3

2.2

2.6

1.5

Merchants

240000

165000

280000>

150000

Wevserver resources

greate, VPS

medium level

shared hosting will be enough +

shared hosting will be enough +

medium level

shared hosting will be enough ++

Customiza-

tion

Hard, high level

Medium level

Easy ++>

Quite Easy+

Medium Level

Easy +++

Extensions

20000+

7000+

5000+

13555

Google trends

Source


Google trends picture small

 

What can we say? Opencart is quite competitive ecommerce solution with positive trend. This is one the largest (top 5) opensource software.

6. Example Stores

 

British Red Cross Gift Shop 

The screenshot of the British Red Cross Gift Shop's web site

 

http://giftshop.redcross.org.uk/

 

City of Hair

City of Hair website's image

 

http://cityofhair.com/shop/

 

Sir Bakealot 

(based on Dresscode Opencart Theme)

Sir Bakealot website's picture

http://sirbakealot.sg/

 

SibasWorld

(based on Dresscode Opencart Theme)

SibasWorld website's image

http://www.sibasworld.com/

 

Conclusion

OpenCart software is free, ready to sell out of box, easy to use for customers, easy to manage by store owner, extensible with thousands of extensions and themes with lifetime free support and free software updates.
This is the best choice for small medium online stores.

 

Ok. We wish you prosperity and greate success in your online projects.
Follow our publications.

Best regards,
Tonytemplates team

 

P.S. Did you like this article? Don’t forget to share it with your friends.

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5 комментариев: 6 Reasons Why Should you Choose Opencart
  1. yuk chan говорит:

    i love this post, very strongly reason why should us choose opencart.
    and your recommend extensions is very useful and the all of them are free!!
    thank you for you article! i love opencart too

  2. Django говорит:

    Hi

    After I became crazy with Virtuemart for a few websites, I discovered Opencart : fantastic !

    Much easier, clear and functional.

    And with the blog function, I think it can replace Joomla+Virtuemart most of the time.

  3. F5buddy говорит:

    Showing research and very informative, a great compilation, an Excellent share will be looking for more … keeps on writing. I bookmarked this blogs and share with my friends.
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