LiteCommerce – an online e-commerce software solution for small businesses (review)
Jun 12, 2009 by Veiko Herne E-commerce
LiteCommerce is a compact e-commerce and shopping cart commercial software developed by Qualiteam Software. Their other product lines are X-cart shopping cart software for more comprehensive e-commerce needs, Sales’n Stats and Hacker Proof/Hacker Guardian.
LiteCommerce license for one store costs $109 and there are several optional add-on modules available like Wish List, Affiliate Management, E-Commerce reports, Gift Certificates, Wholesale Trading, Multi Currency, etc for $13-$17 each for your particular store needs.
The difference between LiteCommerce and X-cart is that LiteCommerce have modular design. When purchasing X-cart you will have all the functions included to one license as in LiteCommerce, you will purchase the basic core license, and then will specify your shop needs by purchasing those extra modules for $13 each or download some of those free of charge.
If you want to become an e-commerce application service provider Qualiteam has another package for you: LiteCommerce ASPE
With LiteCommerce ASPE you can take full advantage of Application Service Provider business model. LiteCommerce ASPE is specially designed for:
* Hosting service providers (HSP)
* Companies running multiple shops powered by LiteCommerce
* Companies that provide ecommerce application services
* Companies who need the ability of rapid shops deployment (e.g. shops dedicated to special events to catch up market opportunities)
A complete list of features can be found here (a feature tour is included).
Installation
By registering to the 30 day evaluation version, I got email containing several download links for different operating systems.
As my hosting runs with Debian GNU/Linux, I decided to download the Linux version.
Other Options where Windows 98/NT/2000&2003, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, Solaris and Mac OS X.
LiteCommerce is built using the open source PHP/MySQL technology which can run on operating systems above.
Sphere: Related ContentWant more web software reviews, news and tips/tricks?
Then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
Tags: e-commerce solution, litecommerce, litecommerce review, mysql, online store, php, qualiteam, small business
ZenCart – open source professional ecommerce software solution review
Sep 1, 2008 by Veiko Herne E-commerce
Zen Cart (or ZenCart) www.zencart.com has been developed by group of professionals from Newcastle, England, Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada. It’s not a simple shopping cart module, but truly professional ecommerce store management platform (named also a shopping cart system) with newsletters, coupons, gift certificates, etc more capable to run Amazon type of stores than small websites with thousands of products allowing unlimited category depth and site search.
Even if Zen Cart comes with one standard outlook, there is several free sites and commercial stores (algozone.com, zen-cart-templates.ichoze.net, zencarttemplates.info, www.templatemonster.com/zencart-templates.php, themestock.com) available to give your store a custom outlook.
Installation and store setup
ZenCart shopping cart installation went smoothly, however the system complaint again several PHP setting parameters like register_globals=on (had to create separate php.ini for those), and even I didn’t had secure server protocol purchased to my hosting account, I was able to complete the installation with some simple steps.
There were eight editable pages from the administration module to customize the site layout using pure HTML language or JavaScript based Rich text editor, the side box content can be set on and off and their sort order can be modified. The software which I installed was with “Contemporary Classic Green” and English language but additional templates and languages can be purchased and downloaded.
The administration module is extremely broad and from first look, I was little bit confused where to start.Defining the products should be most reasonable step to start and as those are belonging to categories, those should be defined first. For SEO purposes, you are able to define your own Meta tags (title, keywords and description) for the category and build category tree structure.
Sphere: Related ContentWant more web software reviews, news and tips/tricks?
Then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
Tags: e-commerce software, online store, open-source, php, review, zencart
Magento – the newest e-commerce package to hit the market
Mar 14, 2008 by Melanie Bremner E-commerce, New Releases
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open source e-commerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store.
Magento’s powerful marketing search engine optimization and catalog management tools give merchants the power to create ecommerce sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Magento is distributed free under the GNU General Public License OSL license.
Magento is a registered trademark of Irubin Consulting Inc. DBA Varien. It is currently listed as in a preview release mode and not recommended for use in production environments. There are articles written by community members who have tried this new program and available for your benefit at http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/
Update
Magento is actually ready for the prime time! The version 1.1.1 was just launched and it won The Best New Project at 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards.
Is this software compatible with your server?
Megento can be used on any server that is Linux or UNIX based. It can be run on a Windows based platform but at the moment there are some known issues that are being worked on and it may cause some conflicts, although, there are some documents on the main site to help. You can find some guidelines here
One of the known issues is the image uploads do not work in Windows.
This system is a Linux based software program and was designed with ease of install on a Linux based platform that has PHP 5 installed. This software is a PHP 5 only application and may cause issues if your system only supports PHP 4, although there is a work around solution found here
If you do not have any programming knowledge or skills, this system may not be suitable for you unless you have a technical support team who can assist you.
The server requirements for this software are:
- Linux or another UNIX-compatible operating system
- Apache web server (1x or 2x)
- PHP 5.2
- MySQL 4.1
- A sendmail- compatible Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)- if not Megento connects to SMTP server.
Also recommended is the use of APC as a bytecode cache for performance improvements. You can find it in the PECL archives here: http://pecl.php.net/package/APC
Other bytecode cache systems are not supported at this time.
Sphere: Related ContentWant more web software reviews, news and tips/tricks?
Then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
Tags: e-commerce software, magento review, new release, online store, php
osCommerce – review of a popular e-commerce software solution
Mar 3, 2008 by Melanie Bremner E-commerce
osCommerce www.oscommerce.com is an open source online e-commerce software solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. osCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Herald Ponce de Leon. Every year the members of the community join forces in designing more add-on features to increase the feasibility and functionality in all areas of development. The new version 3.0 is planned to hit the market and it will have a template feature that will allow users to create a more unique layout for their site.
OsCommerce was designed with a rich set of out of the box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort, and no costs, fees, or limitations involved. This software was designed for ease of install and usability for any online store owner from newbie to techno king.
Is this software compatible with your server?
OsCommerce can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. Most of the web host providers have included this software for a general automatic install from your account control panel or within the Fantastico control panel, depending on which host provider you have gone with. If you do not have the automatic install capability, the osCommerce software is available from main site for downloading and installing manually.
You will need to know where to access your files, usually under the file manager option in your control panel, to FTP your extracted files into the correct folder. You can use this software as a standalone site, meaning you can choose to install in the root directory of your domain, and have the store as you main index; or you can choose to install in a sub directory as an add on, an example being http://www.yoursite.com/store.
Although the oscommerce is not the “ultimate” e-commerce solution, it is by no means “basic”; with the capabilities of customizing to meet the specific needs of ones own business.
Sphere: Related ContentWant more web software reviews, news and tips/tricks?
Then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
Tags: e-commerce software, fantastico, online store, oscommerce, oscommerce review
Get News by RSS feed