[Music]hi everybody this is Joe from ecommerceplatforms and today we're going to becovering the best open source and freee-commerce platforms of this year so ifyou're looking for one of the cheapestor freest to open source ecommerceplatforms you've come to the right placewell technically you could pretty muchchoose the majority of the platforms outthere since they're all fairly low interms of pricing range so I'm get higherup there once you start expanding yourbusiness but you know it's good to lookinto some of these options that arealmost completely free or completelyfree so the open source model hasbrought about all sorts of praise frompeople who use it especially consideringthese online store systems are oftendeveloped and managed by numerous peoplearound the world so basically what itmeans is you know it's not necessarilyowned by one particular company you knowsometimes sometimes it is I mean it'skind of managed by one entity but youcan expect to be able to download orlaunch any of these open source freeecommerce platforms without any problemsusually just by going to the website soto get the ball rollingthe first option we have here is wooimmerse that's probably the most popularout of all of them so you know this is agreat example to kind of go through thepros and cons of an open source systemthis as with everything online there aregoing to be advantages there are goingto be disadvantages and WooCommerce is agreat example for that so I kind of wantto go over the pros and cons firstbefore we get into some of the bestoptions that are free and open source solet's start with the pros the advantagesfirst of all open source ecommerceplatforms are almost always free sothat's a good place to start as well asthatyou often have more creative controlover design and how the store works sobasically what that means is you knowyou're you owe yourself host yourwebsite and you have complete controlover that you know you are paying for aserver or a host and then you can go inthere and adjust the the code and youcan add plugins you can do whatever youwant you can hire a developer to createcustom code for you which is usuallywhat most people do especially if theydon't have any experience withdevelopment so you know options likeShopify and big commerce you can'talways you don't always have completecontrol over your website which might beconcerning for some people you also haveto consider that open source solutionsare often packed with more uniquefeatures because they are constantlybeing developed and like I said in termsof an open source platform that meansthat there are many developerscontributing to the code the code youknow it's open so it doesn't necessarilymean that every single person that getstheir hands on the API is able to adjustthe core product but you will start tosee you know like more plugins that workwith with something like WooCommerce orsomething like that you can also controlthings like hosting plugins themes sothere's a lot of flexibility in terms ofcustomization and finally mostopen-source platforms usually have avery strong community behind them sothat's worth something for sure becauseyou know you will be able to find a lotof support online communities you knowforums stuff like that to help you outalong the way in terms of the downsidesthere are a few first of all ittypically requires some sort ofdevelopment knowledge so if you don'tknow how to build a website on WordPressor any of the other content managementsystems then you know you might eitherwant to hire a developer or go withsomething likefire BigCommerce you also to look aroundto find a server for hosting by yourselfand this is basically just a hostcompany like there's tons of themGoDaddy Bluehost you can just do agoogle search and find some of the bestones and basically this means thatyou're gonna have to install WordPressby yourself you're gonna have tounderstand hosting a little bit so youkind of have to figure out you can alsopay for for managed wordpress hostingbut you know it depends on how muchmoney you want to spend and how muchtime you want to spend on the on thewebsite yourself another thing toconsider is that site related operationssuch as maintenance security speedoptimization it's all done by you so ifyou don't have the time to do that thenyou might have a problem once again ifyou don't have that time you might gowith Shopify or or Bing or somethinglike that you also don't get dedicatedsupport but like I said you know anoption like WooCommerce you can find allsorts of resources online there areforums blogs so if you do like toresearch yourself and kind of find yourown solutions to problems then anopen-source ecommerce platform might beright for you otherwise if you're justlike picking up the phone and havingsomeone who knows exactly what they'retalking about to give you you know tosolve your problem on your website thenyou might go with a hosted solution likelike Shopify alright so we've we've gotquite a few options and solutions toroll through here so let's get startedfirst as we said is called WooCommercethe benefits of fuu commerce are thatthe plugin is free to download andinstall many stores don't need anythingmore than the plug-in so you know youcan install WordPress that's free youcan install WooCommerce that's free andall you have to do yourself is gethosting you know you might have to payfor a themeto pay for some plugins it's by far oneof the best options to go for if you'retrying to build your online store andit's great for developers those who wantto really customize their stores it alsoyou know they have plenty of extensionshere so if you're looking for marketingpayments stuff like thatspeaking of payments another benefit isthat it connects to old major paymentgateways by the by default you're givingPayPal and stripe and you can also addsome extensions like down here it's likeif you wantauthorized.net Amazon pay squarewhatever and another benefit is thatwith a WooCommerce theme we'll go to thetheme store right here you hardly haveto do anything besides adding contentand they have a storefront framework onhereyou can also buy themes from so manymarketplaces online or premiumdevelopers you know I would just searchcommerce themes WordPress themes fore-commerce anything like that a greatwebsite is ThemeForest which has thelargest collection of WooCommerce themeson the market so they're highlycustomizable and right out of the boxyou can offer coupons and discountsalong with many other features with thehelp of the extension library or just asbuilt-in features so you know sometimesif you get an alternative like sayShopify or just like a hosted solutionyou might find that some of thosefeatures aren't included right off thebat it's also a very popular platformwhich means that there is supportavailable now I know we talked about itbefore how there's not dedicated supportbut WooCommerce actually does providededicated support for a fee but besidesthat it's so popular that there are tonsof blogs out there there are tons offorums and just conversations going onconstantly about WooCommerce that youshould really be able you know once youget your bearings if you're completelynew to WooCommercethen you should be able to figure outyour own problems or at least yourdeveloper should alright so as you cansee there are plenty of benefits withWooCommerce but I also want to rollthrough some of the some of thedisadvantages and to start there areplenty of expense I know I said it wasfree and everyone talks about the Ohcommerce is free WordPress is free butthere if you're running an online storethere are tons of extra expenses nottons but like there are a handful suchas WooCommerce themes extra extensionsyou're hosting for the website and adomain name so it may be labeled as freehowever you know a theme might set youback more than a hundred bucks a domainmight cost you ten to twenty dollars ayear hosting can be anywhere from fourdollars a month which I wouldn'tnecessarily recommend going for allthose cheap hosts out there anywhere tofive thousand dollars a month forenterprise websites for a regularstartup you probably shoot for aroundthe twenty five to thirty dollar rangeper month so you know that is areoccurring recurring expense for youronline store commerce also has severalmoving parts on the surface you know itseems pretty simple but it requireshosting wordpress a WooCommerce pluginso as a beginner or if you are abeginner you might get a littleintimidated by this especially withtasks like SEO security hosting andcaching you know you might need sometechnical knowledge or a developer byyour side or sitting down at thecomputer for WooCommerce to becost-effective if not you you knowyou'll have to outsource to to a moreexpensive developer you know so if youdon't have someone on your team who canhelp you out with thatyou're gonna have to look at hourlyprices or project prices which can endup being extremely costly okay so I knowthat outline kind of seemed a littlelong but WooCommerce is one of the mostpopular out there in terms of opensource platforms so that will probablyend up being the longreview here but our second option isgoing to be called x-cart but which isfairly popular it has helped to createover thirty five thousand online storesand this has been rapidly growing overthe past few years I'm so it definitelyis a viable solution and it is opensource so some of the benefits of x-cartit depends on the package you go withbut you can also get you can often getmultilingual and multicultural 'its andadd-ons let's actually take a look atthe price you just to give you an ideaso yes they do have a free editionthat's their open source solution butthen you can also paid for you know asoftware for like a lifetime license orif you're running a multi vendor store Ialso have an ultimate that's more likean enterprise solution but you can likeI said you can integrate with shoppingcarts like PayPal and Sage and it's freeand open source so because it is opensource you know there are plenty ofintegrations you can tap into the codeand customize as much as you want themost advanced developers will have allthe control they need with x-cart soit's pretty fun to play around with andit is very scalable so if you plan onrapidly growing as your store growsx-cart can grow alongside you now a bigdownside to x-cart is that they don'toffer free customer support even ifyou're paying for you know one of thesoftware packages you have no access todirect support unless you pay that extrafee other than that you'll have to relyon self-help tools you know a knowledgebase or if there's any blogs online youcan find even another downside I don'treally like is that you have to pay forhosting if you opt for one of thepaid plans so like with Shopify you payfor the product and that kind ofincludes everything including hosting soyou know this this extra hosting withx-cart can cost anywhere from fivedollars a month to several hundredseveral thousand depending on the sizeof your your operation alright and thenalthough the premium plan is only fourninety five for a lifetime this you knowthis is still somewhat high compared tothe other options also if you need amulti vendor store like we saw beforewell this is the support page now let'sgo back marketplace pricing the multivendor store is close to fifteen hundredfor a lifetime license so that's justgetting your your website launched youknow that it that doesn't include any ofthe extras that you might have thatdoesn't include hosting so you could endup depending on your budget you couldn'tthat could end up in the hole you knowright right from the start and finally adownsidethe final downside for x-cart is there'sa good chance you'll have to utilizesome sort of manual coding when settingup your store yes there are plenty offeatures in here but it is it is alittle bit more intimidating in myopinion compared to like WordPress soyou know if you don't need PHP code thenyou will have to outsource or if youdon't have knowledge in that you'll haveto outsource your development work whichcan end up being very costly all rightso moving on another solution for ifyou're looking for an open-sourceecommerce platform or something that'sfree or close to free is called Zen cartit was created specifically for peopleyou know who have experience with webdevelopment and those who could couldbuild their own online stores I wouldn'tgo so far as to say that you don't needany count coding knowledge but it'spretty closeum you know it's I would highlyrecommend having some sort of codingknowledge or development knowledge ifyou want to dive in with den Zhen cartealright so some of the benefits to Zencart as you can see it's not exactly themost modern website but they do have aforum they do have plugins a fake use ofblogs you know if we take a look at theplugins here it's an entire directoryand you can search you can scrollthrough here maybe look at somemarketing tools so there is someextendibility with Zen cart as for thepros Zen cart is extremely secure so youknow your site and soft customerinformation is protected it is alsogreat for scaling up a store because ofits wide range of features and fullcustomization options but once again youprobably have to be a developer to makethat to take advantage of that you canalso send out HTML emails directly fromyour website to leads or customers andthen of course there's the Zen cartcommunity and we just get a little tasteof it here from the forum so you knowthere are gonna be some people out thereto help you along the way ok so somedownsides we kind of covered a few ofthem already but Zen cart like many ofthe options for covering here todaydoesn't provide any dedicated support soyou will have to either hire someone tohelp you out or you can you know tapinto the forum or look for blogs thatmight be helpful it can also be somesometimes be difficult to upgrade yoursoftware I've read a bit about customershaving complained in the past that theyhave lost some of the custom options oftheir store as a result now you can takethat with a grain of salt because it isfrom some customer reviews however youknow it's who else to to listen to thanthe people who have actually used thesoftwarefinally although there is an SEOout-of-the-box tool use search engineoptimization you need to purchase themore advanced features that othercompanies would offer for free such assitemaps and meta tags so you know for asitemap you get that already withShopify you get that with you knowplenty of other e-commerce platforms butyou actually have to purchase thatthrough Zen cart and finally thetemplates they're not nearly as good aswhat I've seen from other options likeWooCommerce shopify bigcommerce so youknow if you're really looking to startwith a theme or template then you mightbe out of luck that you might have tofind someone to design something for youokay now Magento is actually an Adobecompany it's it runs some of the mosthigh-powered ecommerce websites on theinternet and it's because there are it'spacked with features they do have anopen source solution they they offersome other products that require you topay but you know the features they'reall built in anything you can expect touse you don't usually have to go out andfind a plug-in so you know this opens upall sorts of avenues when it comes tomarketing to your customers creatingthings like membership plans recurringpayments and discounts so if you wantcomplete control over the design andfunctionality of your site Magento isalmost definitely the way to go it willmost likely require a developer or foryou to have development knowledge but itonce again it does give you absolutecontrol of your website some of thebenefits include the fact that it's freeor at least they offer a free versionthere is a paid version if you want toupgrade and scale your businessyou can also or you almost never need tolook for an extension like I mentionedthere's a huge feature list see if wecan find it herethis is just a taste of it but you knowyou can scroll down here and see thatthere's all sorts of features for shopseamlessly shopping operationsmanagement cloud deployment webapplications and there's actuallysomewhere on here there's a whole listof like thousands of features that youcan get from magenta but some otherquick advantages you can send outproduct alerts to customers there's lotsof automated marketing in here as wellas price alerts and back in stockmessages Magento lets you make separatemultilingual sites that load updepending on the user's location that'snot the case for many other e-commerceplatforms out there this is a highlyadvanced multilingual system that theyhave in here so if you do plan on goingglobal think about using Magento finallyyou can customize the user interface andadmin area as well as your store to makeit look completely unique all right somoving on to the down sides let's go toa different page here just you can see alittle something else they do haveresources resources library ecommerceresources they've case studies here kindof give you an idea of what types ofcompanies are using Magento but yeahlet's touch on some of the downsidesbecause there are just a few it's packedwith features but it can tend to beclunky and resource hungry thereforeyou're gonna have to find a host or aserver that can can hold up this type ofresource hungry platform and althoughyou can learn how to use Magento themain reason you would consider it is ifyou had development skills you knowlarger companies are known to go withMagento because they have access andmoney to hire a developer or a team ofdevelopers which makes a lot easier forthem but yeah similar to other optionsso far you are on your own in terms ofcustomer supportnow the Magento support has gottenthe community is very large there aretech resources there's forums you can goto the Help Center here developmentdeveloper documentation but you're notyou shouldn't expect a direct phone orchat support from Magento and finallyMagento is very good for you enterprisecustomers which you can see you knowit's it's very it makes a lot of sensefor just those huge corporations to gowith Magento so it can be quiteexpensive once you start taking intoconsideration the cost for themeshosting and domain especially you knowif you start scaling up too quickly andmoving on here let's go to Open Cartthis is our fifth open source freeecommerce platform it's actually prettyeasy to use compared to some of theother options we've looked at you knowlike Magento you it's it's built mainlyfor developers but Open Cart it's reallylightweight it's free and there is adecent community to turn to if you haveproblems when designing your store Ilike to recommend Open Cart more forstartups since it doesn't take too muchtime to customize the website fromscratch ok so then some of the benefitsthe startup costs are actually prettylow even though you have to get your ownhosting and all that the download isfree and there are some really nicethemes which are available as well so ifwe go to the resources page you candownload here you can look at there'sthere's an open car cloud there's forumsso there is some support available butif you go to the showcase I'm assumingalso the marketplace we can take a lookat some of the themes and extensionssome of them are free some of them areyou only have to pay for but if youcheck out the themes you can kind of dothis on your own time but some of themare fairly cheap you can also look forthree free options as wellso I've looked through opencart manytimes I've used it in the past and youknow these free solutions for in termsof themes are aren't that bad and thecommercial ones are actually really nicebut like I said it said the averageperson should be fine with setting upopen carts you know it doesn't suck downthe resources like it does in Magentoand I also like it because the featuresare pretty solid and it has a largecatalog of of plug-ins and themes so youknow it can do really well for you interms of like order processing shippingcustomer relations anything like thatone of the final advantages I like foropencart and it's it's fairly unique toOpen Cartis that you if you have multiple storesor if you plan on having multiple storesyou can set products to appear indifferent stores as well as offeringdifferent prices on each um you knowthat's really unique and you canpersonalize this entire network ofstores you know you can do that onWordPress with multi-site but the OpenCart multi-site solution seems to be alot more user friendly okay so moving onto some of the disadvantages if youcompare the feature list of say OpenCart to say Magento you know therereally is no comparison Magento isprobably open cards biggest competitoron this list but in terms of the list offeatures Magento wins by a landslide youwill also need to add lots of add-onsand we kind of took a look at that inthe marketplace for open card so youknow it can get expensive it depends onwhat you need but there are lots ofthings to choose from and although youknow I mentioned that it's easier forbeginners to get get a hang of thismeans that the customization options arealso fewer you know you might consideropen card as one of the few open sourceecommerce platforms that experiencedevelopers would rather avoid and youknow there are developers that work withopencart but you know there can be somelimitations when compared to Magento allright but regardless you know besidesthat opencart is really nice I stilllike it for startups and you know youhave all sorts of themes and and pluginsto look at so let's move on here thoughthe next one is going to be calledPrestaShop if you have any experiencewith this one it's actually been on themarket a little bit longer than some ofthe other open-source platforms thatwe've covered today but the thing thatmakes it most unique is that it has ituser friendly user friendly interfacewith effortless inventory management anda process for store maintenance thatanyone could understand in addition youcan use press the shops live demo beforeyou register so you know you can have alittle try at press the shop and see howyou like it it's also one of the moreuser friendly websites just saleswebsites it actually looks like it'smade for the average person who is justtrying to get their business off theground so yeah you can go to thePrestaShop download there are someadditional options here's the demo I wastalking about and then there are plentyof resources like documentation forumcommunity alright and then someadvantages there's a beautiful interfaceon the backend for establishingdifferent websites for multiplelanguages and currencies take a look atthe themes they are really really niceand as with many of these open-sourceplatforms you can choose from premiumtemplates and go through all of thecategories and even go to choose yourstyle or included functionalities youknow just just a few top ones here theylook really modern nice and clean butyou know you might have to spend alittle bit of money on it say 140some of these up at the top here I'msome other things to consider is thatyou know overall it's very lightweightwe like that compared to Magento but italso has a multi vendor option similarto Open Cart that we mentioned you knowif you want to run a multi vendorplatform so that would be anything fromlike ThemeForest to I mean Amazon is amulti-vendor marketplace so if youwanted to allow other vendors to come toyour website and sell their productsPrestaShop offers an option for thatokay so let's just roll through thedownsides really quick one PrestaShopisn't as robust as some of the otheroptions like Magento it's also notrequired to install any extra modulesfor an online store but more often thannot it seems like you'll need to pay forsome sort of extension and as you mighthave noticed as I was scrolling throughhere they aren't necessarily cheap thethemes I think are some of the best outthere but they aren't necessarily thecheapest so that's something to considerbut also might notice that some of themarketing tools aren't as as impressiveas some of the other open sourcesolutions for example you can'tnecessarily cross sell products which isa criticism that is widely put to themand you know there might be someextensions in here that give you thatfunctionality but usually you would findthat as a built-in feature alright sothat is PrestaShop it's really one of myfavorites out therepartly because their themes are nice andI actually think it's it's really easyto understand how to build a websitethrough it so I like it for startups andsome smaller companies or growing okayso next up we have OS commerce and thisis our seventh on the list so we'regetting close to the endOS commerce you haveaccess to a thriving community ofdevelopers and users they also they havea wonderful forum to check out solutionsto your problems and talk with otherpeople there are actually over 300,000online stores made with OS commerce soit's clear that plenty of companies haveworked on this and you know the pricingis obviously a plus since you don't haveto pay anything to launch an onlinestore so the benefits of OS commerce I'mnot a fan of their website by the waybut you know we can look at some oftheir products services and support aswe talk about this the online support ispretty amazing you're not going to getdirect support but the forum hasmillions of active conversations thatyou can search they also have links likepartners and developers here's the forumI was talking about there's tons ofconversations you can even tap into alive chat if that is your styleI mean similar to WordPress the strongcommunity means that you have access tomany plugins and add-ons so a lot ofthese developers are are introducing newadd-ons you might be able to look on amarketplace or complete a Google searchregardless you know there are constantupdates going through this system alsopretty easy to open up the files andmake more advanced customizations to iteven less experienced developers can goin there and make modifications prettyeasily there are also over 7,000 freefeatures to take advantage of now thisthis is almost rivals Magento you knowwe've regularly talked about how muchoverall costs can accumulate to to highhigh cost along the way but perhaps OScommerce is one of the cheapest on thislist because you don't have toconstantly keep reaching out and gettingadd-ons and extensions ok some of thedownsides the main reason you mightconsider going with something else likeMagento is that OS commerce isn'tnecessarily known to scalewell so you know if you have a smallercompany that's not that big of a dealbut if you plan on rapidly expandingthen you know you might stick withsomething like WordPress or Magento butI do like OS commerce for small tomidsize stores I also feel like OScommerce requires more maintenance thanother platforms you know this means thatyou'll have to spend more time makingupdates keeping the site secure andworking on things like SEO and onceagain this is an opinion of mine but theI really don't think the backendinterface is quite as user friendly soit has a bit of a learning curve just tokind of understand and it's not I don'tthink it's as popular as say WooCommerceor Magento so you know there aren'tnearly as as many experienced people outthere to help you out but the good thingis that the people who do use OScommerce are extremely vocal about itand on to our next open source ecommercesolutionit's called jigger shop and it oftengets compared to whoo because of itsease of use and clean interface you canalso expand the functionality of thesite with a wide range of plugins andadd-ons so let's take a look at what wehave here on the website they haveplenty of demos for you to play aroundwith there are themes extensions itlooks like they have some documentationand some support to help you out let'sgo to the themes page okay so right offthe bat you know we have about $35themes that's pretty affordablewe'd have to zoom in on these but itlooks like they're somewhat moderndoesn't look terrible okay let's look atthe pros you can't really find an easierto use open source platform than thisother than WooCommerce this would alsobe on the top of my list for beginnersand intermediates and you know judo shoprecognizes this and similar to some ofthe other solutions theyfor a demo demo version of both thefront end and the back end of thewebsite before you download you'd alsochoose from a large selection of themeslike we saw you know they're reallyaffordable and there is a 14-daymoney-back guarantee on the themes andyou can also get a 10% discount off yournext purchase in the store if you leavea reviewall right so other than that you knowit's fairly easy to edit the code onyour site and the integrations are veryplentiful similar to that of WordPressyou know we've kind of been comparing itwith WordPress over and over where youcan search online for the type ofadd-ons you want and it returns dozensof solutions going on – and here's someof the extensions for you but you canalso search for things on differentmarketplaces because Jigga shop is quitepopular now we've got like upsellsMailChimp it's really a nice extensionlibrary all right so really quick I wantto walk through some of the downsides ofJago shop first of all you don't get anyoptions for customer support and that isdirect test customer support so you knowyou have your documentation up herethere seem to be some forums online andthey help you out with things likepartners and development but you're notgoing to be able to pick up the phoneand you know give give someone a callwho you know is trained on this softwarealso the initial feature set isn't thatisn't as plentiful as something youwould expect from like magentaoh so you might have to install a lot ofadd-ons depending on what you're you'relooking for and although some of thosethemes look nice you'll have a hard timelocating themes that are completely freeI'm actually when we looked at thattheme page most of them were requiringsome sort of payment they weren't thatexpensive but you know 30 bucks 40 bucksthat still is some money so it'ssomething that keep in mindand next up gia is untick you'll earlypopular at the moment so there aren'tthat many partners listed on the websiteif we go here you know you can find webdevelopment web graphic designers webhosting but it's it's just not as aspopular as like WooCommerce or WordPressso you're not going to be able to findas many developers who are well versedwith Jigga shop next up we have Drupalcommerce and we're rolling through thesenow this is our third to last one so ifyou're not familiar with Drupal it's oneof the most common options to go to whendesigning any kite type of website it'sa closed competitor of WordPress since astrong percentage of the Internet isactually powered by Drupal not tomention you can pretty much make anytype of website you want on here if welook at the website they do haveextensions there's documentation alongwith a developer guide right there whichis always nice you can get help so thereis support it looks like there's a blogthere tooso you can you know request certaintypes of support this isn't necessarilydirect support without having to pay butif you know it looks like you can getcommerce guys application supportstarting at five eighty a month theremight be some other options on herealright so some pros to Drupal commerceDrupal was designed with the idea thatonly professionals were going to use itso this is why if you're a developeryou're gonna feel right at home and youknow there are very strict developmentstandards on the Drupal website thatmust be adhered to so to ensure highquality output you probably need to be adeveloper and hopefully well-versed inDrupal or trained at least I meanhas built-in caching and that was a prothat was a benefit by the way I guessthat would be a downside for beginnersbut you know we really like Drupal forsome of those more advanced developersout there who would like or if you youknow you have a developer on your teamand Drupal also has built-in caching sothe overall speed and performance isusually much better than otheropen-source platforms such as Magentonext up unlike many other freeopen-source solutions Drupal commercehas its own security system built in notonly that another Pro would be that theonline community is always there to helpyou along the way so let's see yeahthere is support there's a video librarythere's documentation that's pretty niceconsidering you know Drupal there aretons of people who use it and there'salso an extensive help guide Avellaavailable on Drupal's website and like Isaid there's that video library whichyou know you can't really find that onmany other platforms where they havejust a ton of videos for you to look atas for the downsides of Drupal you'regoing to have a tough time running anonline store if you're new to this andwe kind of mentioned that beforebeginners should probably avoid Drupalunless you are you know getting intodevelopment or coding and you'd like tomake Drupal part of your your arsenal aDrupal commerce websites can becomeresource hogs since they often turn intolarge sites with lots of components andmodifications now this might not alwaysbe the case you might keep your sitepretty small and lightweight but thatcan end up draining your resources alsoDrupal Commerce was created by thepeople behind the commerce guys ifyou've ever heard of them and if youneed support from them we actually sawthat before that comes at a price let'sgo here get help support you know forso for a site modification we're lookingat 580 dollars a month that is extremelyhigh so hopefully you're making enoughwith your ecommerce store to cover thatif you want direct support and finallythere's really no chance of paying for alow priced host with Drupal commerce youneed something high-powered and fastpreferably a VPS or a dedicated serveralright our second to last open sourceplatform it's called WP e-commerce thisis often an overshadowed cousin ofWooCommerce now they're not technicallyrelated at all in terms of like whodeveloped them but it's a solidWordPress plug-in that doesn't getnearly as much attention as WooCommerceso first what you would do it's verysimilar to commerce you would have toget a host install a wordpress site andthen you would install this as yourplugin so in terms of some of thebenefits the plug-in supports about adozen payment gateways and don't youPete ecommerce provide support if youneed to go with a gateway that isn't inthe system so that's pretty cool alsothe back end is pretty easy to navigateand the front end results look clean andmodern what's more is that you cancustomize all of this easily with somesimple CSS or HTML there's also arowboat robust coupon feature thatallows one-time use you know value basedon percentages or a hard number you canalso put restrictions on certainproducts from that discount so you don'talways get quite as advanced discountingfeatures with some of the otherplatforms you can also pay for let'stake a look here so now here's thedownload key there's support you can payfor direct customer support premiumsupport pricing so yearly access is$4.99that is much more reasonable than whatwe just saw from what was that that wejust looked atDrupal Drupal commerceso $4.99 per year is definitely morereasonableyou get 30-day access to 49 bucks that'snot bad and then finally an SSLcertificate is provided with your checkout with WP e-commerce so that couldsave you some money it's also gonnasecure your store let's go back herelet's actually go to the features pagenow some of the downsides of WPe-commerce there aren't that manyadd-ons and go to the add-ons page righthere in fact as of right now at leastthe last time I checked there were only16 available in the store you might haveadded more by now but you know there'sonly two pages here that's not thatimpressive especially when you're goingup against something like WooCommerce orWordPress in addition the multilingualtools are just ok apparently there aremore advanced multi lingual andmulti-currency tools coming in the nearfuture so we'll have to see how thatgoesyou also can pay for premium support wementioned that beforeum there's video somewhere at least thatused to have videos video tutorials andactually when you click through thatthere it goes to a broken link so it'sjust a 404 page and in my opinion that'sa pretty big downside consideringthey're marketing it as the fact thatthey have video tutorials other thanthat let's see two more times for WPe-commerce you're not going to findnearly as many WordPress themes for WPe-commerce as you are for WooCommerceand according to the WordPress site herethis plugin actually the last time Ichecked it hadn't been updated in thelast year so that might have changed letme just double check here alright socheck on WordPress and it's actuallybeen updated in the past five days sothat has that's I wouldn't consider thata cop but I did notice that a while backwhere they hadn't updated the plug-in inabout a year but seems like that is nota downside anymore so let's move on toour 11th and final open-source ecommerceplatform it's called uber cart and I'mjust gonna bring it up through Googlehere / cartalright so yeah it's called uber cartyou might notice something similar hereit's actually a plugin for Drupal souber cart is the most popular Drupalecommerce platform for your websitemany people compare it to Drupalcommerce in blog posts because both areextensions of Drupal but Drupal commercewas created by an old ubercart developerso ubercart preceded Drupal commerce soyou know many people argue that ubercart is the best because it's theoriginal has more features while othersbelieve that Drupal commerce is actuallyjust an improved version of uber carthere so you kind of make your owndecisions based on that but here's whatwe have to say there are plenty ofbenefits there are plenty of downsidesfirst of all well it is a plug it's anadd-on so you will have to add it ontoyour drupal website the activity loggingin uber cart is a fancy way to locateorder statuses no matter what a customerwhere a customer is in the purchasingprocessso that's kind of interesting becauseyou can you can really bring up customerand order information a lot quicker withuber cart also although both ubercartand Drupal commerce are developerfriendly I would say that uber cart isbetter for less experienced users youknow we kind of talked about how Drupalcommerce and you should probably be adeveloper if you were going to use thatuber car is more for the beginners outthere not saying that it's unfriendlyfor developers but it does seem to havea pretty sleek interface for you it'salso simple enough to work for smallerstores but you do have the capabilitiesto expand and next to that there aresome great tutorials on how to performactions that are frequently used you canalso you also get support for manypayment modules and shipping optionsit's all packaged into one sleekecommerce platform so you don't reallyhave to think about that much whenlaunching ubercartnow on to some downsides the customAsian controls are less powerful inubercart compared to Drupal commerce youknow this can be good for newerdevelopers but some of the advancedusers might want more me although youcan scale up to support lots of productsand variants Drupal commerce isdefinitely more suitable for a largeonline storein addition rubric art advertises a demoversion um let's see if we can find thishere ok so they might have they mighthave removed that demo link I know thelast time I reviewed this plugin forHoover cart there was a demo link and itactually didn't work but it looks likeall of these links are working theypretty much leads you to YouTube pagesthat's nice to get a taste of what theextension does for you but as of rightnow I don't see any demo link so maybethere isn't a demo anymore or maybe theyjust found that it wasn't workingalright so that might have been a longvideo I don't know if you got throughall of it but hopefully we coveredeverything you wanted to know about opensource and e free ecommerce platformsit's just great to know that there areother options out there and you knowwhen you think of things like WordPressand WooCommerce and Magento those reallyare the platforms thatsome of the biggest companies in theworld use so you know Shopify is greatbig commerce is great we like them for awide variety of reasons but it's nice toknow that you do have those alternativesolutions that are open source so youhave more flexibility and at least theystart off free so if you have anyquestions about the best open source andfree platforms let us know in thecomments and be sure to subscribe to ourchannel thank you
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