For the purposes of this website, ecommerce can be defined very loosely as "buying and selling stuff on the Internet." Actuallly, ecommerce involves much more--such as electronic data interchange (EDI)/electronic funds transfer (EFT), supply chain management/inventory management, online transactions--but for the time being, let's focus on the simple transaction of buying and selling stuff. For publishers this would mean making content available online (either electronic content that is downloaded or hard-copy content that is often shipped to buyers), providing a welcoming webpage for users to browse products, taking orders, processing transactions, and maintaining secure records. The web is crowded with open source ecommerce solutions. All of them have similar functions but succeed at different levels. The purpose of this page is not to evaluate these solutions. Rather, the purpose is to introduce the most prominent packages and point the readers to a few resources that will enable them to make their own decisions. The webdistortion blog posted a helpful review of open source ecommerce options in the article, 9 kick ass Open source E-commerce platforms reviewed. That article reviews the following ecommerce applications: Magento To Continue: |
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