Many people devise starting an ecommerce business, but building an online store seems to be challenging.
With an estimation, approx. 26.5 million e-commerce sites are running worldwide, and it is becoming challenging for online businesses to stay competitive and grab their market share. Hence, there is a requirement to understand the ecommerce framework and stand out from other sites offering beneficial features. Here comes OpenCart, which is an open-source platform for eCommerce development.
As per the Research, there is an increment of 12.7% and 77% of OpenCart stores in 2023, quarter over quarter and year over year respectively. As it is an open-source platform and free to use, there are approx. 360020 websites running on the same. So, its scope is broad & also getting expanded with time.
It comes up with numerous features that will be helpful for customers as well as business owners. Let’s read about what is OpenCart and its features.
What is OpenCart?
OpenCart is an open-source eCommerce platform, which means you can download and update it free of cost. It is based on PHP and MVC architecture that works on a MySQL or PostgreSQL database and uses various HTML components. Also, you are not liable to pay any monthly fee for using OpenCart. It comes with a robust store management caliber, which states that you can benefit from its in-built SEO, manage customers, products, coupon codes, tax rules, orders, and more.
Moreover, OpenCart allows you to pick exceptional themes and modules to expand your online store’s functionality. Furthermore, the OpenCart users get dedicated commercial or free community support.
Presently, OpenCart provides two platforms: Free and CloudStore, which is a Paid platform.
CloudStore is a cloud-based version where businesses need to pay approximately $33 per month, but there is a limitation of support, meaning if you need additional options, you need to pay $199 per month. There are three options:
- Bronze: Used for small business (1 CPU 2GB), $59/month
- Silver: Used for medium-sized businesses (2 CPU 4GB), $99/month
- Gold: Used for large-scale businesses (4CPU 8GB), $199/month
One of the most promising CMS for developing an online store, OpenCart, is based on PHP and MVC architecture. It targets offering a reliable and transparent tool for web developers to create high-performing eCommerce sites and online stores using customized modules and plugins.
What is OpenCart used for?
OpenCart is mainly known for its intuitive interface through which anyone can navigate & set up their online stores to sell and purchase products. Additionally, it has extension stores with available payment plugins that online businesses use to boost success rates. Let’s read out the key benefits of OpenCart:
1. Cost-Effective Solution for Online Businesses
Ecommerce business start-up seems to be costly where OpenCart brings an affordable solution as it is an open-source platform where users can download it freely. Along with this, various add-ons & extensions charges are very low which helps to improve & customize online stores easily.
2. Easy to Set up And Maintain
OpenCart can be used by any technical or non-technical person as it has a user-friendly & intuitive interface that helps to easily navigate & set up online stores. People can create visually appealing online stores with its simple installation process & huge range of customizable templates.
3. Scalable for Businesses for All Sizes
This platform has the ability to manage large inventories with high scalable ability and also handles huge traffic volumes. OpenCart offers various features with multi-store support that helps to expand businesses’ online presence.
4. Community Support and Resources
OpenCart has a reliable support team, extensive documentation, and a community forum to resolve customer’s issues. This platform also offers a broad range of resources for ideas, and tips with a large developer’s community.
Best OpenCart Features for eCommerce Stores
OpenCart holds various features that come with an eCommerce platform’s additional and essential operations. Following are a few top OpenCart features.
Let’s go through:
1. User Access
To organize your online store successfully, you need to cooperate with various people performing different roles. If you choose the OpenCart eCommerce platform to develop your online store, you will hold the caliber to regulate your store’s edits.
OpenCart permits you to set advanced user privileges and divide access for users and user groups. In simple words, you can differentiate your store users by their roles to control your team’s website access. This way, you can avoid any potential mishaps.
2. Admin Dashboard
The admin dashboard of your online shop offers insight into your OpenCart site’s performance, including access to customers, orders, sales analytics, and more. Additionally, you can easily customize the reporting tools to track and enhance your business’s strategies.
3. Multi-Store
Using OpenCart, you can manage various stores from a single admin interface. Also, you can set products to list them in different stores. You can choose a unique theme for every store, localize settings, and set the per-store product prices.
4. Attributes, Options
As we know, the products arrive in different options, some feature sizes, while others length, colors, height, etc. Here, OpenCart comes in, and it provides a solution for appending extra essential product variables.
5. Back-up & Restore
OpenCart permits you to set up your backups and restorations in an emergency. Also, using OpenCart, you can easily update and edit bulk products, categories, and almost everything.
6. Coupons, Discounts, & Specials
OpenCart is strong enough to understand the influence of coupons, discounts, and specials on your sales and magnetize more customers. Hence, this feature of OpenCart will prove to be better for your store.
7. Payment Providers
OpenCart performs well with almost all the latest payment processing providers with no extra cost or transactional fee. This way, your business gets the flexibility to process payments itself with no additional charges.
8. Unlimited Products & Categories
This ultimate feature of OpenCart permits your business to sell its products online without bearing any additional fee to increase a certain amount of products. Moreover, OpenCart makes the product organization easy by permitting your business to group the products and assign them in an infinite number of categories.
9. Affiliates
OpenCart arrives with an in-built Affiliate system to promote specific products and get paid. You can set different percentages to offer distinct payment options, like Paypal, cheque, or a bank transfer.
10. SEO Friendly
With OpenCart, you will know what SEO content is essential. It will help make the development and management process more accessible while ensuring that your site follows SEO best practices. Besides, this eCommerce platform is mobile responsive by default leading to increased SEO standards.
11. Advanced Product Filter
Customers can easily refine anything in-store as it creates filters just like categories. They can find and buy anything on this platform.
12. Multi-currency
This platform offers an automatic rates update feature where customers can purchase/buy anything in different currencies. It helps to reach a global customer base and offers some benefits like automating product price translation based on the customer’s IP address, avoiding confusion about foreign exchange fees, improving conversions, and fostering trust.
13. Adding Multiple Languages
A site can be used by different customers from different places. Hence, this platform offers multiple language options. These language packs can be easily downloaded from the Extension directory.
14. Create Recurring Payments
This feature offers complete control to store owners to decide how much they can charge customers for products. They can promote and sell subscriptions at discounted prices as well.
15. Payment Gateways
There are approx. 36 payment gateways such as AmazonPayments, PayPal, SagePay, Authorize.Net, FirstData, LiqPay, and a lot more are integrated with OpenCart.
16. Sales analytics report
Open cart has a sales report feature where you can view product purchase reports. If there is a requirement to add reporting functionality, then you need to add additional extensions.
17. Mobile tablet
This Platform is designed for mobile, tablet, and desktops to make an effective impression. Users can get community-developed themes on TemplateMonster.
18. Product feeds
This Feature enables you to customize suitable products to OpenCart Store that can be viewed & listed by various search engines such as Google, Safari, etc.
Pros & Cons of OpenCart
Before choosing any eCommerce platform for developing an online store, we should know the complete relevant information. So, now we will review the pros and cons of OpenCart.
Pros of OpenCart
Let’s start with the pros first.
1. Comes Pre-Equipped
OpenCart sites arrive preloaded with numerous features, as we have discussed above, that are perfect for the start of any business. It permits firms to craft their primary online store quickly and efficiently while maintaining enough functionality.
2. Free to Download
An OpenCart platform helps make an eCommerce store affordable by offering a free download with just an additional cost of hosting fee and the paid extensions.
3. Abundant Extension Options
To expand and personalize your online eCommerce store in the future, OpenCart provides various extensions to enhance the standard OpenCart site. The extensions hold an eCommerce platform’s strength to improve the design, operations, and functionality.
OpenCart Cons
Now, let’s know the cons of OpenCart.
1. Limited Functionality
Besides the potential developer requirement, to increase the functionality of your site, you would need to append extensions. However, some extensions may not suit your OpenCart website, or the varied combinations may be faulty. It demands extra resources and time to test extensions that may not perform as we want. It may obstruct the complete advancement of your eCommerce store by limiting its functionality.
2. Need for Technical Knowledge
As OpenCart is an open-source platform, anyone can manipulate the source code. It may raise the need for a website development expert to effectively improve the site’s performance.
While some businesses hold a developer in their staff, some lack this resource, and outsourcing needs emerge that add extra cost to your website.
On the contrary, with a developer’s eye on your OpenCart website, you can customize it according to your business needs.
3. Restricts Scalability
The inconsistent reliability of large-scale extensions hinders your OpenCart site from growing to a vast and more complicated online store. When OpenCart fails to support high-level functions uncomplicatedly, it limits the site’s caliber to scale even as your business expands.
Conclusion
Now, from the above information you know that OpenCart is one of the powerful & scalable ecommerce platforms that offers various features. As it is cost-effective, it saves organizations from paying expensive fees to purchase licenses. It provides flexible, customized options and a huge library of themes & extensions.
To segregate yourself from ecommerce rivals, it’s important to analyze market trends customer requirements, and conduct in-depth research to create a value proposition in the market. Get in touch with EmizenTech, a leading OpenCart development company for a free consultation on tailored solutions for your eCommerce development project!
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