Open-source versus Commercial Shopping Carts Review

[ Thanks to Rob Valliere
for this link. ]

“Many Open-source developers write code to solve
problems and add features that interest them. With commercial
projects, developers have vested interests in providing
applications that comply with their client’s requirements. So
Open-Source projects are continually developing, are reliable and
modular with great looking pages, but their commercial counterparts
tend to be more stable and feature-rich, and are documented.

Windows developers now have an alternatitve to MS Access. A
great Web development platform is Apache, MySQL and PHP, available
on both Linux and Windows. Web support for LAMP and WAMP is very
good, and when compared to the Microsoft alternative for smaller
businesses, MySQL blows MS Access out of the ballpark!

This review compares Open-Source and commercial shopping cards
suitable for smaller Web retailers and discusses Web development
issues. Included is a separate E-Commerce Merchant Guide for
retailers who need an affordable shopping cart with credit card
payments that can be customized for their business.

The Shopping Carts reviewed can be installed and easily
configured, without programming. However, if you have plans to
customize an on-line shop and expand it to provide you and your
customers with a professional and tailored shop that can grow and
adapt to a changing marketplace, including a range of B2C and B2B
Web services, you will need the capability to further develop the
system.”

Complete
Story