Best Free Shopping Cart Software for Ecommerce in 2024

Shopping carts, which are also called ecommerce website software programs, can be hard for businesses to buy. If you choose the wrong shopping cart tools, you could waste a lot of time and money. For your online business to do well, you need to choose the best shopping cart tools when you start doing business online.

This guide will give you an idea of the most important things to consider when looking for the best free shopping cart software for ecommerce. Read our in-depth reviews of the top free shopping cart software to find out more about the best platforms in this area and to compare them.

Trying out a bunch of free trial plans or demos from well-known shopping cart software providers is a smart way to find the best shopping cart software for your ecommerce business. This should let you test the list of important parts of the software before you decide if it meets your company’s needs and before you spend any money on it. The best way to find the best free shopping cart software is to try the tools that have the highest SmartScore and User Satisfaction Rating in our free shopping cart software reviews: Wix, X-Carts, Shift4Shop, WooCommerce, Jimdo, and more.

Free shopping cart software for ecommerce targets the following: 

• Online businesses and brands 
• Small business websites 
• Online retailers and ecommerce websites

In the age of online shopping, big companies are the ones who fight the hardest because they’re always trying to stay competitive and get more and more sales. For them, it’s not enough to get people to visit their websites, they also need a smart tool to keep those people there and get them to buy something. Because of this, they are the ones who benefit the most from a reliable and easy-to-use free ecommerce shopping cart, which solves some of the biggest organizational problems. At the same time, these systems make e-stores more interactive and appealing to buyers, and they get rid of the need to keep track of thousands of orders or customer purchases separately. Based on our thorough comparisons, the best thing about them is probably the analytics, because the retailer has all the tools they need to turn sales data into useful analytics and write reports based on them.

Here are some shopping cart software free of charge that are worth exploring.

• Wix offers a shopping cart feature that makes online shopping easier on WordPress blogs and WooCommerce sites.
• X-Cart is a very flexible shopping cart solution with countless features and integration to help you start an online store that does well.
• Shift4Shop helps easily and successfully build an online store with its many features and partnerships with over 200 top business service providers, such as shipping companies, tax calculators, and more.
• WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin with features and quality that’s on par with those of large businesses.
• Jimdo offers an easy-to-use interface for an easy setup of online stores. It has a flexible package for new businesses and freelancers.
• OpenCart is an open-source shopping cart built on PHP and MySQL. It is easy to use and powerful, with a well-designed user interface and a larger library of extensions.
• Ecwid is a web-based store builder that lets users build an online store that they can add to their existing website instead of having to build a new ecommerce site.
• ShopSite is a fast online store solution that works well with WordPress. It comes with many features and integrations and can be hosted anywhere.
• SITE123 is a website builder that does not require coding, making it easy to use. The interface automatically changes depending on what device you use.
• WCFM Marketplace allows sales and rental of items, subscriptions, and services. It connects to WooCommerce and uses WordPress plugins for marketplace needs.
• Zen Cart is a PHP/MySQL shopping cart run by a community. It uses the GPL2 license and can be changed, built, or customized by anyone with basic IT and web development skills.
• nopCommerce offers a shopping cart, catalog frontend, and management tool. It is an open-source platform, it can be customized to meet business needs.
• Big Cartel was built for “creative” and “artistic” merchants. It has evolved to sell pretty much anything, so its user base has expanded.
• Spree Commerce is an open-source shopping cart with tools and features for building online stores. It is flexible, fast, and free.
• Avactis is a customizable shopping cart software that does not require programming. It is SEO-optimized, secure, and upgrade-friendly,
• osCommerce is a simple ecommerce and online store management software that runs on PHP and MySQL. It’s free under GNU GPL.
• CubeCart is a feature-rich ecommerce script with many tools. It is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses and individuals looking for an easy-to-use tool that has all the features they need.
• MultiVariants is a Shopify bulk order software that provides minimum/maximum variants and interval quantity increments. It boosts sales and conversions by allowing bulk product purchases.
• Drupal Commerce is an open-source ecommerce framework that helps businesses and individuals build ecommerce websites and apps. It combines commerce, content, and community to drive more store traffic.
• AbanteCart is a free shopping cart app built by passionate enthusiasts funded by donations, marketplace sales, and advertising. Install it on any shared or dedicated hosting platform.

Licensed or SaaS Based?

As your business grows, and you are getting ready to move forward with paid plans, this could be the first and most important thing you need to think about. A few years ago, many companies started offering SaaS (Software as a Service), cloud-based or hosted websites, as well as ecommerce hosting solutions. There are pros and cons to both licensed and SaaS-based solutions, but it seems that SaaS tools are moving ahead of the competition more and more.

Licensed Shopping Cart Software Solution

Advantages:

• Flexible and able to grow infinitely
• Most plans with one-time fees have plug-ins and add-ons available.
• You only pay once for the software solution and then you own the code.
• Storage, bandwidth, and products have no limits.
• The freedom to switch hosts if necessary

Disadvantages:

• Installation and set-up are much harder and take much longer.
• Need to update and fix things all the time.
• Design and development are much more likely to need to be outsourced.
• Most of the time, less good help.

Cloud-Based, SaaS, Shopping Cart Software Solution

Advantages:

• Lots of popular features, add-ons, and quick set-up
• Less expensive at the start, hosting included
• Installation and use are both made easier.
• Some design elements, but not all, are easy for new users to change.
• Many software companies offer great support all the time.

Disadvantages:

• Pricing models that are hard to understand
• If the plug-ins aren’t easy to find, it can be hard to change how your site works.
• Over time, the cost can go up a lot.
• Many features and add-ons cost extra money every month.
• If you’re unhappy with your hosting company, you can’t switch.

These SaaS shopping cart software solutions that run in the cloud are easier to set up and keep up to date. So, they are a good choice for businesses that don’t have a lot of inventory and also have needs for the site. But the costs can easily get so high that a company ends up paying many times as much as they would for a licensed product. SaaS solutions are better for users who aren’t designers or programmers themselves, even if the cost is higher in the end. This is because the cost of an in-house IT person or staff is higher than the cost of a SaaS solution.

Most businesses have a few reasons to buy shopping cart software that is already set up. If your business doesn’t have access to developers, hosting providers, and designers, the hosted tools may be the best option. If you care most about ease of use, support, and speed, then hosted solutions are the way to go.

There are different kinds of features that almost every business cares about. When you’re looking for information about service providers, make sure to think about the following:

• Website display and promotions. With this feature, you can easily make offers, pages, and banners without having to do a lot of complicated back-end work. In your business, you’d want your online store to be easy to run, and it’s important to be able to make changes when your product stock changes or when you offer discounts or specials.
• Shipping and order management. This feature is sometimes overlooked when you’re working on the look and feel of your site as a whole. However, you should also think about how product orders are handled from both an administrative and a customer’s point of view. When you get an order, what does it look like? How will you handle the orders? What tools will you use? How can you let your customers know when something is being shipped or what the status is? How hard or easy is it to change your email and message templates? When your website is already up and running, these things become very important.
• Support. It can be a big part of figuring out which tool is best for your business. Many of the best shopping cart software companies offer different ways to contact them or get help, such as live chat, phone and email support, video tutorials, frequently asked questions, a discussion board, and technical product documentation, among other things. When looking for the right shopping cart software for your business, you should look at the support platforms a vendor uses and how quickly and accurately they answer customer questions.
• Digital carts. It lets shoppers put multiple items in their carts and take them out when they need to. Customers can also put more than one of the same item in their cart through the software. Most shopping carts let customers keep items in their carts for as long as they want, so they can order them later.
• Integration of a payment gateway. Make it easy for shoppers to pay for their orders. Most shopping carts let you choose the payment gateway you want to use. Giving your customers a choice of ways to pay for online purchases makes shopping easier for them and makes sure you get paid quickly.
• Inventory management. This is a way to keep track of your stock in real time. With this feature, you can keep track of your stock levels accurately and have them updated as needed. There are also features in a lot of shopping cart software that let you know when you need to restock an item. So, you don’t have to keep track of stock levels by hand.
• Shipping and tax calculations. Make it easier to figure out how much sales tax to pay, especially since tax rates vary from place to place. Customers also know right away how much their order will cost, thanks to these calculators. Automatic calculators not only make sure that your numbers are correct and clear, but they also help you follow tax laws.
• Reporting tools.  Get information about how stores are doing based on different metrics, such as sales, profits, visits, and referrals. Many shopping cart programs also keep track of how people use your store and give you accurate numbers on important metrics like the rate at which people abandon their shopping carts.

Apart from benefiting from not paying anything, free shopping cart software offers the following:

• Integrations. When looking for the right shopping cart software, you should also look at how well it integrates with other programs. Do you want to add third-party tools to your shopping cart that you use in your business? Some examples of third-party tools are accounting programs, email marketing tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and shipping management. Some market vendors offer many of these integration features as paid add-ons, while others include them as part of their base service. Check to see if at least one of these data connections can be handled by you. If you don’t, your business will have to buy custom work in the end.
• Product management and upload. If you only sell a few dozen items, you can make product pages by hand. If you sell more than that, you need to think about how you will upload, change, and manage all of those items. Most people who sell things on the market already have the tools they need to do this. Some, though, have more complicated ways of doing things than others. Some vendors also have features that others don’t.
• Customer convenience. Shopping cart software can help you make shopping as easy and convenient as possible for your customers. These systems make sure that your store is easy to use and that the ordering process is well-organized. Customers will keep coming back to your store as long as they have good experiences there.
• Centralized data. These systems make it easier for store owners to get information about their customers. All of the information about customers is kept in one place, making it easy to find what you need. The software also gathers information about customers, such as how far they get in the buying process before giving up on their cart. This information can help you improve the way you order.
• Order fulfillment. This is easier because shopping cart software helps you do it faster and better. The software makes sure that the orders you get have all the details you need to handle them. Most of the time, taxes and shipping costs will also have been added in. The software also gives you order numbers that you can use as a reference.
• Built-in marketing and SEO tools. Many of these programs have tools you can use for marketing campaigns that are already built in. For example, you might be able to make and send emails that feature your best-selling goods and services. Some shopping cart software also have SEO tools that let you add metadata to the pages of your store and change the URLs.
• PCI compliance. Shopping cart software can help you make sure you don’t break PCI security rules. These standards say how cardholder data and account information should be handled and stored online. If these rules aren’t followed, there could be fines and other penalties.

• Customers will choose the lowest prices. They will choose the lowest price for products that are easy to compare without having to see them in person and that is easy to ship and distribute. So, if you’re not a big online store like Alibaba or Amazon, you should think about other ways to make your online store work and make money.
• Customers will travel the world. More people will choose to buy from sites in other countries. This means that local and domestic merchants need to catch on to the trend and start selling to customers from other countries. They should work on improving their shopping cart and ecommerce software so that they can sell to people from other countries.
• Voice shopping isn’t going anywhere. Voice shopping is likely to stay popular since it is expected to grow by 55% by 2022. The rise of smart speakers may be to blame for this growth. Voice shoppers often order things like clothes, everyday household items, and things to do for fun. Business owners can make sure their stores are ready for this new way of shopping with shopping cart software.
• AR capabilities. More shopping cart software will have augmented reality (AR) features that let customers see a product in any setting they want. AR will let online shoppers see, for example, how a piece of furniture looks in their home or how a shirt looks on them. The technology makes shopping online more interactive and helps customers feel more involved, which could lead to more sales.

• Naming shopping cart. When it comes to the name of the shopping cart, some online stores cause confusion by calling it something else, like a basket, bookbag, or something else. This can be confusing for people who want to buy. For quick and easy access, it’s best to just call the item a “shopping cart” and add a picture of a shopping cart.
• Shopping cart abandonment. A lot of online stores have a problem with people leaving items in their shopping carts. To lower their prices and make it easier to buy, they should make the checkout process quick and easy. You can tell customers right away how much shipping will cost, show stock availability so they know if a product is in stock, and clearly explain the different steps of the buying process and how long it will take to finish the transaction.
• Security. This is an important issue, especially since online stores usually store customer and credit card information so that orders can be processed. The security features of shopping cart software should be strong enough to protect sensitive information. If you use shopping cart software that doesn’t have enough security features, you could get fined and lose sales and customers.
• Integrations. Not all shopping cart software has the integrations you need for your online store. For example, some shopping cart software don’t have built-in tools for selling on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, which are all popular places to buy and sell goods. You might also have trouble integrating shopping carts with the analytics, CRM, and sales software you already use.

Cost can, of course, be a very important factor when you decide that it is high time to move out of your free software and get a paid subscription. It can be hard to really understand how much the tool will cost upfront.

To deal with this, put the prices into the three main groups listed below and think about your needs in each group.

• Software fees. Do you want to pay a one-time fee upfront for the shopping cart software? Or would you rather pay a monthly fee based on the number of products or storage space you need? If you want to add more products to your store over time, make sure to plan for that, since hosted plans have different limits at different price points. You should also remember that in addition to the cost of the software solution, all licensed plans need hosting.
• Design and development costs. No matter which platform you choose, you will have to pay extra if you want anything on your site to be programmed or designed from scratch. In addition to custom development, you should think about how the actual artwork design looks and how much CSS/HTML work is needed.
• Add-ons, plug-ins, and integrations. Many add-ons, plug-ins, and integration features are free. Some, though, will need to pay for programming, a subscription, or a one-time purchase. Check to see if your short list of shopping cart vendors can meet your needs. Find out if the payment gateways you use work with the vendor. You should also look into this issue before you buy a shopping cart solution. You also need to make sure that the tool’s payment gateway works with the online merchant account you have with your bank.

You’ll see that it’s easy to spend all of your company’s money on a shopping cart solution, only to find out that you forgot to account for important things like a payment gateway. You may also find yourself in a situation where, to your horror, your cart software is so hard for customers to use that you need help shopping for products yourself.

Don’t be in such a rush to choose a vendor that you don’t take the time to fully understand what their pricing plans include, how their services work, and how much it will cost to work with them. Before you decide to buy something, take the time to look at the information on the vendor’s website and talk to a sales or customer service rep. Before you sign up with a company, you need to know how good their customer service is. This will give you a good idea of how easy or hard it will be to work with them, especially if you have problems in the future.

You wouldn’t want to find out you made a bad decision after your business is up and running and is already selling products.

There are no signs that online shopping will slow down. These numbers can help you get the most money out of your online store and figure out how to solve the age-old mystery of cart abandonment.

• By 2021, the total amount of money made through retail ecommerce around the world was expected to reach $4.5 trillion.
• Over 90% of polled Americans bought groceries in person, while 31% bought groceries online over the last six months from the survey. The number of people who bought groceries online declined by 7%
• In the US, 75% of shopping carts online were abandoned in Q2 2022, while 85% of mobile customers did the same.
• When asked, 36% of US online shoppers said that unexpected shipping costs made them leave their carts. Other top reasons were discount codes or coupons not working on their purchase and final feels (e.g. sales tax) being too high.
• Cart recovery can double or even triple your sales.

Not all free software for shopping carts are created the same. Some of these systems, for example, are made to be all-in-one solutions with a full set of ecommerce features. On the other hand, some shopping cart programs focus on just one or two main features. Here are some best practices to think about before you decide:

• Consider what you want to sell. Some shopping carts work best for selling physical goods, while others have features for selling digital or virtual products. It’s best to choose shopping cart software that can handle the kind of products you want to sell. You won’t have any trouble putting together your online catalog this way.
• Check the security features of the software. Security features in shopping cart software are important because they make sure you won’t get fined or get in trouble for not keeping cardholder information safe. You should look for SSL certificates and website monitoring in the shopping cart software you choose.
• Choose software that can be used for mobile commerce. Google’s mobile-first indexing makes it more likely that a mobile-friendly online store will rank high on SERPs. The best shopping cart software makes sure that your online store is easy to use, even on mobile devices. This makes shopping for your customers more enjoyable.
• Consider the good and bad things about cloud-based versus on-premise software. Most shopping cart software can be set up on-premise or in the cloud. Every kind of deployment has its own pros and cons. For example, software that runs in the cloud is easier to set up and use, but software that runs on-premise gives you more control over your data. It’s all about putting the things you care about most at the top of the list.

Check how well the software can work with other programs. Make sure that the shopping cart software you choose will work well with the other programs and systems you use, such as payment options, customer service systems, and shipping carriers. You should also check to see if the shopping cart software you’re looking at lets you sell on other channels as well.