Popular Free Ecommerce Scripts

Having decided to start a business in the field of e-commerce, at the stage of preparing a business plan, it is worth thinking about what functionality a trading platform should have. Specifying your needs and requirements will help you choose between a specialized online store management system and a free CMS. Free scripts, despite their appearance, offer many features, are intuitive and allow you to optimize many elements of the site for SEO.

The most popular open source CMS
Magento

Among the free tools, Magento Open Source (formerly Magento Community Edition) offers great opportunities. In fact, this is the basis for creating a sales platform. The disadvantage of this script is its huge resource consumption. Creating a simple online store on a virtual hosting may not be possible. Changes to the site code can be made without any problems with the help of experienced programmers. An adequate configuration can also support large online stores.

Adapting Magento for SEO:
  • Friendly URLs
  • Setting metadata for products, categories and individual subpages
  • The page map is created automatically
  • Filling in alt attributes from the editor level
  • Mobile version of the site
  • Sales functionality
  • Tracking actions performed by logged-in users
  • Preview of the most popular products and other sales statistics
  • Extensive product card management capabilities — image scaling, social plugins, comments, social plugins
PrestaShop

This software is popular mainly due to the simplicity of implementing various functionality by installing modules. The administrative panel resembles the WordPress platform, so it will not be difficult for people familiar with this CMS to navigate in PrestaShop. You can count on free plugins that allow you to expand the site's capabilities using a payment system (for example, PayU) or configurations with transport company platforms (for example, DPD). Nothing prevents you from creating a store of any business profile on PrestaShop.

PrestaShop is not as demanding as Magento, so it should work on virtual hosting without any problems. However, it depends on the number of products in the store and the number of users visiting it. One of the undoubted advantages of this software is a fairly good adaptation to the requirements of SEO already in the standard configuration. In the case of a standard template, only a few significant corrections need to be made.

PrestaShop optimization for search engines:
  • Setting up title, description, keywords tags
  • Implementation of extended snippets and simple labeling, for example, of goods using microdata
  • Expansion of content on the main page and product cards
  • Optimization of graphics for Seo
  • A separate subpage of the blog
Sales functionality:
  • Сross-selling, i.e. recommendations of complementary products on product cards
  • Remarketing and automatic reminders to customers about products in the shopping cart
  • Advanced payment options and product delivery methods
  • Contact forms, surveys and online chat
OpenCart

This script is not as popular as the CMS discussed above for e-commerce. It has a simple and well-thought-out structure that allows you to expand the capabilities of the sales platform without any problems. However, OpenCart in its standard form does not offer as many ready-made functions as Presta or Magento. This is more of a base for creating an expanded store.

SEO optimization of OpenCart:
  • Meta tags for the main page, categories, product descriptions
  • Generation of friendly urls
  • THeaders H1-H6
  • File access robots.txt
  • Optimization of graphics for Seo
SOpenCart's sales capabilities
  • Multiscreen - connecting an unlimited number of online stores operating on different domains
  • Implementation of various payment methods
  • The ability to integrate the platform with the systems of courier companies
OsCommerce

For historical reasons, this script also deserves a mention. In the past, it was quite often used, today it is practically not taken into account when creating new online stores. The script code is intertwined with page templates, which makes it much more difficult to change the appearance of the trading platform.

Optimization of the ОsCommerce store for search engines:
  • Setting meta description and title tags for products and categories
  • Generation of friendly urls
  • Graphics optimization - scaling, setting alt tags
  • sitemap, file robots.txt, generated from the admin panel
Features of sales in the ОsCommerce system:
  • Easy and fast updating of product prices
  • Reviews are displayed on product cards
  • GIntegration with auctions and comparison services
  • Product availability status
  • The ability to add multiple product images

Having decided to start a business in the field of e-commerce, at the stage of preparing a business plan, it is worth thinking about what functionality a trading platform should have. Specifying your needs and requirements will help you choose between a specialized online store management system and a free CMS. Free scripts, despite their appearance, offer many features, are intuitive and allow you to optimize many elements of the site for SEO.

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