Free Technology Options For Creating A Bustling eCommerce Website

This article goes over three different options for creating a managable, configurable, and professional eCommerce website platform absolutely free.

If you’re looking at creating an eCommerce site, these are the free options that you might not have considered.

Each option given here is free and widely accepted amongst the developer community as a valid eCommerce solution. They are the basis of many eCommerce websites on the internet.

I’ll present two options as what I call a fully fledged eCommerce solution, and another “lite” option for a cut down eCommerce site that doesn’t need to do quite as much.

First, the “lite” eCommerce solution.

WordPress + WP eCommerce

WordPress is far and away the most powerful and popular blogging platform available. It’s strength lies in the vast range of plugins developers have contributed to the community.

WP eCommerce is a plugin for our beloved WordPress content management system. Basically turning our humble blog into a website that can accept payments for products.

I call this solution (the WordPress and WP eCommerce combination) a “lite” solution because while WP eCommerce is great and has lots of neat features, it is still an additional component you add on top of your blog.

Adding eCommerce features to a blog is one of the best methods of monetization for bloggers. Creating your own products like eBooks and selling them via your own methods (and hence not having to pay someone like ClickBank or eJunkie) can be a great way to cater for your captive audience’s needs.

Drupal + Ubercart

A time tested combination that so many developers use for their clients, and it’s free, so you can use it too.

Drupal is another content management system, but this time it’s not quite like WordPress and a little more like Joomla! which we’ve talked about at Code My Own Road before.

Drupal allows you to extend it’s content management framework in a number of ways. Contributing developers have provided literally thousands of modules for bolting onto drupal to do a range of fancy pants things.

Ubercart is one such module that was coded specifically as an advance eCommerce cart software solution. It’s one of the most popular shopping cart modules and support a large array of payment gateways with people extending it further to include local gateways for their country/region.

Joomla! + VirtueMart

We’ve introduced Joomla! recently and talked about it’s nice features, extensibility, and the fact that extensions themselves will often have a community around them. VirtueMart is one of those entensions.

VirtueMart is a free shopping cart implementation for the Joomla! platform, and again, is something that web developers wordwide use for implementation of eCommerce websites for their clients.

It’s highly customizable and integrates very tightly with Joomla!. VirtueMart itself has been extended as well for different languages, gateways and more.

One feature I really like is that, even though the traditional way of installing it (as with all plugins) is installing it on top of Joomla!, you actually don’t have to fiddle around with installing Joomla! first.

VirtueMart provides what they call a Joomla! eCommerce edition for you do download and install on your website straight away as a combined unit.

Conclusion

Creating an eCommerce site is a lot of work. I’m not going to pretend like these solutions are just drop in and away you go. With any project like there there is a bit of configuration, and lots of adjustments to get things the way they you like them.

That said, it’s not that hard to do the installation and adjustments yourself. You do need patience and a willingness to learn. But if you didn’t have that, you wouldn’t be at this site!

Even if you’re not the best designer in the world, you can still implement the bones of your site, add products and get your payment system running, then hire a designer to do the work you can’t do like tidying up the look and feel (a lot cheaper than getting someone to do the whole lot). That’s the DIY way, and you’ll save yourself a bunch of money.

So far we’ve discussed a brief introduction to Joomla!, and now we’ve covered my three favourite options for designing an eCommerce website for free, DIY style. Soon we’ll be getting our hands dirty, setting up a Joomla! environment on your computer. This will hopefully allow us to get comfortable with the Joomla! interface and start testing different ideas.

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