Its capabilities are enough to develop almost any e-commerce site: from small e-commerce sites to storefronts with thousands of items and hundreds of product categories. CMS and popular add-ons are regularly updated.
What makes OpenCart popular. What features the CMS has. How it differs from competitors and for which stores is best suited. All this you will learn by reading the article. And before we move on to consider the functional features and advantages of the platform, a short excursion into history:
OpenCart (the meaning of the name is “Open Shopping Cart”) is one of the oldest platforms for online stores. The first presentation of the engine to the general public took place in 1999, when the online shopping market was just forming. Due to the under-formed market, the project developed slowly, and in 2000 work on it was suspended. OpenCart experienced its second birth in 2009, when the code, popular in the late 90’s, fell into the hands of British developer Daniel Kerr and he undertook to refine it. He rewrote the CMS, which was originally created in Perl, to PHP. And this is where the new history of OpenCart began.
Advantages of OpenCart
- Free license GNU General Public License v3 allows you to use OpenCart for projects with a low starting budget.
- Steadily growing base of add-ons, modules, templates greatly simplifies and accelerates the development of sites on OpenCart.
- High performance with a relatively small load on the server reduces the cost of hosting fees and optimization of program code.
- Suitable for multilevel projects: from stores with a few hundred products to sites with tens of thousands of items in the assortment.
- Open source code opens almost limitless possibilities for individual customization and development of add-ons. OpenCart is written in PHP and it is possible to make changes to the source code.
- Continuous development – updates are released several times a year, and found serious bugs are fixed within a few days.
- A large community of developers and technically savvy users, as well as dozens of live forums, where you can get any necessary information on working with CMS.
- Security: protection of transactions, prevention of hacking, fraud, loss of information data.
- Clear admin panel – administration is intuitive, it is easy to find a content manager or train a staff member to work with content on the site.
- Fast indexing and compliance with the basic requirements of search engines, which greatly simplifies and somewhat cheaper search engine optimization of an online store on OpenCart.
- More than 13,000 paid and free extensions that make the creation of the site as flexible as possible.
- The ability to sell physical and electronic goods. That is, such an engine is quite suitable for selling e-books, for example.
Functionality of OpenCart
- Backup native tools: save any information by simply selecting the option in the admin panel.
- Multilanguage: 24 interface languages are available.
- Multicurrency: the ability to select a main currency and add an unlimited number of currencies.
- 20+ customizable payment and delivery methods. When selecting a delivery option, the corresponding payment methods are displayed.
- adaptive magazina kofe OpenCart – an overview of the platform for creating an online store
- Ability to add categories, subcategories, manufacturers in unlimited quantities.
- Dynamic calculation of product cost taking into account weight, packaging, shipping.
- Modules for creating promotions, accounting for discounts and bonuses.
- Product rating (popularity tracking), display of related product items.
- Ability to unload product items from lists in xls, xml, csv format.
- Simple integration with 1C.
- Display customer reviews.
- Ability to create multiple stores on one platform using built-in modules.
- Optimization of images according to the screen size of the user’s device.
- Built-in reporting on products, purchases and customers.
- Modules for calculating tax rates.
- Error registration and reporting.
- Working with physical and virtual goods.
- Registration on the site and saving the history of purchases.
- Affiliate program: can be activated to increase sales.
Among additional options:
You can make a list of recommended products to already viewed or purchased, as well as separately highlight best-selling products. You can automate the sending of sms about the order status or add the function of comparing prices for different products.