The Value of E-Commerce and Online Store-Management Applications E-Commerce Websites

The steady increase of e-commerce websites in the World Wide Web had triggered the development of different maintenance tools in which web owners can use to allow themselves to maintain their own websites without the assistance of a professional web developer. This is when e-commerce and online store-management applications were developed.

What is an E-Commerce and Online Store-Management Application?

An e-commerce and online store-management application is a program used to maintain e-commerce websites, allowing people who have little to no knowledge of web programming and web development to maintain their own websites with little assistance from a professional e-commerce web developer.

This is very similar to the purpose of using a Web CMS or WCMS to maintain a website. However, these programs possess more functionality which allows these to manipulate an e-commerce website.

Popular E-Commerce and Online Store-Management Applications According to different expert web developer Philippines, there are many online store-management applications used today, and some of the most popular are:

Magento

Magento is an open source ecommerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. Varien, the company owning Magento, formerly worked with osCommerce. They originally planned to fork osCommerce but later decided to rewrite it as Magento.

There are currently three versions of Magento, the Professional Edition, the Enterprise Edition, and the Community Edition. The Magento Community Edition is the only free version of Magento available. 

osCommerce

osCommerce (“open source Commerce”) is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.

There are currently two supported stable releases of osCommerce. Versions 3.0 and 2.3 are developed as two independent programs, and as such do not share code. Contributions, the official name for the open-source community developed plugins, are developed for either 2.x or 3.0, and are incompatible with one another. There is much more support, and are many more contributions for osCommerce version 2 releases than version 3. Contributions are updated, or released daily. 

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution used by more than 120,000 active stores around the world. It supports payment gateways such as Google Checkout, Authorize.net, Skrill, PayPal and Payments Pro via API. Further payment modules are offered commercially.

The software makes extensive use of AJAX in the admin panel, while module blocks can be easily added to the store to provide extra functionality; these are normally provided free of charge by independent developers. The makers of PrestaShop have an official marketplace for priced modules and themes entitled PrestaShop Addons.

There are a number of volunteers who support and contribute their own Addons to PrestaShop. Contributors often program additional features for the software, on top of the 275 features available by default.

Source from Margarette McBride of IT Company Marikina