Best Shopping Cart Software
⏰ Old Post
This post is over 12 years old - it might be slightly outdated and consigned to the history books.
So as a retailer, finding the right shopping cart system for your e-commerce business can be tricky. There’s a wide variety of offerings out there, some simple and cheap, others complex and expensive. For full disclosure, I (personally) don’t know what the best shopping cart system is to use, however, BuiltWith has years of trends on what shopping carts people are using at any given time, so using that data, here’s the top shopping carts in use today -
Most Used Shopping Carts on Top Sites
Magento is currently the most used shopping cart in the top million sites (as of November 2012). Magento Commerce provides various versions of it’s popular shopping cart software system, from a free downloadable community edition, Magento Go for small businesses and Magento Enterprise versions for medium to large businesses. Brands like Harbor Freight, Snorg Tees and Jet Blue use Magento for their shopping cart systems.
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![]() View Magento Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using Magento |
![]() Download list of websites using Magento |
Yahoo! Store is the second most used ecommerce package on the top million sites. Yahoo! provide a hosted ecommerce solution for retailers looking to get setup on the web without having to run their own hosting systems.
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![]() View Yahoo! Store Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using Yahoo! Store |
![]() Download list of websites using Yahoo! Store |
Most Used Shopping Carts on the Entire Web
The shopping cart systems we come across the most on the entire internet are typically free systems.
ZenCart is one of the largest, another free shopping cart system, written in PHP. It used to be a part of the popular PHP shopping cart programming language osCommerce and was branched out to its own product in 2003, giving it plenty of time to spread across the web.
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![]() View Zen Cart Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using Zen Cart |
![]() Download list of websites using Zen Cart |
Premium Shopping Cart Software
The top 10,000 sites on the internet are responsible for the majority of the traffic on the web. Many of the shops in the top 10k list are premium retailers that require 99.999% uptime and bullet proof shopping cart systems to ensure their online shops are always working and open.
ATG Commerce, a shopping cart system acquired by Oracle is the most popular premium shopping technology in this group. Brands like American Apparel, Macys and American Eagle rely on ATG’s shopping cart systems.
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![]() View ATG Commerce Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using ATG Commerce |
![]() Download list of websites using ATG Commerce |
IBM's WebSphere Commerce is another premium cart technology used by the largest retailers on the web. Bass Pro, Hanes and LL Bean all use their technology to run the ecommerce parts of their websites.
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![]() View IBM WebSphere Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using IBM WebSphere |
![]() Download list of websites using IBM WebSphere |
As for pricing for ATG and WebSphere, it’s all on a quote basis and will depend on the size of your store and requirements.
Fastest Growing Shopping Carts
Over the past year, some of the fastest growing customer base installation shopping cart systems have been –
OpenCart, another PHP based free community driven shopping cart system that can provide premium support when and if you need it. OpenCart has doubled its growth in the past year from 20,000 installations to 40,000.
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![]() View OpenCart Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using OpenCart |
![]() Download list of websites using OpenCart |
Shopify, a premium hosted shopping cart system has also double in popularity over the past year with nearly 10,000 installations that we’ve tracked, incredible growth for a pay for only solution.
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![]() View Shopify Usage Statistics Information |
![]() View Top Sites using Shopify |
![]() Download list of websites using Shopify |
Which shopping cart software should I choose?
Hopefully some of the systems listed above should already be in your sights. Your own shopping cart software requirements will play a factor into which one you choose. For example, if you’re technically minded, a self hosted solution will make sense, if you’re not, then a hosted solution with support might be better.
You can always take a look at our e-commerce trends to find out what cart technologies are growing in popularity and which ones are sinking and also find out which ones are the most used across various sectors of the web.