It is a commonly known fact by now that when a company is looking to create not only a simple, static-content website (for which transLucidonline blink, blink would of course be optimal) but wishes to re-use content, manage multiple sites with many editors, that an evaluation of open-source content-management-systems (CMS) is a very good option. I for one am actually of the personal opinion that for the vast majority of all cases it is *the* option to at least evaluate open- with closed-source CMS.

Lesser known is what to do when it comes to building a website that supports e-commerce transactions. There are now several viable options in the open-source world for companies to choose between for specialised e-commerce platforms. There seem to be so many in fact, that even I who is supposed to be an e-commerce "expert" hadn't heard about some of the new frontrunner's.

Following are three different platforms that i believe to hold the greatest potential in surviving the recent boost in e-commerce systems due to the large developer community and/or support from sponsoring companies supporting these open-source projects. I might add more detail to this "review" later on; for now, here we go.

1) OSCommerce; the princess of open-source e-commerce systems and probably the one that is best known with the largest developer community and a myriad of extensions. Good luck on picking your winner of the package to install and use, there are some packages that create a link with existing CMS such as Ubercart for Drupal

2) Magento which i was sent a link to by someone who had used it very successfully and who found the solution both architecturally very sound, easy to learn and enabling him to launch his site in a very short amount of time. They certainly have to still build a large following but there seems to be just an incredible drive from Varien, the company behind Magento which integrates really everything that you need to run a great e-commerce site in a nicely packaged form that will run out of the box.

3) OpenTaps (based on OFBiz) is astounding in terms of the feature scope it offers; this is clearly the choice for a company wanting to set up a full e-commerce operations, including ware-housing and customer-service. It is sponsored by the Apache Foundation, running under the "Apache Open For Business Project" based on Java technology. The feature list is simply too long to list, so check it out yourself. There is however a nice overview they provide on the opentaps site which i integrated below. Once again, this would be my choice to create the next Amazon.

Having worked at Amazon.de and Amazon.com for such a long time, i find it mind-boggling to see that there are now open-source platforms available that offer many of the same features and scalability that Amazon had 3-4 years ago. No need for a hundred developers, get yourself one or two and build your dream e-commerce site in under three months. It shows just how evolved the open-source landscape has become.

PS: While researching some of this entry, i found a wonderful review that a company called WebDistortion did on "9 kick ass open-source e-commerce platforms"; they provide a good overview of PHP solutions available.

PSPS: Following our post, this came in from a contributor to OFBiz (we are currently not allowing comments on our blog):
"The phrase "It is sponsored by the Apache Foundation" might be a bit
misleading - Opentaps has been started as a extension to OFBiz (notably with the financials and CRM components). But these days OFBiz has this functionality too (or it is being worked on) and Opentaps is considered rather a fork of OFBiz (I think the Opentaps people are telling that they just use the OFBiz framework...). One big difference is the license - Apache OFBiz is available under the liberal Apache License Version 2.0 whereas Opentaps uses the HPL/GPL license. IMHO there are few reasons to use Opentaps instead of OFBiz (of course as an OFBiz committer I'm absolutely biased ;-)."