AbanteCart

Selling online usually means picking between a hosted service with fixed rules and a platform you can inspect and change. AbanteCart takes the second route. Its code is open source and written in PHP, and the project aims it at small and medium-sized online companies wanting to operate a store of their own, and it is free to use according to its makers.

Selling anything from your own store

Shops can sell tangible products as well as downloadable files, and the project says the platform can handle any e-commerce vertical. Merchants can also sell from an existing website by pasting products into a blog post, an article or any page, rather than rebuilding a whole site. Both the storefront and the admin area are responsive, so they adapt to desktop, tablet and phone screens, and the pages shoppers see, mobile ones included, are put together with search engine ranking in mind.

What is built in

The cart ships with many features out of the box. Real-time shipping rates are available from USPS, UPS and FedEx. A built-in editor lets the shop owner change the email notification templates. Integration with Google Analytics is supported. The makers also say the interface is simple enough to learn without special training, and they mention a voice-controlled interface.

Technology and extension

AbanteCart is built on Bootstrap 5, jQuery, AJAX and an MVC structure. Outside systems can connect through REST and JSON interfaces that cover both the shop front and the admin side. The code is described as clean and easy to follow, and the architecture is flexible so that the cart can grow with a business. The project says it follows PCI compliance practice for security. Because it is open source, owners hold their own code, with a community available for support. No license, subscription or transaction fee applies to the software.

Custom work

For companies whose needs outgrow the standard package, the project introduced a distributed edition called AbanteCart Charged. It is designed for bespoke e-commerce, where particular business processes and complex workflows are built into the storefront. The site also lists payment and hosting partners for merchants.