Businesses all over are aiming at building their customer base through online business. Even the customers prefer to opt for online shopping because of the convenience it offers. A good ecommerce website would help the companies to attract the customers. Few of the features that customers look out for in an ecommerce site are – easy navigation, no lag while browsing, ease of operation at payment gateways, convenient options with shopping carts etc. Building up such an ecommerce site does require efforts and resources. This might sound an expensive affair but the availability of free ecommerce software which is open source helps to cut down the cost as well as build a high quality website.
Benefits of open source software include:
· These software are easily available online and can be downloaded without any cost. Thus the businesses do not need to incur any costs.
· They contain the required options to be able to build up an e-commerce site. The best feature of open source ecommerce software is that the technology which is used in the software does not relate to any specific software company. Being open source enables programmers and developers from various technical backgrounds to contribute in enhancing the software.
· The open source nature removes any restrictions of download and use. If an ecommerce developer is looking at options beyond what is provided by the free ecommerce software, they can buy those specific options from the software providers.
Most of the shopping carts are supported by Joomla software which helps in easy integration of the shopping cart with the ecommerce site. Joomla in itself is an open source software which can be downloaded for free and used in developing the websites. Other programming software like html, Css, etc. are also available as free software and can be used to develop the website. So, if you are looking at developing a good ecommerce website without incurring much cost, an open source ecommerce software would be the way forward. You do not need to be a skilled or seasoned web developer to use the software for developing ecommerce site. A basic understanding of programming would suffice to use the options available in the software and build a site as per your liking. If you do not want to put in that effort, there are online developers who can help in building an ecommerce site. 
Yashi
