It is really easy to be a Multi-Channel Online Marketer: Part 2 of a 2 Part Series

In part one of this series, we discussed getting up and running online quickly with three “Big box marketplace oriented solutions” – Amazon.com, EBay and Yahoo stores.  These solutions provide out of the box order taking systems with built in marketing and promotion of your product or service listings.  There are many other options available online and we will explore cost effective, “Open Source” solutions in this article.  For those marketers who have additional marketing efforts that drive traffic to an “online store”, using the “Big Three” may not be so cost effective.  Remember from our last article that the real value those solutions provide is “a built-in community”.  Your fees to acquire that customer via those channels have bundled in the marketing cost, so to pay for external marketing efforts and send those customers to one of these solutions is akin to paying twice as much for your customer acquisition.

These open source solutions are as feature rich as many expensive commercial e-commerce solutions and the level of adoption from the end user and developer community has been rampant.  The three shopping cart solutions we will discuss are osCommerce, VirtueMart and Magento.

The first open source solution to look at is osCommerce.  This solution has been around for over 10 years, has a community of over 250,000 registered members and has had over 6,400 add-ons developed to give osCommerce a very robust set of features.  You can find thousands of osCommerce powered sites all over the Internet and can even view some of the 12,000+ sites which have registered with the osCommerce Project right from their site to see the types of sites that can be imagined using this solution.  The osCommerce value proposition is really straightforward.  With the right web developer (and there are plenty of them available), an osCommerce site can be tailored to your unique needs in a fairly short period of time.  There are also hundreds of pre-defined templates available at little or no cost to give you the look and feel you require for your customer’s shopping experience.  The end result is a low cost, full-featured ecommerce solution which is well documented, supported by a large community and carries no software costs or restrictions governing use.

Next, we will look at a VirtueMart solution.  This is a very popular system these days because it is made available as a “Plugin” to be used within the very popular Joomla  Content Management System (CMS).  If you are a marketer who can benefit from publishing dynamic contrent such as news, articles or an ongoing blog to help support the sales of your products or services, than VirtueMart might well be a good solution for you.  With over 2.5 million downloads to date, this solution is the gold standard for integrating e-commerce into the Joomla CMS.  VirtueMart allows for product and pricing configuration, order capture with very flexible sales tax configurations and supports multi-currency and can be deployed in multiple languages.  It also supports real-time on-line payment capture through Paypal or the popular Auth.NET Credit Card processing gateway and can calculate shipping charges for popular carriers such as USPS, UPS and FedEx.  The only thing left to do once VirtueMart is done is to ship the order to the customer.

Last, but certainly not least, Magento Commerce provides an open-source solution for e-commerce.  If you talk to any online marketer, they probably know about Magento.  It is probably the fastest growing eCommerce platform currently available.  One of the reasons it is so popular is that Magento is offered in 3 editions.  Magento provides a free Community Edition, which has over 3 million downloads.  If your organization requires systems including a support package, Magento also offers a professional and enterprise edition.  These supported editions offer a larger set of features on top of those supported in the community edition as well as other important benefits such as built-in PCI compliance, warranties and service level agreements.

In summary, open-source e-commerce platforms offer most if not more of the features available in commercial packages.  Although there are many open-source solutions available, the three reviewed in this article are tried and true leaders in the open-source e-commerce arena.  As you increase your marketing efforts that drive online traffic, it makes no sense to pay extra fees to the big-box solutions you may be using as part of your online sales strategy.  These open-source platforms will provide an excellent, cost effective solution to capture sales from your web site and online marketing initiatives.