Shopping carts for downloadable products

If you are planning to sell downloadable (or digital) products such as software, music, eBooks or any other kind of files here are the best shopping carts that can help you easily start your business with the right foot.

I’ve used and tested all the software included in this article and bellow is my personal opinion about each one of them.

Magento

Magento is a very powerful free open-source shopping cart that becomes really popular due to is  capabilities. Magento  is really extraordinary and it comes with some amazing features. Its flexibility and features makes it one of the best shopping carts at this moment. But because its really a complex software and somehow difficult to customize I wouldn’t recommend it for small shops that sell only a couple of products. The other thing is that it requires a lot of resources and if you don’t host with a company that is “magento friendly” you would need to spend extra on a vps or dedicated server. Supports downloadable products very well and gives you a lot of options. We use it in our online shop Desigious.com for more than 6000 products.

Cubecart

Cubecart is a cool shopping cart with lots of features. It has a paid and a free version. What makes Cubecart great is the community behind it, you will find a lot of free and paid extensions and templates. It’s easier to customize than Magento but it doesn’t have so many features. On the forums you can easily find any problem you may have. The free version lacks a few features but you will find free mods to add. This feature makes it almost as good as the paid version. Cubecart does a good job when it comes to downloadable items and you can have an unlimited number of products. A nice cubecart store is Estelle’s Cubecart mods.

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a cool WordPress plugin that transforms your blog into a full online shop. There are a few other plugins that do the same thing and maybe better but this is definitely the most common. It integrates in your blog very well and has a bunch of cool features. If you want to expand its capabilities you have a few cool extensions that you can buy and create an awesome shop. If you have a blog and want to sell a few digital products this is what you need. Icondock.com is a good example of a really cool shop that uses the plugin.

CS-Cart

CS-Cart is a professional shopping cart with a lot…, I mean A LOT of  features in it. Its has and ajax admin interface, is SEO friendly, has an affiliate program in it, gift certificates and more. This is not a free shopping cart, it costs $265 per license but for some it may worth every cent, you get a really good cart with lots of features. Go Media has a really cool implementation of the cart for their Arsenal.

Ubercart

Ubercart is an open source ecommerce package that integrates with Drupal. It comes with a lot of features and settings and of course with the community support behind this cool module. It can be enhanced with other modules that integrate seamless in Drupal. If you are used to the Drupal CMS this may be the ideal setup for you but if you are not, well… it may take a while to get used to it.

Virtuemart

Virtuemart is a free plugin that turns your website into a full ecommerce solution that integrates in Joomla and Mambo CMS. With over 1,5 million downloads this extension really rocks! It has a huge community and it can be extended with the help of other extensions made specially for Virtuemart. If you want a powerful CMS with ecommerce capabilities that supports digital downloads you need to use Joomla+Virtuemart. A good example for digital downloads is Tshirt-factory.com.

Prestashop

This is one professional shopping cart packed with lots of features and best of all is open source. Very easy to use and with a friendly admin interface makes Prestashop one of best shopping carts. The community for this software is very active and you get answers for your questions/problems really fast. The developers worked really hard to make this shopping cart a really fast, reliable and intuitive software.

There are a lot of factors that influence the decision in choosing the right cart to sell your products. There are many options to consider and you need to do it carefully.
That’s about it, there were a few more that I’ve tested but they were either very expensive and wasn’t worth it or really bad. If you know other that must be mentioned please do tell.