First of all, let’s discuss how to promote the free template. Many people would like to use the free open-source shopping cart software, for example, Zen-cart, osCommerce，Magento，Prestashop，Opencart, etc. If you know how to design the template yourself, and you have enough time, you can use it as a method for promoting yourself. The template you designed must be criterion and beauty and give others a good impression. You must mark the designer and the links in the bottom of the finished template. For example,“Designed by IECSP.COM”，add this words to the links leading to you domain name. Meanwhile, you’d better write the information about the author at the Meta of the website. The more your template is popular, and is installed, the more you can get backlinks. Howevery, some user of shopping cart software will delete the author links of the bottom, which cann’t be controlled. If this happend, you have to accept this reality.

Besides the shopping cart software template, wordpress blog software is also very popular now. Designing the beautiful wordpress template is better than designing the shopping cart template, for you can receive more installing quantity. The people using blog will more respect the designer, they will reserve more links from the designer. The main reason is that the bottom links of blog have no any influence for the owner, but the shopping cart is in the different situation.

Next, let’s talk about the development of plug-in. The development of plug-in is the same purpose of designing free template, add the links of your own shopping cart in plug-in. The sort of the plug-in is various, simple and complex, your purpose is to develop a popular plug-in. Besides the various open-source free shopping cart system, you can still develop the plug-in for wordpress. The plug-in you developed must be perfect and undivided, not excessive. Usually speaking, one good plug-in can attract many users. Developing the plug-in is different from designing free template. You need to not only modify and consummate it for long time, but also update along with the main software, and answer the questions from the users.

No matter designing the free shopping cart template or developing the software plug-in, you need to do a lot of work, meanwhile, you can get the return. If you don’t want to make the AD in Google AdWords, you must get the traffic by labor, which is more significant and lasting than the direct charging Ad.No pain no gain.

Function contrast:

Conclusion: Magento win, Prestashop and Opencart lose.

Code contrast:

Opencart’ code is not only a very excellent but also a high efficient framework, which adopt MVC schema development, and have a clear logic structure, easy to study and modify. Of course, the precondition is that you have to possess a powerful PHP developing ability. Opencart don’t use the Smarty template engine, which is a reason IECSP admire it. This project can not only increase the efficiency, but also decrease the code workload of the programmer.

Based on PHP5, Prestashop adopt smarty template engine. The first MVC schema is not excellent. It will be tough, if you touch the code of prestashop first. The linage of code is much more, for it adopt smarty, increase the workload of extending development.

Magento adopt Zend framework, not smarty template engine. For the programmer who are making extending development, they not only need to master PHP, but also need to handle Zend framework. The efficiency of development will be increased, if you can handle Zend framework. However, adopting Zend framework will definitely decrease the disposal performance of Magento, which is congenital deficiency, but Magento add the Compiler module in order to increase performance, at least 30%.

Conclusion: Opencart win, Prestashop and Magento lose.

Speed contrast:

We deploy the three shopping cart softwares on the same host, and turn on the cache function, Magento turn on Compiler module, the homepage display 20 products. We make the first and second visit to every shopping cart software, then record the visit speed. Through many time testing and average value contrast, we find that the speed of Opencart is the best. The speed of Prestashop and Magento is a little worse. What IECSP need to show is that our test is based on our own host environment, our own simple method, not the general objective evaluation. The possibility of error exist. If you test, the result maybe different from ours.

Conclusion: Opencart win, Prestashop and Magento lose.

Community and support contrast:

Magento developed by a company from US, Prestashop by a group of students from French, Opencart by a programmer from British.
Now, magento Community have 130,000 members, Prestashop have 30000 members, Opencart have only 4000 members.

Conclusion: Matento win, Prestashop follow, Opencart last.

Home Page Design：

Style of color choosing: deep and soft, comfortable vision feeling. Neat and clean is the main trait. Menu and character contrast is deep, and plentiful color, but not confused, which means that the use of the color is very suitable.
What we should learn is the arrangement of the catalogue, full function and simple use.

Categories Page Design:

Two column style design. It is little difference from the homepage, and an outputing page for the convenience of viewing the products. There isn’t the unuseful factors, it seems like a very standard and simple catalogue page layout.

Product page:

Adopting the two column style too, the homepage and catalgue page layout are all the same of this page layout, which decrease the study time of the browser definitely.

The design of this shopping cart is perfect. The homepage design feeling is very powerful, and the traditional factor is less. The arrangement of the picture and character is in a good style.
From the choice of the color, the quantity of the color is much but all are the safe color, not hurt the eye, which is the children’s color and close to their life.
The strong contrast of the picture is free, stable and suitable for aesthetics.
The design of the homepage didn’t almost involved the products, which purpose is to offer the people the feeling of kindness. The perfect experience.

Categories Page Design:

The product classifying page layout is very simple, for it use the less function fators, which purpose is to give the children a chance to choose their toys easilly.
Every toy picture is disposed, and delete the background color, and arrange it the same of the background color of the webpage, express the transparency and arrangement feeling.
The pictures of the product of this page is various, and fullfil the color shortcoming of the middle part, balance and stand out the page layout.

Product page:

It is simple and easy to use. There are the children are playing in the picture, which is very efficient to promote according to the statistics.
In short, I like the design of this shopping cart.