OpenCart - platform overview
OpenCart is the most popular open source content management system for online stores.
Its capabilities are sufficient for developing almost any e-commerce sites: from small e-commerce sites to storefronts with thousands of positions and hundreds of product categories. CMS and popular add-ons are updated regularly. As of 2022, 1% of all websites in the world based on popular CMS work on OpenCart.
What makes OpenCart popular? What features does the CMS have? How does it differ from competitors and for which stores it is best suited. You will learn all this by reading the article.
Benefits of OpenCart
- The free GNU General Public License v3 allows you to use OpenCart for projects with a low start-up budget.
- A steadily growing database of add-ons, modules, and templates greatly simplifies and speeds up the development of sites on OpenCart.
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- High performance with a relatively low load on the server reduces the cost of hosting and program code optimization.
- Suitable for multi-level projects: from stores with several hundred products to sites with tens of thousands of items in the assortment.
- Open source code opens up almost limitless possibilities for customization and development of add-ons. OpenCart is written in PHP and it is possible to make changes to the source code.
- Continuous development – updates are released several times a year, and detected serious bugs are fixed within a few days.
- A large community of developers and technically savvy users, as well as dozens of live forums where you can get any necessary information on working with CMS.
- Security: transaction protection, prevention of hacking, fraud, loss of information data.
- Clear admin panel – administration is intuitive, it’s easy to find a content manager or train a staff member to work with content on the site.
- Fast indexing and compliance with the basic requirements of search engines, which greatly simplifies and somewhat reduces the cost of search engine optimization of an online store on OpenCart.
- More than 13,000 paid and free extensions that make website creation as flexible as possible.
- Ability to sell physical and electronic goods. That is, such an engine is quite suitable for selling e-books, for example.
OpenCart functionality
- Backup with native tools: save any information by simply selecting an option in the admin panel.
- Multilingual: 24 interface languages are available, including English and Russian.
- Multi-currency: the ability to select the main one and add an unlimited number of currencies.
- 20+ customizable methods of payment and delivery of goods. When you select a delivery option, the corresponding payment methods are displayed.
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- Support for acquiring payment systems PayPal, SagePal, PayPoint and others out of the box.
- Ability to add categories, subcategories, manufacturers in unlimited quantities.
- Dynamic calculation of product cost taking into account weight, packaging, delivery.
- Modules for creating promotions, accounting for discounts and bonuses.
- Product rating (popularity tracking), display of related product items.
- Ability to download product items from lists in xls, xml, csv format.
- Easy integration with 1C.
- Display customer reviews.
- Ability to create multiple stores on one platform using built-in modules.
- Optimize images according to the screen size of the user’s device.
- Built-in reporting system for products, purchases and customers.
- Modules for calculating tax rates.
- Logging and reporting errors.
- Working with physical and virtual goods.
- Register on the site and save your purchase history.
- Affiliate program: can be activated to increase sales.
OpenCart has built-in search engine optimization features
- Fields for conveniently filling out meta tags in product item cards.
- A separate block in your personal account for installing and monitoring the correct operation of counters of the Google Analytics analytics system.
- CNC URL generator.
- Ability to write unique title and h1 headings for pages without opening the code
- Redirect configuration manager.
- The ability to close pages from indexing in one click (a useful option at the site creation stage or when significant changes are made)
Export and import of data and CMS OpenCart integration
Especially if we are talking about tens, hundreds, thousands of positions. Not only do you have to pay for the operator’s work filling out product cards, but a person can make a mistake. An incorrectly indicated price, characteristics, or properties of the product can negatively affect sales. To minimize the risk of error, it is better to automate filling out product cards on OpenCart using modules.
CSV Import Pro. Paid module with flexible settings. Export, import and updates of assortment, information on the customer base, orders. Automatic price recalculation, support for multiple languages and multi-stores.
Import/export xls. A free module with an extremely simple and convenient admin panel. Feature: completely updates the assortment by loading new products from an Excel file. If you need to save old positions, you will need to do a preliminary unload.
Export/Import of large XLS files. Updated version of the previous module. Improvement: reduced load on the server. Information is processed in parts.
Module for importing xls, csv files. Paid module with flexible settings. Works with CSV and XLS files. You can select the fields you want to import. Create a category system and send items to one or several categories at once.
Working with price lists. Paid module for importing goods. Among the advantages: the ability to load goods from several price lists at once, automatic generation of markups, generation of a “Ready Price List” – a document with data on the entire range of goods, updating information on balances and prices.
Automatic processing of price lists. One of the most functional and convenient paid modules, which includes the ability to set separate settings for different suppliers (different price lists), search engine optimization options.
- Automatically selects the supplier with the most reasonable price for the same product.
- Can work with several stores at once.
- Analyzes the pricing policies of competitors and offers the optimal price.
- Automatically creates categories and adds attributes specified in price lists.
- Generates descriptions for products using a template.
- Loads and updates bonuses.
- Over 180 additional useful features.
Conclusion
A simple and convenient admin panel allows you to understand the administration of content on the site, even if you have never had to do this before. Open source and a large number of modifications, templates and modules open up almost limitless possibilities for implementing interactive capabilities, taking into account the specifics of the site.
What are the disadvantages of this platform? One of them is manual removal of page duplicates. That is, this cannot be done automatically. To ensure that your site’s parameters match those of all search engines for effective indexing, additional SEO plugins may be required.