Our recommendation for the best shopping cart software for most people is Shopify because it offers the most seamless service. Try Shopify free for three days, no credit card is required.
After reviewing dozens of shopping cart software on the market, we narrowed it down to the top six best options. Whether you need a higher security checkout system or want to give your customers the best possible shopping experience, shopping cart software can help transform your entire checkout process.
The Top 6 Best Shopping Cart Software
- Shopify — Best for one-click checkout
- Ecwid — Best for high security
- Shift4Shop — Best for customizable checkout
- Shopaccino — Best for rewarding customers
- OpenCart — Best free shopping cart software
- X-Cart — Best for high-volume sales
Match Your Scenario to the Right Shopping Cart Software Solution
Sometimes it can be difficult to choose the right shopping cart software solution that will fit your brand’s needs. To alleviate the stress of deciding, we’ve put together five of the most common scenarios that might lead you to invest in shopping cart software.
- You need a seamless checkout experience
- You need a diverse range of payment gateways
- You need more extensive shopping cart tools
- You need to manage a high volume of payments
- You need strong security features
You Need a Seamless Checkout Experience
Best Option: Shopify
Instead of sending your customers to different payment portals every time they make a purchase or having a tedious, multi-page checkout with unnecessary forms, Shopify offers the most seamless checkout experience with its one-click checkout system. Shopify lets your customers shop now and pay later, ensuring you can make sales four times faster.
Another great choice: Shift4Shop
While Shift4Shop allows you to add multi-page checkouts, your customers can still utilize its one-page checkout system for fast processing. Your customers can also edit and save carts seamlessly, which is perfect for customers who want to purchase at a later date.
You can find shopping cart software with a more seamless checkout experience if you look for:
- Customization capabilities: is your chosen software customizable in any way? Can your customers easily add or remove products from their cart?
- Mobile checkout: can your chosen software allow customers to pay from their mobile devices?
- Abandoned cart: reliable software will offer an abandoned cart feature that follows up with your customers to ensure you don’t lose potential sales.
- Limited pop-up messages: successful software won’t overwhelm your customers with an abundance of pop-up messages.
You Need a Diverse Range of Payment Gateways
Best Option: OpenCart
Sometimes PayPal isn’t enough for every customer, and your checkout system should have a diverse range of payment gateways, ensuring you don’t lose any potential sales. OpenCart has the most extensive range of payment gateways on offer. In fact, OpenCart has more than nine pages of payment gateway and shipping options, with free and commercial preferences.
Another great choice: Shopify
Shopify is an excellent alternative for payment gateway options because it makes it a little easier to choose from. While it doesn’t have as vast a range as OpenCart, it still offers the most popular payment gateways, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
If you are looking for a diverse range of payment gateways, try to find software that offers:
- Free and minimal-fee options: you should look for software that offers at least one or two free payment gateways and ensure the options you choose to integrate into your system have minimal fees for your customers.
- Payment search function: does your checkout system offer a payment search function? If you have a wide variety of options, it’s easier for your customers to search through a list instead of manually scrolling.
- Multi-currency options: does your software offer payment gateways in multiple currencies?
You Need More Extensive Shopping Cart Tools
Best Option: Shoppacino
You don’t have to settle for shopping cart software that offers the bare minimum. Many software on the market offers extensive built-in tools and additional integrations to help you enhance the software. Shoppacino is one of the best options for extensive shopping cart tools because it comes packed with multiple features in its checkout system alone.
For example, not only can you benefit from a multi-currency checkout system, but there are checkout banners, single-click coupons and gift packing options, OTP login, and a persistent cart to keep track of unpurchased items.
Another great choice: X-Cart
X-Cart is another excellent choice for extensive shopping cart tools because it specializes in servicing enterprise-level stores. With this in mind, you can find a complete ecommerce omnichannel suite with a marketing hub and features for global expansion.
If you need extensive shopping cart tools, be sure to consider the following:
- Automation: do the more advanced features offer automated capabilities to make life easier for you?
- Marketplace capabilities: does your chosen software have a marketplace? How diverse are its applications?
- Customization: more advanced software will offer a customizable experience to ensure you have complete control and get your money’s worth.
You Need to Manage a High Volume of Payments
Best Option: X-Cart
X-Cart offers integrated analytics tools with additional sales and marketing features to help you manage a high volume of payments for enterprise-level stores. These specific features are crucial and ensure your system doesn’t become overwhelmed with transactions. X-Cart’s analytics give you an insight into your customer’s actions to improve their engagement and increase sales over time.
Another great choice: Shopify
With more than $79.5 billion in sales, Shopify also has the tools you need to manage a high volume of payments. Shopify Checkout is optimized for mobile, so every transaction from both mobile and desktop is accounted for. You can tailor Shopify insights to both devices, allowing you to manage every payment and alter your marketing strategy to ensure increased sales.
If you are looking for shopping cart software that supports a high volume of payments, pay attention to:
- Analytics: does your chosen software offer an analytics feature to help you understand where your transactions are coming from and how to manage them?
- Credit card information: does your chosen software let your customers save their credit card information to make future purchases easier?
- Recurring charges: can you set up recurring payments on products or services?
You Need Strong Security Features
Best Option: Ecwid
Ensuring your online store has the highest security possible is integral to running a reliable and trusted store. Not every ecommerce platform offers a high level of protection, which is where Ecwid comes in as the best option for its strong security features that will protect your store and your customer’s confidential information.
Ecwid has the best security measures for its price point, including two-factor authentication, secure hosting, and HTTPS connection, ensuring your store is always secure.
Another great choice: X-Cart
Technically, X-Cart has more advanced security features, but at a $199 price point, it’s not always affordable for everyone. X-Cart offers multi-layered security features, including anti-fraud protection, an address verification system, and anti-bot protection.
If you are looking for shopping cart software with stronger security features, pay attention to:
- PCI DSS certification: is your shopping cart software PCI DSS certified? This certification is the highest international standard for secure data exchange.
- Secure hosting: where does your chosen software host, and how secure is it? Is it shared, VPS, dedicated, or cloud hosting?
- Backups: utilizing a platform that has a reliable backup system is the key to running a successful online store, so you don’t lose important data.
- Technical support: if you need help with any security breaches, your chosen support should offer 24/7 technical support.
Shopping Cart Software Company Reviews
Now that we’ve covered the top five most common scenarios that may lead you to invest in shopping cart software in the first place, it’s time to take a look at six of the best shopping cart software on the market today. Whether you need software for stronger security or more customizable functions, we’re confident you’ll find the perfect match from the list below.
Shopify – Best for One-Click Checkout
Powering more than 1 billion orders, Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for a smooth, one-click checkout experience. Shopify Checkout is reliable, scalable, and fast—ensuring you maximize conversion and increase sales.
Shopify offers a one-click checkout experience with Shop Pay, an integrated online checkout system offering the highest conversion rate. You can utilize Shop Pay on any device and install it in any online store, the Shop app, and now on Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
Increase your average order value with Shop Pay Installments, a fully integrated solution that allows your customers to buy now and pay later on biweekly or monthly payments. You can also encourage your customers to utilize the Shop app, allowing them to track their orders seamlessly.
What Makes Shopify Great
Shopify is a fully integrated ecommerce platform, meaning you can build your online store, market your business, and manage everything from one intuitive interface. With Shopify, you can:
- Add ecommerce functionalities to any blog or website
- Sell in-person with its point-of-sale system
- Create a custom domain
- Embed customizable shopping cart buttons anywhere
Shopify has three pricing tiers that have online store capabilities, sales channels, point of sale, and 24/7 email and live chat support. Shopify’s plans start at $39 per month and scale up to $399 per month with the most advanced features. For businesses that find themselves in the middle ground, you can expect to pay $105 per month for more professional reporting and staff accounts.
Ecwid – Best for High Security
Ecwid has some of the best security on the market for its price point, especially with its free forever plan. Ecwid’s checkout system is extremely secure, as all its stores run on an HTTPS connection.
One of the main benefits of using Ecwid is that it doesn’t collect, store, or process any credit card information. Instead, Ecwid supports several popular payment gateways that handle all of this information securely. In fact, Ecwid’s platform is PCI DSS certified, meaning every data exchange and transaction is to the highest standard of security.
Ecwid stores all your products, customer data, and general information together. Ecwid runs regular breach scans and protects your information with software updates and free backups. Ecwid currently stores all of its data on Amazon Web Services—one of the most secure and reliable hosting solutions.
The only downfall of Ecwid is that it doesn’t offer any support for its free plan. You have to pay $14.08 per month, and that’s only for chat support.
What Makes Ecwid Great
Ecwid prides itself on allowing its users to sell anywhere online. With seamless sales channel management, you can sell online, through social networks, mobile, or in person. You can benefit from a bunch of nifty features, including:
- Point of sale system
- Global advertising tools
- Dynamic emails
- Marketplaces to sell on Amazon, eBay, and Etsy
Not only does Ecwid have nifty features that you can scale with the size of your business, but you can also do so affordably. With a free forever plan, you can get started immediately, but its real value resides in its Venture plan, which is only $14.08 per month for automated tax calculations, discount coupons, inventory management, and advanced SEO tools.
Shift4Shop – Best for Customizable Checkout
Shift4Shop has the best customization features for its checkout system. You can create a unique customer experience and even let your customers make changes on their behalf for added convenience. Shift4Shop’s checkout system is bug-free and optimized with the industry’s best shopping cart tools that will transform the way your customers shop online.
When your customers click the Add to Cart button, you can decide the exact next steps they will take. Shift4Shop lets you create a unique checkout process by either sending your customer to a View Cart page, taking them directly to checkout, or letting them add the item to their cart without redirecting them to another page. Shift4Shop also utilizes a feature known as QuickCart, which displays a pop-up summary of your customer’s cart.
Your customers will have complete freedom with Shift4Shop, as they can view, edit, and save their carts through a drop-down menu. Customers can also choose to save their cart and make a purchase later, with all the information being saved and secured in Shift4Shop’s system. Speaking of saving and security, Shift4Shop also allows your customers to create an account or continue to the guest checkout, serving both preferences.
A downside to Shift4Shop is that its shopping cart software isn’t built-in into the platform, meaning you will have to install the software separately, which can sometimes be time-consuming.
What Makes Shift4Shop Great
Shift4Shop has versatile shipping setup options that let you display real-time shipping rates to your customers to prevent surprise charges. You can connect your store to several carriers, including USPS, Canada Post, UPS, and FedEx.
Shift4Shop also offers reliable and scalable ecommerce hosting, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, alongside a few other features, such as:
- Monthly transparent updates
- 256Bit SSL certificate
- FTP access to files
- Daily backups
- Custom domain name
Shift4Shop has pricing plans that scale to the size of your business. You can spend anywhere between $29 to $229 per month, depending on how much automation you need.
Shopaccino – Best for Rewarding Customers
If you are looking for shopping cart software that turns your visitors into customers and encourages them to sign up, shop, and stay, Shopaccino can help you. With a fully integrated rewards system, you can automatically sync it to any website or application, even if you have your own branded mobile app.
Shopaccino allows you to reward your customers at various stages, no matter where they are in their buying journey. You can reward customers for signing up, subscribing to your newsletter, shopping, and giving a product review.
Not only that, but you can offer exclusive reward schemes to loyal customers, manually send rewards to a customer’s account, and even offer reward points on special occasions or events, such as birthdays or anniversaries.
The one downside to Shopaccino is that its customer support isn’t as adequate as it could be. Users only have the option to submit a support ticket or read help documentation, which isn’t as extensive as most other companies’ support.
What Makes Shopaccino Great
As an all-in-one ecommerce software for small to medium-sized businesses, Shopaccino lets you do anything, from creating your online store and accepting payments to generating invoices and analyzing reports.
Shopaccino takes marketing and customer engagement to the next level with SEO-friendly tools, advanced campaign tracking, and a coupon code generator. Shopaccino gives you the freedom to use your own payment gateways and shipping agencies, with a diverse list of options to choose from.
Shopaccino comes with an abundance of intuitive features, including:
- Completely customizable design and store set-up
- Product catalogs
- B2B ecommerce
- Multi-currency checkout
- Persistent cart
- Order management
Shopaccino has four pricing plans, ranging from $200 to $1,000 per year. However, its most popular and best-value plan is its Professional tier, which starts at $600 per year. You get 5,000 products, 5GB of file storage, and access for five staff members.
OpenCart – Best Free Shopping Cart Software
Most shopping cart software comes with a price tag, but not OpenCart. In fact, OpenCart is completely free and is an open-source ecommerce platform for you to create, scale, and run your business with ease.
As a free platform, there is no limit to what you can do with OpenCart. You get access to unlimited categories and products, so you don’t have to worry about the numbers. OpenCart gives you complete freedom to modify, share, and edit the platform to suit your business needs perfectly.
With its checkout system, OpenCart offers the most extensive range of payment gateways and shipping options. You can choose from commercial or free payment gateways, including PayPal, Skrill, Authorize.Net, BluePay, and Klarna. You can take your chosen payment gateway, create recurring payments for your customers, and pair this with powerful sales reports to determine who your regular customers are.
The only downfall to OpenCart is that you have to pay for dedicated support. And while that is the only fee on the entire platform, it’s not great that users have to pay between $99 to $150 for support, based on what they need help with. However, it’s not all bad, because OpenCart has a very extensive community forum with more than 110,000 members. You can find a lot of the help you need there.
What Makes OpenCart Great
Not only is OpenCart free and offers everything in an unlimited capacity, but you can also benefit from additional features in areas such as administration, mobile, and SEO. Here’s a list of some features you can expect from OpenCart:
- Administrator dashboard
- User management panel
- Multi-store admin
- Multi-currency and multi-lingual functions
- SEO extensions
- Mobile compatibility
- Guest and registered user checkout
Another unique benefit of OpenCart is that developers can sell their modules and themes on its marketplace. OpenCart utilizes the MVC-L architecture pattern for all its third-party applications, which is one of the most secure and reliable software on the market today.
X-Cart – Best for High-Volume Sales
Trusted by 38,000 enterprise-level companies, X-Cart can help you stand out from your competitors through advanced and extensive shopping cart software. X-Cart has some of the most effective features to improve your customer’s buying journey.
With 120 payment processing providers, you can expand your online store to reach customers internationally without the hassle of experiencing any currency issues. You can also choose from one-step or multi-step checkout options, making the buying process much easier and more user-friendly.
For enterprise-level stores that experience high-volume sales, X-Cart is the most efficient platform because of its powerful email marketing with abandoned cart emails, sales and marketing features such as loyalty programs and exit offers, and PCI DSS-approved subscriptions.
Unfortunately, one of the downsides of X-Cart is that its enterprise-level features are only accessible from its most expensive plan, which is currently $499 per month.
What Makes X-Cart Great
X-Cart is one of the most advanced shopping cart software on the market today. With a fully integrated enterprise platform, you can transform the way you interact with customers with additional features, such as:
- Customer authentication
- Customer data protection
- Exclusive hosting server
- Fraud prevention
- Automation capabilities
- Ecommerce omnichannel
X-Cart offers three pricing plans that scale to the size of your business and depends on what industry you service. X-Cart’s Auotomotive plan is the most expensive, starting at $499 per month, but has the best value due to its fully integrated enterprise platform.
The Top Shopping Cart Software in Summary
Shopify and Shopaccino are our top two recommendations for the best shopping cart software.
Shopify is the perfect ecommerce platform that offers a seamless, one-click checkout experience because of Shop Pay, which you can utilize on any device. Shopaccino is excellent for rewarding your customers through its integrated loyalty program.
On the other hand, Ecwid, Shift4Shop, OpenCart, and X-Cart are all decent alternatives if you need software that offers higher security checkouts, customizable and enterprise-level functionalities, or software that’s simply free.