If you plan to sell products on your site – either tangible goods or downloadable goods – you need a shopping cart. Deciding which cart to use is, in my opinion, as fun as pulling out your own hair, one clump at a time. Choosing the right cart is extremely hard, and frankly, it’s impossible to list all the choices out there. There are far too many; just run a search if you don’t believe me. It is also impossible for me to recommend one specific shopping cart since every situation tends to require specific features. Keeping all that in mind, I’ve only listed a few of my favorites that I think will probably work best for at least a majority of you.

My Top Picks: 3 Free, Open Source eCommerce Shopping Carts

OpenCart – Free, open source, great features

Zen Cart – Free, open source, great features

PrestaShop – Free, open source, great features

There’s nothing more for me to say about the choices I listed above. Each has a load of great features, but you’ll need to look at each one to see which might be the best fit for you.

Free Cart That Works Either Standalone or as WordPress Plugin

FatFreeCart is free and very basic, but also offers a pro version (E-junkie) for more features. FatFreeCart is pretty much just copy/paste (with a little editing to fill in the product info), and it can either be used as a standalone cart on just about any site, or you can download the WordPress plugin to easily add the cart to your WordPress blog. This one is great for the small site that doesn’t need a full-blown ecommerce solution. If you’re just looking to sell the occasional ebook, for instance, this qualifies as quick and easy.

WordPress eCommerce Shopping Cart Plugins or Themes

If you want a more full-featured cart for your WordPress blog than FatFreeCart gives you, here are my top picks for shopping cart WordPress plugins/themes.

eShop is a popular free plugin. It’s a good middle-of-the-road solution, in that it has decent features, but comes with less documentation and help than the other choices below.

YAK is another free WordPress plugin that comes with free basic documentation, but you’ll need to pay a little extra if you want the detailed installation and configuration instructions available in the YAK Handbook.

WP e-Commerce is free for its basic module but also offers premium extensions and themes that each cost extra. This is the WordPress cart that started the whole movement.

PhPurchase isn’t free, but at the current cost of $49, that’s affordable enough for me to think it worth including here, especially since it comes with a robust set of features.

Templatic eShop is one of my favorites. It’s not free either, but I got the $99 multiple site license, which lets me use it over and over again. I like it mainly because it does everything I need, plus it creates a few sample products when installed, so beginners don’t have to start from scratch. Just edit the sample products, and you’ll be ready to add new ones after that.

WP eStore is my other most favorite. At just $49.95 (the usual on-sale price), with licensing that allows you to use it on as many sites as you own, this is not only a great deal, but it’s also the one I find to be the most flexible. There is tons of good documentation for it, and it’s really very easy to implement. This is the one I recommend the most for downloadable goods (digital products), such as ebooks, templates, software, etc.

Other CMS-Specific Carts

Sorry, you’re out of luck if you’re hoping I’ll be listing carts for other non-WordPress CMS systems such as Drupal or Joomla. I’m not knowledgeable enough about those systems to make a list, so you’ll have to rely on someone else’s research for those.

Why The Short List?

I know many people will wonder why I didn’t include this or that cart in the list (I know some will be asking why I didn’t mention Magento and osCommerce, for instance). I left many carts off the list on purpose because I find them to be too complicated or too old to make my top picks list. That doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t absolutely perfect for some people; I’m sure they are. And of course, there are lots of great but costly choices tht I could have included as well. But I love free or extremely affordable options when available, so that’s what I chose to focus on.