There is a wide variety of shopping cart software on the ecommerce market. You can choose suitable solution from cheap shareware scripts to expensive custom applications. Furthermore there is also a wide range of free shopping cart software available. Can free software be good? Sure, there are a lot of examples of extremely good free software, for example, Linux, Gimp, Apache... Does it concern shopping cart software?

Typically free shopping cart software can be separated into three large groups:

1. primitive shopping carts written by students as a part of their educational process, enthusiasts who try their strength as web developers, etc.
2. shopping carts software offered as a part of a commercial service (webhosting, payment processing)
3. shopping cart projects maintained by communities of independent developers

Let's take a closer look. First group usually doesn't refer to practical use in real business, however it can be good for self education purposes when getting familiar with web technologies. Second group is not actually free, since you have to pay for the service this software is integrated with. It ties you to specific service provider so changing it might lead to some problems. Also our research shows that this kind of software suggests solely basic shopping abilities that can satisfy only very unassuming demands. In the third group there are some good examples of free shopping cart software, some of them even can compete with commercial shopping carts in the number of features. So why does one strive to pay for shopping cart if it's possible just to grab it for free?

Technical support: free software lacks professional support. Usually the only way to get technical support is to post your problem to the members forum and hope for the answer from other users. Some individuals also offer technical support as commercial services. So you may take the risk and find the person who will provide you with suitable quality of service.

Unbalanced functionality: as a rule free shopping cart projects cannot allocate sufficient resources for market researching and keep the product in line with the demands of modern ecommerce industry. The product development is based on code contributions instead, as a result the software is becoming the collections of features that still don't have the functionality vital for real business.

Weird system architecture:if software consists of parts of code contributed by a number of independent developers it can be successful only if all contributors follow the common development standards. Unfortunately, project management is not free shopping software projects forte. As time passes the software code is beginning to look like quilt. This adversely affects the stability and complicates customization of the product.

Security: unstable architecture is a fertile field for security issues. If there is no reasonable control over coding standards it will result in vulnerable code.

Documentation: services of professional technical writers are fairly expensive, so free project doesn't usually have proper budget for user manual, supporting documentation, tutorials, etc. Many just do not have any comprehensive documentation, sometimes documentation is written by programmers but as a rule they do not move farther than writing a vague Readme file.

So what is better - to use free shopping cart software or to spend some money for the commercial product? For most internet merchants commercial solutions are highly recommended since it is better to concentrate on making profit of their ecommence site than spending hours and hours fiddling with the software. Web developers may risk and work with free shopping cart software as they are usually more technically experienced and obviously are able to overcome most of the problems on their own. The choice depends on the ratio of money and time that is needed to run the shop and maintain it.

The X-Cart shopping software is an example of a good low-cost commercial shopping cart software that comes with complete source code, reference manual, support, a lot of features for users and administrators in the back-end administration, support for many payment gateways, platform independent, with multilingual support and wide user community.