Nowadays Internet is the fastest growing market in the world. Thus, there is nothing more reasonable than your desire to step into it and sell your products world wide via your eCommerce website.

Paid or open source - that is the question

Of course, before you start you should choose the platform of your online shop that will best fit your needs and budget. You can always hire a team of developers to build your very own shopping cart but in most cases this will be an expensive solution. In case you would like to save some money you may choose between the free open source applications and the paid products on the marked.

Here comes the question why should someone pay for a shopping cart when there are plenty of open source applications available to download and use free of charge. Because of the growing need of secure and reliable platforms the open source applications became more and more stable and functional. In addition, a large number of independent contributors developed many modules, components and addons to these applications in order to fit the needs of the larger number of people who want to start their online shop.

On the other hand, this forced the developers of paid applications to bring the technical support, functionality and stability of their products to a whole new level of quality. By trying to apply all the cutting edge features that you might need from your shopping cart and providing technical support for their clients many paid products managed to keep their place on the market.

What are the benefits of choosing a paid eCommerce application rather than an open source one?

Some of the most important advantages of the paid applications are the support and better security provided by their developers.

Technical and development support

Very often during the development process of your shop based on any application you may need some special modifications which may require a development work. Usually such services are not offered by the hosting companies which provide technical support only for hosting/hosting service related issues. In such cases you will need to contact a developer which most often may be expensive even if your request is a minor modification of a basic functionality. In such case it is a major advantage to have the developers of your paid shopping cart on your side. As their customer you are entitled to receive technical support for issues related to their application and sometimes this can be a great advantage.

Furthermore, in case a bug occurs in your application you can count that it will be resolved by the developers of your application. As for the open source applications, very often it can be a real pain to find a solution for certain bugs.

Security

It is not a rule, but in most cases it is true - the paid applications have better security. In most cases the security is one of the main advantages that the developers of the paid applications are trying to point out. Not only because a hacked paid application is the worst advertisement for the product but for the fact that when you rely your business on a piece of software the very fist thing that you expect is to have security.

Some disadvantages and additional expenses

Unfortunately, in most cases the application installation support for these applications is considered by the vendors as a paid service. Having in mind that you will need a hosting for your website add some extra expenses and this might be a problem if you are just starting your online business. Most of the companies provide hosting services for their products, however, it is rather expensive or very limited to the resources required for their very own application.

Solutions and additional features

You should consider the fact that your business will need not only the shopping card but email accounts, additional space or even a forum or a blog for additional SEO optimization of your website. Very often this cannot be achieved on the limited or expensive hosting services that paid shopping cart companies offer.

As every new beginning you may come to the struggle between the expensive high quality and the cheaper solution. In order to assist you in this matter for better results you may revise the articles below. There we will present some popular paid shopping cart applications and a specially designed hosting solution for them that will save you a certain amount of money on the same high quality.

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