OpenCart Review

Pros

• Free to download
• Well-designed editor
• Highly customizable
• Numerous integrations

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Limited features built-in
• Limited customer support
• Expensive add-ons often necessary

What Is OpenCart?

OpenCart is free eCommerce software you can use to build, customize, and manage an online store. Is this open-source software a good eCommerce solution for your business? While there’s a lot to like about OpenCart, some important drawbacks could mean OpenCart isn’t a good choice for you. Let’s find out why!

The first thing to know is that the software is based on PHP (hypertext preprocessor), so any merchant considering OpenCart would benefit from a background in that programming language. Next, it’s important to understand that OpenCart follows a core+extensions model. That means that, out of the box, OpenCart is a fairly light platform that requires add-ons to perform higher-level functions. Fortunately, OpenCart has a large and diverse community of developers who consistently add to an already enormous pool of extensions.

If you’re thinking about using OpenCart for your online store, ask yourself if you will be comfortable setting up and maintaining a highly technical store largely on your own, because support is limited. You’ll also need to be prepared to purchase a good number of add-ons.

If you’re comfortable with both those aspects, keep reading for a full analysis of OpenCart.

OpenCart Pricing

OpenCart pricing can be somewhat deceiving. Yes, OpenCart is free to download and use — and that’s great! But you shouldn’t expect to operate your platform free of any charges.

For starters, OpenCart is not a hosted platform, so basic expenses will include web hosting, a domain name, and an SSL certificate. You should also budget a significant amount for extensions, thanks to OpenCart’s core+extensions model. Although you’ll need to pay for these add-ons, your site will be totally unique from every other site. However, that could make it more difficult for outside support to be helpful, so it’s best if you are able to work on the site that you built.

OpenCart’s open-source software can be a good choice for small and mid-size companies on one condition: You must have web experience. If you don’t have any relevant experience, you probably will want to hire someone who does. It’s up to users to do most of the problem solving, without much in the way of customer support. If you want to give OpenCart a go without downloading anything, you can view two free demos that show the storefront and the admin.

OpenCart Features

OpenCart does not come with an overwhelming feature set by any means. You’ll have just enough to get you off the ground. The rest of the functionality necessary for running a site will have to come from applications, customization, and development. Here’s a summary of the features that come preloaded:

OpenCart Themes

Dozens of free themes are available from third-party design companies like Theme Forest and Template Monster. You can find the full collection on the OpenCart extensions store. Narrow your search by looking only at top-rated options or by what version of OpenCart software the theme works best with. Click on a theme to find out when it was last updated, how many times it’s been downloaded, how users rate it, and what they have to say. You can also access documentation for most themes or see a demo.

Here’s a sample of some themes you might choose from:

You can make small changes to your design by adding and rearranging modules in the design panel of your admin. To make larger changes to your site’s look and feel, you’ll have to dive into the code. If you don’t have the skills to make those changes yourself, you’ll have to hire someone to do it for you.

Types Of Payments Accepted With OpenCart

OpenCart accepts 53 payments methods out of the box. And you can add more than 1,000 additional gateways as integrations. These add-ons include crypto and country-specific options as well as familiar names like PayPal, Square, Authorize.net, and buy-now-pay-later options like Klarna, AfterPay, Mollie, and more.

Selling On Multiple Sites With OpenCart

Keep in mind, OpenCart is designed to allow users to take advantage of the shopping cart’s open-source software to customize their online stores any way they’d like. That said, if you’d like to incorporate extensive social media selling, you’ll largely need to add on that capability. OpenCart has a social sharing extension that allows sharing only of orders on customers’ Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts.

However, you’ll be able to use OpenCart to manage multiple stores. You can add additional stores to your initial store’s admin panel, without having to install OpenCart separately for each store.

Does OpenCart Offer Buy Buttons?

Buy buttons give customers the option to select an item to purchase and go directly to a checkout page to complete the purchase. OpenCart allows users to add buy buttons to their product pages. You can replace “add to cart” buttons with buy buttons or use both together.

Selling Internationally

Your admin will come with English as its default language and you will be able to list products with prices in British pounds, USD, and Euros. You can select additional languages as add-ons and input additional currencies using special codes. Currencies update automatically to stay true to their current rate.

OpenCart Marketing Features

You’ll find a good selection of marketing features out of the box. Here’s a summary of a few of these:

• Checkout: You can reduce abandoned carts by giving customers a guest checkout option. They also can choose to create an account that saves their shipping information. There’s a shipping calculator that integrates with Royal Mail, UPS, USPS, and more.
• Marketing: Product reviews and ratings let customers give feedback on your products. You can set up your site so that you moderate those comments, to eliminate spam. OpenCart also has modules that add functionality to your cart, including Bestsellers, Category, Featured, Specials, Information, and Google analytics.
• Reports & Analytics: View reports including sales, products viewed, and products purchased.

OpenCart Product Limits

OpenCart lets you list unlimited categories, subcategories, products, and brands or manufacturers. You can list digital products alongside physical products.

Inventory Management With OpenCart

OpenCart offers a special modification for inventory management. This allows you to enter purchase price information and filter results so you can see how much you earn from each sale. You can export data filtered by price, model, name, or status as a CSV file or open in your favorite spreadsheet program.

OpenCart Shipping Tools

You’ll need to visit the OpenCart extension store to add shipping tools to your store.

OpenCart SEO Tools

Pages are indexed by major search engines, and you can customize your product and category meta tags.

OpenCart Discounts & Coupons

Set coupons and discounts by a percentage or by flat rate.

Developer Tools

Because OpenCart is a free open-source platform, anyone can access OpenCart documentation. You’ll also find a supportive community to assist you.

In-Person Selling Tools

OpenCart offers its own POS system, allowing you to manage store inventory both online and off. You’ll need to purchase the POS extension (currently listed at $24.99 on the OpenCart extension store). Developed by the OpenCart community, the POS comes with documentation and includes 12 months of support.

Is OpenCart Easy To Use?

When you log in to the OpenCart admin, you’ll encounter this sample dashboard, which seems clean and orderly.

Overall, the OpenCart admin looks like most of the other software I’ve tested, and I can imagine navigating around it on a daily basis quite easily. As I always do, I went first to add a sample product.

I was disappointed to find that although product information is spread out over several tabs, which I prefer, it is not particularly well organized. It took me a few minutes of searching to find where I was supposed to list an item’s price. Information is also a bit more spread out than I’d like, which means more scrolling. Despite these minor irritations, I imagine you’d eventually get used to the layout of the pages.

Next, I tested the discount engine. You can create percentage or flat-rate-based coupons, which you can then apply to specific products or categories.

Screenshot of OpenCart webpage, captured 10/5/2020

Despite some surprises, as a whole I found OpenCart’s admin to be adequate. It isn’t my favorite admin panel, but it’s certainly on the better side of average. You can download OpenCart to try it out — it’s totally free, after all. Or, if you’d rather not go through the trouble, OpenCart provides a demo that lets you try out its storefront and a limited demo of its admin that lets you input various bits of information but won’t let you save any of the information or see it displayed in the storefront.

OpenCart Service & Support

As with most open-source software, OpenCart support is limited mostly to forums and documentation. Fortunately, OpenCart’s forums are very active. You can always find developers who are willing to answer questions if you’re unable to resolve your OpenCart challenges on your own.

OpenCart promotes a few third-party developers on their site, too. You can locate someone to help you, at a price, of course, by searching through the listings by country.

I chose to submit a web ticket with a general question about OpenCart. My response came three days later. Here are all the support options you can access for OpenCart:

• Phone: No telephone support is offered. However, you can try calling the OpenCart office, located in Hong Kong. Office hours are Monday-Friday from 9:30 AM to 2 PM local time, with an hour off for lunch.
• Email: Use a ZenDesk link to ask for help. 
• Contact Form: Fill out a form to send a message to OpenCart.
• Community Forum: Join the active OpenCart forum and seek the answers you need there.
• Video Tutorials: Developers post a host of videos on YouTube.
• Documentation: Access OpenCart documentation through the website.
• Bug Tracker: Use the GitHub bug tracker to find solutions to common problems.
• Find An Advisor:  You can find a list of OpenCart partners, willing to offer general assistance or in areas like development, hosting, and payment services. Narrow your search by finding premium and certified partners if you like.
• Books: The OpenCart resources tab includes a list of helpful books on various topics, available to download for free in most cases.
• Social Media: You’ll find OpenCart on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

OpenCart has also introduced dedicated support plans that are worth a look. You can choose between four options, starting at $99 for admin password reset assistance. A one-time store backup will cost you $160, and one-time bug fix service starts at $150. You can also subscribe for $120/month and receive dedicated support, if you want ongoing consultation on technical issues, upgrades, and installing extensions.

OpenCart Integrations & Add-Ons

Free integrations are available in abundance from third-party developers. You’ll find 13,000+ extensions for currency, language, payment processing, site building, and marketplaces. Many but not all of them are free. Search by categories, including languages, payment gateways, shipping methods, modules, reports, and more.

Look under Shipping Methods, for example, and you’ll find some familiar names, like ShipStation, UPS,  and DHL, as well as perhaps lesser-known but useful extensions that let you hone your store’s shipping processes. In this category, all the extensions are rated by users so you can see what you’re getting. I think it’s safe to say that OpenCart has whatever extension you need.

OpenCart Reviews

Comment boards generally indicate positive OpenCart feedback, overall. For example, on Capterra the software has earned a 4.3/5 star rating, with 139 reviews, and on G2 it’s rated 4.5/5 stars with 100 reviews. The negative comments posted tend to focus on the drawbacks already discussed in this OpenCart review. Here’s a summary of both the good and the bad comments.

Negative Reviews & Complaints

• Add-Ons Required: In order to really make OpenCart work for you, you’ll need to install a variety of add-ons. This is where OpenCart can get expensive, and complicated. Multiple add-ons may also make your platform more difficult to operate, which leads to the next complaint. Even when add-ons are available for free, users don’t like having to install them.
• Some Tech Knowledge Necessary: Add-ons are not necessarily compatible with each other. You’ll probably have to work through a few bugs yourself unless you’re willing to pay for expert help. Also, as far as I can tell, OpenCart does not offer any significant design editing tools. You’re on your own there as well.
• Limited Support: Your support options will be mostly self-help routes.
• Difficult To Upgrade: Customers say upgrades to new versions of the software are not completely bug-free. You may also need to reconfigure some elements of your shop to display correctly in the new update. Some users even say they wait to upgrade until the community of users has identified and fixed any issues.

Positive Reviews & Testimonials

As I’ve mentioned, most comments on OpenCart are fairly positive. Here’s what customers like most:

• Free: Free is a very good price. Some downloadable carts cost upwards of a thousand dollars and don’t offer a whole lot more.
• Open-Source: Open-source code lets developers build extensions and create customizations much more easily. And OpenCart is written in PHP, a widely used and familiar language.
• Ease Of Use: I’ve seen posts on either side of this. Some say that OpenCart is very easy to use, while others have more difficulty. I think this relates particularly to the “some tech knowledge required” qualification.

Final Verdict Of OpenCart

Generally, when merchants are looking for an open-source, free, downloadable shopping cart, I recommend Magento. And while I stand by that recommendation, OpenCart could be a good alternative for merchants for whom Magento just won’t work. That includes those looking for an easily customizable online store who don’t need endless scalability and the complications that can bring.

This cart’s largest limitation is its features-via-extensions model. Larger companies and companies that hope to grow to be large may find that handling and orchestrating all those integrations — and doing it all without personalized support — is more trouble than it’s worth.

And what if you don’t have enough technical expertise on your team to feel truly comfortable using an open-source software solution for your eCommerce needs? A software as a service (SaaS) solution like Shopify might be a better solution in that case. In fact, Shopify is one of our top shopping cart recommendations for eCommerce beginners. Or, if price is your top consideration, you may find a suitable software solution in our list of the best free eCommerce platforms.

On the other hand, if you have PHP coding experience and you don’t mind juggling handfuls of add-ons, you should give OpenCart a go. It might just be the answer to your online store needs.

OpenCart FAQs

Featured Free eCommerce Plan 🔥

Square Online	Start Trial Read our Review

Get a free website builder, online ordering, gift cards, in-store pick-up options, and dozens of other features for eCommerce and hybrid businesses. Free options available. Learn more from Square.

Featured Free eCommerce Plan 🔥

Square Online	Start Trial Read our Review

Get a free website builder, online ordering, gift cards, in-store pick-up options, and dozens of other features for eCommerce and hybrid businesses. Free options available. Learn more from Square.

Sources