There are PLENTY of open source e-commerce solutions out there. For example, WebStore, written by Gunther Birznieks and myself has been available as open source/freeware since 1995! There are hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses that use WebStore and all of the hacks that other clients have sent in to improve the base code. You can download it at http://www.extropia.com/products.html...... However, there are at least a dozen other stores available as well including Richie Carey's commerce.cgi, Ignacio Bustamante's WebMall, and Matt Wright's WebShop. Knowing all of these developers I could recommend any of them (though commerce.cgi is open source/not-freeware)....... Of course, this is only a small part of what e-commerce is. When I think of e-commerce I think more in terms of business to business transactions (store to American Express, or store to supplier or, store to store) rather than simply selling online. This is where we need some better open source products. We're working on it at Extropia. We're building business logic and order processing objects in Perl and then Java, but we won't have the new code for WebStore out until early next year. But I would be happy to see some other people fast track it.
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There are PLENTY of open source e-commerce solutions out there. For example, WebStore, written by Gunther Birznieks and myself has been available as open source/freeware since 1995! There are hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses that use WebStore and all of the hacks that other clients have sent in to improve the base code. You can download it at http://www.extropia.com/products.html ...... However, there are at least a dozen other stores available as well including Richie Carey's commerce.cgi, Ignacio Bustamante's WebMall, and Matt Wright's WebShop. Knowing all of these developers I could recommend any of them (though commerce.cgi is open source/not-freeware). ...... Of course, this is only a small part of what e-commerce is. When I think of e-commerce I think more in terms of business to business transactions (store to American Express, or store to supplier or, store to store) rather than simply selling online. This is where we need some better open source products. We're working on it at Extropia. We're building business logic and order processing objects in Perl and then Java, but we won't have the new code for WebStore out until early next year. But I would be happy to see some other people fast track it.