Shop Online systems help companies to sell their wares on the World Wide Web. In general, they serve as a complementary distribution platform for normal trading on the traditional shop or department store. There are now also increasingly online-only retailers who renounce completely on the branch sale, such as for example www.amazon.com. Even services such as travel are increasingly distributed over the Internet.
Because of the booming Internet market, there are a large variety of different store systems, to elaborate on the minimalist solution for individuals and up expensive options for large enterprises. Some web hosting and Internet providers such as 1 & 1, Lycos allow its customers access to free Web-applications with which they can in their private home small online shop integrated systems. Other companies have focused on such solutions and downright offer shop systems including hosting and maintenance at reasonable prices, for example, Agora Nova Store64 or web Creativ.
Even a pure software solution on CD-ROM, which makes the user hosting on your own server are available, for example, from vendors such as Mondo Pro Shop and shop. The advantage of such solutions is, of course, that one’s data on its own servers and databases managed in their own and do not rely on external service provider.
A particularly interesting solution for shop offers XT-commerce systems. It is open source software, which is to acquire, together with a 12-month support package at a very reasonable price. Because the code of this software is freely available, many developers have designed this program to their own needs, so many individual features are included which the user can be shared use as needed. In functionality and performance is the open source software programs for non-professional providers.Particularly the medium-sized commercial uses often fall back on this offer. Among the features of XT-commerce include an infinitely variable number of categories and products, different layouts, any currency settings and the ability to sell digital products for download. In addition, any number of photos will be published on the products, a means of volume discounts to certain customer groups is possible and also a separate FSK18-range can be set up.
In addition to XT-Commerce Magento is developed mainly to a very long and especially flexible CSS-based shopping system with a growing number of users. In contrast to XT-Commerce, Magento is also no support contract available under the GNU / GPL Open Source License.