Which standalone shopping cart solution should I use for my online store?

It’s a tough question to answer since there are so many solutions out there. (Just so we’re on the same page, what I’m talking about here is self-hosted shopping cart software that you download and install on your own web server.)

The obsessive geek in me figured that there has to be some objective way of comparing them all. So I thought I’d dig around a little to see what insights I could uncover.

The first thing to find out was the quality of each solution, which should be linked to how popular it is. I measured this by running through the list of solutions with Alexa. I also ran the list through Google Trends to get a second opinion. And interestingly, the two sets of rankings were very similar.

Besides popularity, I also wanted to find out how much online interest there was in each solution. To do this, I looked to Delicious to see how many people bookmarked the solutions.

This legwork resulted in three tables. Each shows only the top 10 results in each area.

The three different approaches having surprisingly similar results, especially in the top few. So what can we learn from these rankings?

Magento is king of the custom carts - It is top, by far, according to all three sources. Enough said.

Prestashop and osCommerce comes next - These two solutions are consistently in the 2nd or 3rd positions in each area. Their results are close and I’d find it pretty hard to choose one over the other.

Google Trends has a nice graph to drive home the rankings.

So I now have my answer. If asked again, my reply will roughly be -

Magento Magento Magento. If that doesn’t meet your needs, the next in line are osCommerce and Prestashop.

There you have it. Recommendations based on some objective comparison between solutions, rather than your cousin’s husband’s colleague’s testimony. Of course this is just a quick and dirty analysis, but I think they’re good enough to serve as a starting point.