Introduction
While you could order anything from a pencil to the furniture for an entire classroom from online stores, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be an important driver of the ecommerce industry and hence the inevitably rising importance of PHP Marketplaces or e-commerce marketplaces in general. Every business regardless of the industry and niche has been forced to set up an online presence and seek out their share of the ecommerce pie.
The challenge here is to ensure a quality experience from the initial contact and at every step of the process. This requires a solid foundation in the form of an ecommerce platform that is a perfect fit for your online business model and offers all the tools and options to ensure that the customers have a great experience. In this article, I will walk you through the five best PHP marketplace scripts and platforms which can help improve the user experience and streamline business processes. But first, let’s have a quick look at the basic definitions of scripts and platforms
PHP Scripts
PHP scripts are individual pieces of code written in PHP for a particular task. For instance, there is a script for setting up a login module or a script for setting up the checkout process at an ecommerce platform. These scripts fulfill a single purpose in the much larger context of the ecommerce platform. infrastructure.
PHP Platforms
A platform is a complete website built using PHP language (in real-world terms, a PHP framework such as Laravel and Symfony).
Five Best PHP Marketplace Scripts
- FleeCart
- Active eCommerce CMS
- Vanguard—Advanced PHP Login and User Management
- Classic Invoicer
- Shopping Cart
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FleeCart
If you are planning to build a PHP ecommerce website and do not know where to start, FleeCart is the answer. It has a powerful admin panel that allows you to manage products, categories, discount coupons, and more. It is a multi-function and multi-vendor PHP script. Features:
- Multiple themes
- Currency rate updates
- Guest checkout
- Sales analytics
Active eCommerce CMS
Active eCommerce has all the marketplace features that can be combined based on the needs of the ecommerce business. If you are looking for a marketplace that works perfectly, this should be your g-to PHP script. Features:
- Support for all popular payment gateways
- Dynamic wallet system
- Order tracking system
Vanguard—Advanced PHP Login and User Management
Vanguard is a PHP application built using the popular Laravel framework. This script offers secure login, authorization, authentication, and user management for any PHP website. To ensure compatibility and smooth performance, the script comes with several automated tests. Features:
- Fully documented JSON API
- Nearly 300 automated tests
Classic Invoicer
An ecommerce business is incomplete without a solid invoicing system. The Classic Invoicer is a customer management system that doubles as a powerful web-based invoicing system. It is built using Laravel 5 and jQuery and supports MySQL databases. Features:
- Create and send invoices directly to clients
- Track, report and manage sales and revenue
Shopping Cart
A simple yet powerful PHP script for integrating a feature-rich shopping cart with any online store. The script is open source and can be altered as per the requirements. Features:
- Add products
- View products
- Remove products (Individually and all products at once)
Five Best PHP Marketplace Platforms
- CraftCMS
- Magento
- WooCommerce
- Bagisto
- OpenCart
CraftCMS
CraftCMS is a powerful CMS with a ton of exciting features that keep the developers coming back for more. The CMS offers a user-friendly interface and you have the flexibility to change the backend as per your business requirements. CraftCMS is built to cater to online businesses and ecommerce development requirements. This versatile CMS offers a custom ecommerce development module called Craft Commerce that is flexible and highly customizable for all online ecommerce projects.
Magento
Magento is a popular ecommerce platform that offers a flexible dev environment, complete control over the UI, content, and functionality of the store frontend. Along with many amazing and powerful marketing tools, Magento offers SEO and catalog-management tools which makes it a premium choice of the online business operators. A number of business giants use Magento including Helly Hensen, Liverpool, Landrover, and Ford.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is not an eCommerce platform per se but a WordPress plugin that converts WordPress into a feature-rich ecommerce store. It is an open-source PHP marketplace plugin powered by WordPress. The dev community considers WooCommerce a complete platform because of the features and development possibilities. In fact, developers love WooCommerce for its integration with WordPress and very customizable features. The CMS industry has been ruled by WordPress for more than a decade now and WooCommerce capitalizes on that with a significant market share.
Bagisto
Bagisto is a free and open-source ecommerce platform built using Laravel. Users (dev and ecommerce store owners) love it because of the ease of building dynamic, flexible, and secure ecommerce stores. While it is a newcomer on the ecommerce platform block, Bagisto is making it into the big leagues because of the easy-to-use platform that simplifies setting up a multi-vendor marketplace. It has impressed the dev community and business owners globally and the number of users is growing rapidly.
OpenCart
OpenCart is a free and open-source PHP-based marketplace/ecommerce solution that allows businesses to tweak the platform as per their business requirements. It offers popular management features such as built-in SEO, products, orders and customer handling, tax rules, easy-to-implement coupon code functionality, and support for renowned payment gateways. You can choose from a wide range of extensions, modules, and themes available for scaling the store. OpenCart also offers prompt support and has a large and very supportive community.
Scalable Hosting for Marketplaces
Marketplaces tend to get over-burdened with the increase in vendors and influx of traffic. To make sure your marketplace is always running at optimal performance, you need a scalable and fast hosting. This is what Cloudways promises. You can host your above-mentioned PHP based marketplace projects with ease and expect exceptional performance. It allows you to install Custom PHP, Laravel, Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, and WordPress/WooCommerce and enables you to focus on expanding business. Cloudways PHP Hosting enables your marketplace to perform better and load faster with zero downtime. Cloudways offers 24/7/365 customer support. PHP marketplaces hosted on Cloudways get up to 300x better website performance.
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Conclusion
There are literally hundreds and thousands of scripts and platforms available in the market that are trying to compete to capture a huge market of eCommerce businesses and developers, offering dedicated or multi-vendor functionalities through dedicated and multi-vendor PHP Scripts and platforms. There will be platforms that are loved by thousands but simply won’t fit your business requirements and there will be many that are not so popular but surely covers your business requirements.
In short, make sure you do your homework before making the final decision of choosing a platform because a bad decision in selecting the platform or even script can result in the loss of multiple resources. I’ve covered the top five PHP marketplace scripts and platforms.
Let me know in the comments section below about your favorite and which one I should explore and cover in my next article.
What are PHP scripts used for?
PHP is known as the pioneer general-purpose scripting language that can be utilized to create interactive and dynamic websites. It was among the primary server-side languages that can easily be embedded into HTML, making it less demanding to include functionality to web pages without requiring to call outside records for information.
Umair Hussain Siddiqui
Umair Hussain is a Digital Marketer with a Computer Science background, and working at Cloudways - A Managed Cloud Hosting Platform. He is an internet savvy & loves to dig into search engine optimizations. In his free time, he likes to watch Sci-fi and mind-bending time travel movies & series. You can ping him at [email protected]