As we all know Magento is a popular ecommerce solution now a day, but the main two disadvantages of Magento is(1) It is so slow (2) Magento is very hard to customize, These two points make people move from Magento to OpenCart.

OpenCart is very easy to customization. And it is also very fast. Another advantages of OpenCart are as follow.

1. Very Faster.
2. Much Easier.
3. Great Scalability
4. Very Affordable.
5. Safe and easy online payment.
6. Non-programmers like anyone can easily understand the code and make their own changes.
7. OpenCart has pretty templates.
8. More standard modules.
9. Shopping Cart Simplicity.
10. B2B and B2C in one eCommerce shop.
11. One Back Office in your language.
12. Affordable.

You can checkout its admin panel and front end Demo at

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=demonstration/demonstration

Contact us for opencart customization and integration.

* They have provided most awaited WYSIWUG editor with easy static block implementation for CMS and product pages.

* They also have now support “media” folder browsing to select existing file or upload images from admin panel itself rather then uploading images through FTP.

* From the first use of this latest version, I feel lots of speed improvement in website loading. Now they have started supporting indexing

There are other lots of changes they have made like

• Implemented 3D Secure credit card validation (Visa and Mastercard)
• Full reimplementation of PayPal modules, includes lot of new functionality and numerous bugfixes
• Full review of frontend themes, introduced design cross-package fallback and the base/default theme. Includes SEO and accessibility enhancements. Changes are oriented to dramatically reduce themes maintenance.
• Added ability to define arbitrary cache backends
• Optimized performance of sales reports, added new sales report types
• Added image/media uploader/browser, that can browse entire media folder
• Optimized performance of search indexer
• Made order processing workflow more informative and severe
• Reimplemented 404 and report pages, introduced 503 page, specifically for maintenance purposes
• Improved javascript files merging, added CSS files merging
• Added Widgets functionality, added several widgets out of the box
• Added Custom Variables functionality
• Added lot of new System Configuration options
• Improved order placement reliability
• Added WYSIWYG for CMS and Catalog
• Optimized cache initialization during startup
• Optimized export from grids in admin area
• Improved tax and discount totals calculation
• Replaced admin notification flash popup into a simple HTML overlay
• Implemented product and category URLs per store view
• Added ability to configure entry point using virtualhost environment configuration, rather than creating another physical entry point
• Optimized simple product view without custom options

Now we are very excited to start working on this latest version. we shortly add our latest portfolio website in magento 1.4 version.

Here is the list of functionality that magento have

1. Analytics and Reporting
   • Integrated with Google Analytics
   • Admin Dashboard for Report Overview
   • Sales Report
   • Tax Report
   • Best Viewed Products Report
   • Best Purchased Products Report
   • Low Stock Report
   • Coupon Usage Report
   • Total Sales Invoiced
   • Total Sales Refunded
   • Best Customers Report by Total and Number Orders
2. Catalog Browsing Reporting
   • Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products
   • Static Block tool to create category landing pages
   • Configurable search with auto-suggested terms
   • Recently viewed products
   • Product comparisons
   • Cross-sells, Up-sells and Related Items
   • Popular Search Terms Cloud
   • Filter by Product Tags
   • Product Reviews
   • Product listing in grid or list format
   • Breadcrumbs

3. Product Browsing
   • Multiple Images with Zoom
   • Product Reviews
   • Related Products
   • Stock Availability
   • Multi-Tier Pricing Up-sell
   • Product Option Selection
   • Grouped Products View
   • Add to Wish list
   • Send to a Friend with Email
4. Customer Accounts
   • Order status and history
   • Re-orders from account
   • Recently ordered items
   • Address Book with unlimited addresses
   • Wishlist with ability to add comments
   • Newsletter Subscription management
   • Account Dashboard
5. Customer Service
   • Contact Us form
   • Feature-rich Customer Accounts
   • Order History with Status Updates
   • Order Tracking from Account
   • Forgot Password Email from front-end and administration panel
   • Order and Account Update Emails
   • Customizable Order Emails
   • Create and Edit Orders from the Admin Panel
6. Catalog Management
   • Inventory Management with Backordered items
   • Batch Import and Export of catalog
   • Batch Updates to products in admin panel
   • Simple, Configurable (e.g. size, color, etc.) and Grouped Products
   • Tax Rates per location, customer group and Product type
   • Attribute Sets for quick product creation of different item types
   • Create Store-specific attributes on the fly
   • Search Results rewrites and redirects
   • Approve, Edit and Delete Product Tags
   • Approve, Edit and Delete Product Reviews
   • RSS feed for Low Inventory Alerts
7. Order Management
   • View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel.
   • Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credi memos per order
   • Print invoices and packing slips
   • Call Center (phone) order creation
   • Create re-orders for customers from administration panel.
   • Email Notifications of Orders
   • RSS feed of New Orders
8. Shipping
   • Integrated for real-time shipping rates from: – UPS, FedEx, USPS and DHL
   • Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
   • On-site order tracking from customer accounts
   • Multiple shipments per order
   • Ability to specify allowed destination countries per method
   • Flat rate shipping per order
   • Flat rate shipping per item
   • Free Shipping
   • Table rates for weight and destination
   • Table rates for product sub-totals and destination
   • Table rates for number of items and destination
9. Checkout
   • One-Page Checkout
   • SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
   • Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
   • Checkout without account/Guest Checkout
   • Shopping Cart with tax and shipping estimates
   • Checkout with account to use address book
   • Option to create account at beginning of checkout
   • Accept gift messages per order and per item
   • Saved Shopping Carts with configurable expiration time
10. Payment
    • Configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices
    • Integrated with multiple PayPal gateways
    • Integrated with Authorize.net
    • Integrated with Google Checkout (Level 2)
    • Saved Credit Card method for offline payments
    • Accept Checks/Money Orders
    • Accept Purchase Orders
    • Additional Payment Extensions Available through Magento Connect
11. Search Engine Optimization
    • 100% Search Engine Friendly
    • Google Site Map
    • URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
    • Meta-information for products and categories
    • Auto-generated Site Map for display on site
    • Auto-Generated Popular Search Terms Page
12. International Support
    • Multi-Lingual
    • Support for Multiple Currencies
    • Tax rate support
    • Localization

If you are going to developed your website for business purpose, for personal blog or for new publishing website you can use following open source.

WordPress
WordPress is the most popular web blogging software because it provides platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress API allows creating unlimited plugins to extend the impressive standard functionality even more. WordPress is blessed with an active community, which is the heart of open source software. It comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. Check out our wordpress customization service for more details.

Joomla
Joomla is an effectual open source content management system which empowers you to build Website and online application. Joomla is an open source CMS that is freely available to everyone. Joomla affords you an opportunity to develop your site in short period of time using set of external joomla element and joomla module. By hiring a joomla developer for joomla theme customization, you can change website look as per your need. Multiple joomla templates are available for add and can change it with skilled joomla templates.

Drupal
Drupal CMS is an open-source web development application and content management system for building dynamic websites offering a broad range of features. Many website design company relies on drupal content management system. Drupal CMS based website help to increase productivity, improve operational efficiency and reduce risk.

If you are going to developed your website for ecommerce shopping cart solution and for online store, You can use following open source.

Magento
Magento is a robust E-commerce software application design to be simple to customize. It is an open-source e-commerce platform that provides merchants with a sophisticated software platform to manage their online sales. Using Magento one can never feel trapped in eCommerce Solution. One of the most power full feature of magento is it contain ability to manage multiple websites and stores from one back end. It allows store owners to manage stores on different URLs, It has ability to easily expand into additional languages makes Magento scalable as your business grows out of your home market. You can easily turned your ecommerce store to work as per your need by hiring magento programmer

osCommerce
osCommerce is an Open Source ecommerce solution and PHP based Online Shopping Cart Software, distributed under GNU General Public License. It provides wide range of features that allows online stores to be setup properly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License.Now a day osCommerce ecommerce solution used by many website design company.

Zen Cart
Zen Cart is an open source online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a mysql database and HTML components. Support is provided for several languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License. Zen Cart provide truly professional ecommerce store management platform. Zen Cart contains all essential tools required to build a successful online store.