Should you use Opencart 3 for your ecommerce site?

Opencart has had some up’s and down’s through its development timeline, but there’s no arguing with its vast popularity for its modularity and customisabilty across the board. We’ve been using Opencart since 2014 and here’s why!

1. Open Source and Customisable: OpenCart 3 is open-source software, meaning it’s free to use and modify. This gives developers like us the flexibility to customise the platform according to the specific needs and requirements of any eCommerce site. Whether it’s tweaking the design, adding new features, or integrating with third-party services, opening the doors for functionality on the front, or back end of the site.
2. User-Friendly Interface: OpenCart 3 comes with a user-friendly admin interface that makes it easy for store owners and web masters to manage their online stores. From manually adding products and managing inventory to processing orders and handling customer inquiries, the admin panel provides intuitive tools and controls. This is something
3. Scalability: OpenCart 3 is capable of handling both small and large eCommerce stores, but we’d air on the side that it’s more suitable for smaller to medium-sized e-commerce sites. It’s designed to scale along with the growth of the business, accommodating increasing product catalogs, higher traffic volumes, and expanding operations. This scalability makes it suitable for businesses of various sizes and industries.
4. Extensive Extension Marketplace: Outside of bespoke development work OpenCart has a vast marketplace of extensions and themes available. These extensions allow store owners to add additional functionality to their sites without needing to develop everything from scratch. Whether it’s payment gateways, shipping methods, marketing tools, or custom analytical modules, there’s likely an extension available to meet the specific needs of the eCommerce site.
5. Community Support: Being an open-source platform, OpenCart has a large community of developers and users who actively contribute to its development and provide support to others. This means that if you encounter any issues or need assistance with customizations, you can often find help from the community forums, documentation, or third-party developers.
6. SEO-Friendly: Last, but by no means least, OpenCart is built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, offering features and tools to help improve the visibility of the online store in search engine results. This includes customizable URLs, meta tags, sitemaps, and other SEO-friendly features that can help drive organic traffic to the site.

The keener readers might be wondering why Opencart 3 is still important when Opencart 4 is out there for use, well it comes down to testing and community support. Opencart 4 has been available since mid-2022 but hasn’t been certified by its creator as officially ready for production use due to some missing functionality and the occasional bug. Once the version is stable, and gets the big tick from Opencart, we’ll start to see far more developers flock to the module market place and we’ll start seeing a lot more of Opencart 4. Until then, version 3.0.3.9 is still our go to.