An Open Source shopping cart setup for your e-commerce needs? You better believe it! Check it out for yourself:

What’s the best way to use the Web to sell products? A good open source option is OSCommerce, a shopping cart package that uses Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) software. Because it’s open source, companies that use it can customize it themselves to better meet their needs.

I spoke to a variety of companies that use OSCommerce. They sell everything from girls’ socks to embedded software, and their business models run from mom-and-pop through full-blown manufacturing/distribution operations. In general, they had good things to say about the software. They noted that OSCommerce has been around since 2000 and has a large user community and a huge collection of contributions — packaged sets of code modifications or documentation — which is both a blessing and a curse. Many of them have made changes and additions to the code, which they then contributed back to the project. Some other positives that they pointed out: [Read the rest]