OpenCart is a free, open source shopping cart written in PHP and MySQL. The admin is uncluttered, the front end works without a designer, and the licence costs nothing, which makes it one of the cheaper ways to start selling online. We host a large number of OpenCart stores alongside the CubeCart, WooCommerce and Magento stores on the same servers.
It is quick to get running. A standard install gives you a working catalogue, checkout and order management in an afternoon, and most shop owners find their way around the admin without training.
Multi-store is built in. One OpenCart installation can run several storefronts, each with its own domain, theme, products and prices, sharing a single admin and a single set of orders. Very few carts include that without an extension, and it is the main reason to choose OpenCart over the alternatives.
There is a large extension marketplace. Payment gateways, shipping methods, themes and functional add-ons, both free and commercial.
You own it. The software is free, the data sits in your own database on your own hosting, and there is no monthly platform fee and no percentage of your sales.
Extension compatibility is the practical risk. OpenCart extensions change core behaviour through OCMOD, which applies modifications to core files rather than running code at defined hook points. Two extensions that alter the same file can conflict, and an extension written for one minor release may not work on the next. Keep the extension list short, buy from developers who are still maintaining their work, and test every upgrade on a copy before touching the live shop.
Major version upgrades are a project, not an installer run. Moving between 2.x, 3.x and 4.x involves theme and extension work. Budget for it when you choose a theme and extensions, because the cost of that work is decided by how many of them you are carrying.
Ask the age of anything you buy. The question to put to any extension or theme developer is when it was last updated and which OpenCart versions they currently support. An unmaintained extension is what eventually stops you upgrading the core.
OpenCart is database heavy in the way every shopping cart is. Every category page, filter and search is query work, so the difference between a fast shop and a slow one is usually the server rather than the software.
Hosting plans are normally compared on disk space and bandwidth, which are the two things that matter least, because almost nobody runs out of either. What decides whether a store feels quick is how much CPU and memory are genuinely free when your customer arrives, and that depends on how many accounts the host has put on the server. Nobody advertises that number. We do not oversell: servers are loaded to a level that leaves headroom, and our e-commerce plans run only on our better servers, tuned for MySQL throughput rather than for fitting in as many accounts as possible.
Four things account for most slow OpenCart stores, and all four are fixable:
If your store is slow and you are not sure which of those it is, ask before buying a bigger plan. Support here is answered by administrators who have access to the server, so they can read the error log and the raw access log and see what is actually happening rather than infer it from the symptoms. Fairly often the answer costs nothing, and we will say so.
Our shared hosting plans include cPanel, free SSL certificates issued and renewed automatically, your choice of PHP version per account so you can match what your OpenCart release and its extensions need, MySQL databases and phpMyAdmin, daily backups you can restore yourself, and email on your own domain with SPF and DKIM configured correctly. The choice of PHP version matters more on OpenCart than on most applications, because an older release and an older commercial extension can both pin you to a version the rest of the server has moved past.
An OpenCart store needs at least one MySQL database, so the entry level plan, which includes none, is not the one to pick. Beyond that, the right plan depends on your catalogue size and traffic rather than on disk space. Tell us roughly how many products you sell and how busy the store is and we will tell you which plan fits. Upgrading later involves no downtime and no penalty, and if you outgrow shared hosting entirely the next step is a VPS or a dedicated server.
Your checkout requires an SSL certificate, and an expired one closes the store until somebody notices. Ours are issued and renewed automatically, so there is no yearly renewal to remember.
Migration from your current host is free and we do it regularly, including from hosts who make it awkward. We copy the store across and get it working on our servers, you test it properly on a temporary address, and DNS changes only when you are satisfied. The old store stays live throughout, so there is no window where your shop is missing. If you have email on the domain we move that as part of the same job, because email is where badly planned migrations usually go wrong.
The fault we most often find on a store that has just moved to us is email: order confirmations landing in customers’ spam folders because SPF and DKIM were never set up on the old host. That produces support tickets, chargebacks and refund requests, and it is fixed as part of the migration.
We write and sell our own extensions and skins for CubeCart, not for OpenCart. If you need custom OpenCart functionality, the extension’s own developer is who you will deal with for the code itself. From our side we can read the server logs and tell you which extension is producing a fault, so you approach the right developer with evidence.
OpenCart is the right answer if multi-store matters to you, or if you want a working shop quickly at the lowest possible software cost. CubeCart hosting is where we have specialised since 2007, and a CubeCart store gets full CubeCart software support included with the hosting, our own plugins and skins, and upgrades applied for you on a managed plan. WooCommerce is the obvious choice if you already publish content in WordPress and want the shop in the same place. Magento is built for complex catalogues, multiple currencies and trade pricing, and is unnecessary for anything simpler.
We host all four. Tell us what you are selling, roughly how many products, and where your customers are, and we will give you a straight answer.
OpenCart publish their own demo store and documentation, and their community forum carries answers to most common questions. Try the demo before you commit to a platform: the admin is the part you will spend your working day in.