CRELoaded is one of the best “free” shopping cart software packages out there. All of them have limitations and irritations, but this system has fewer than most, and when you need a full featured shopping cart, it can usually do the job.

CRELoaded is built on the framework of OSCommerce – the biggest and most respected of the older Open Source Shopping Carts. CRE has been refined and simplified a little though, so it is easier to customize, and easier to maintain long term.

It is a flexible enough cart to handle stock/inventory tracking, multiple images per item, downloadable items, combinations of product types, it tracks customers and orders, and interfaces with a wide range of payment systems. It even has a simple affiliate program built in.

This is a software driven shopping cart. That means it installs into the hosting space – your website is made of software instead of regular pages. They LOOK like regular pages when people go to them though. This kind of shopping cart has a lot more function and flexibility than those that you create by pasting a buy link into a page.

We've researched a lot of carts. We knew that if we were going to offer these services, that we needed to find something that was sustainable – many carts are so hard to make security updates to that they become prohibitively expensive for businesses to operate long term. For a small business, that is a major consideration. This one isn't perfect – it isn't what we'd like it to be. But after researching over 50 carts, and installing and testing about 20 of them (the others didn't make it that far!), this is the one that rose to the surface as the best of the bunch.

If you'd like more details on which cart options are best for you, give a holler – we'd be glad to talk to you about what you need, and what is likely to do the job.