CRE Loaded PCI CE - Free Shopping Cart Review
CRE Loaded PCI CE was an open source off shoot project of the osCommerce free shopping cart engine, taking many elements and improving upon them. Thus creating a more robust and scalable solution that was adopted by many online store owners. The CE in CRE Loaded PCI CE means that this is a community-supported shopping cart solution, and therefore any support and help you receive is community driven. The target audience of the CRE Loaded PCI CE free cart software are small businesses, often which are ran out of the owner's home. With CRE Loaded PCI CE, you can easily add transactional capabilities to an existing website.
There are a number of feature and tools that come with CRE Loaded PCI CE, including being compliant with PCI DSS Payment Application Data Security Standards (PA-DSS) version 1.2. You can also manage and organize your inventory to ensure that you can ship the orders when people make purchases at your online store. The current release of CRE Loaded PCI CE is the 6.41 free shopping cart, which has features like the ability to use a number of Paypal options, Google Base feeds, and a One-Page checkout process. Overall this free cart has taken osCommerce to the next level, and is constantly expanding and improving their offerings with the open source community.
CRE Loaded - Requirements for Use
CRE Loaded is not like other free shopping cart software, which you can generally install with one click of a button through your hosting provider. Instead, you have to make sure your server is configured for the CRE Loaded software and install it yourself. You must find a server that runs on the Linux operating system, can handle PHP 5.2, a MYSQL database (version 5.0.12 or greater), and has a secure socket layer certificate (SSL). There is extensive help documentation available on the CRE Loaded website to guide you through the setup process, but just like osCommerce, a knowledge of PHP will be extremely helpful when setting up CRE Loaded. This free PHP shopping cart solution can be customized easily if you know PHP, but without an extensive knowledge of PHP, it's best to hire a developer to customize this cart to your needs.
In addition to the CRE Loaded PCI CE free cart software, there are also two paid versions which are very cost effective. They offer the CRE Loaded PCI Pro Shopping Cart as well as a business focused option, PCI B2B Shopping Cart. The pricing is a one time fee of $125 or $297.50 respectively. The paid versions provide merchants with a much more robust feature set, but try out CRE Loaded PCI CE for free so you can get test drive the product.
