Batavi open source e-commerce

Batavi is  free ecommerce software based on the open source osCommerce e-commerce engine. According to the developers, Batavi was formed by ICEshop in 2007, combining their 10 years experience in e-commerce services with knowhow from some of the the former osCommerce core team. They claim that

In fact, you could say that Batavi is the real osCommerce 3.0 (the version we were all waiting for but that never came).

Batavi certainly has the “blocky” appearance that is prevalent in osCommerce and its offshoots – some people like that, some don’t, but never mind if you don’t like it, Batavi has a fully flexible template system so you aren’t stuck with it. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many live shops to look at to get a feel of what can be achieved, but the ones that are linked to on tha Batavi website look OK, except that 3 of the 4 don’t seem to have SEO-friendly urls for the product pages. These days it really shouldn’t be an option  – you need all the help you can get to get traffic to your shop.

A look round the administration demo showed the software to be reasonably straightforward, although one thing did stick out – there is no “add new product” button. Hovering over the “Products” item in the Content menu brings up a flyout sub menu with several options, but it is not immediately obvious that you need to ignore the sub menu and click on  “Products”. At least there is a good wysiwyg editor for the product descriptions – developers of other ecommerce software please note – small business owners often want to know things like “how do I put a heading on that product in big red text?” Answering  “Ah – you need to know html to do that”  just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Features:

• Fully flexible template system including pages/boxes groups layout and page access limitation
• Full content management including menu’s, texts, mails, pages etc
• Robust architecture to process very large numbers of products, visitors, customers and orders
• Customer-/group specific pricing, payment or shipping modules
• Related products for cross- and upselling
• Unlimited product segmentation to present products
• Product-price rules for pricing large product volumes
• Fully automated integration with product content providers: ICEcat interface available
• Interface for multi warehouse and multi supplier/distributor (incl stock and purchase prices)
• Advanced batch import and export facilities

To be fair, Batavi is still a beta product at v0.9, even though there are a few live shops already using it. Batavi is a promising project, but unless you are happy to use a beta version software and accept that there are known bugs which are still being fixed, then for the time being for a production site it might be best to consider other free ecommerce software.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Free Ecommerce Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.