ChronoPay, a leading open source ecommerce solution, has announced a sponsorship deal of osCommerce. There are numerous ecommerce solutions available to merchants but open source options can often be the lowest cost and most feature rich choice if you have some technical confidence.

Many web developers use osCommerce (or similar Zen Cart) to develop their clients ecommerce sites and the backing of the osCommerce project by ChronoPay merely underlines this growing trend. osCommerce offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allow online stores to be setup quickly and with relative ease. As it is an open source solution it is available for free. The solution currently powers more than 10,000 live shops around the world. The success of osCommerce has been accelerated by its large, active webmaster community, in which members share ideas and assist each other in development.

"ChronoPay strongly supports the osCommerce project," said Ido Schiferli, ChronoPay's European Marketing Manager. "The osCommerce shopping cart combines a rich feature set and powerful online shopping cart functionality, which will allow our store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimal effort and with no software costs, license fees, or limitations involved. When combined with the ChronoPay payment module for osCommerce, which is easy to integrate, our merchants are able to rapidly and economically launch their online shops".

It is interesting to note that ChronoPay sees the main objective of the partnership to be making it easier and more cost effective for businesses to trade online. Let's hope that trend continues across the payments industry.