OpenCart was originally developed in 1998 by Christopher G. Mann for Walnut Creek CDROM and later The FreeBSD Mall.The first public release was on the May 11, 1999. Developed in Perl, the project saw little activity, and progress stalled in 2000, with Mann posting a message on April 11 stating "other commitments are keeping me from OpenCart development".

The domain expired in February 2005 before being revived by Daniel Kerr, a UK-based developer, who used it as the basis for his own e-commerce software, written in PHP. The first stable release was version 1.1.1, released onto Google Code on 10 February 2009.

In September 2014, Kerr claimed that OpenCart was the number one e-commerce software supplier in China while in August 2015 it was recorded as responsible for 6.42% of the global e-commerce volumes recorded by builtwith.com, behind WooCommerce and Magento and ahead of OSCommerce, ZenCart and Shopify.

We have this shopping cart running in a few sites right now, including US Fireworks. Here are just a few of the features in the current release:

Provides a complete "drop in" replacement for the PayPal shopping cart, including parameters. All you need to do is change www.paypal.com to your own URL and your code will continue to work using Authorize.Net (a real merchant gateway).Provides a credit card interface to Authorize.Net.

No more PayPal to deal with!Written entirely in Perl -- can run on any platform with DBI, MySQL, and a few common Perl modules.Provides full encryption of session cookies.Built in code to prevent cross-site scripting attacks and other malicious behavior.Uses the MySQL database.