It is PHP-based, using a MySQLi (MySQL, MariaDB, Percona Server) or PostgreSQL database and HTML components.

OpenCart was originally developed in 1998 by Christopher G. Mann for Walnut Creek CDROM and later The FreeBSD Mall.

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.

In September 2014, Kerr claimed that OpenCart was the number one e-commerce software supplier in China [5] 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.

[12] Version 4.0.0.0 of the software was released on May 24, 2022 [13] OpenCart uses fraud management services such as FraudLabs, ClearSale and Global Payments to review customer orders.