I Built a Free, Open Source PHP E-Commerce Platform – FriSay

A few years ago, I was looking for a self-hosted e-commerce solution for a small Turkish business. The options were either too complex, too expensive, or just not built with the Turkish market in mind — local payment requirements, Turkish invoice fields (TCKN, tax office), and Turkish language support out of the box.

So I built my own. And now I'm releasing it for free.

What is FriSay?

FriSay is a free, open source, self-hosted PHP e-commerce platform. No monthly fees. No vendor lock-in. You own your data and your store.

It's built on a stack that any PHP developer will feel comfortable with:

PHP 7.4+ (GD, PDO MySQL, mbstring)
Smarty templating engine
Bootstrap frontend
MySQL 5.7+ / MariaDB 10.3+
Apache with mod_rewrite

Key Features

🛒 Store Management

Product catalog with categories, brands, barcodes and stock tracking
Order management with status updates, cargo company and tracking number fields
Invoice fields with Turkish tax ID (TCKN) and tax office support at checkout

💱 Multi-Currency Support

Products can be priced in USD, EUR or gold — with automated cron-based exchange rate updates:

GET /api/cron.php?action=currency&token=SHOP_TOKEN

🔌 REST API (v1)

Full remote integration support out of the box. Authenticate with a header or query param:

X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY

Endpoints cover products, orders, categories and brands — with pagination, filtering and quick-update support.

🧩 Module System

Extend FriSay without touching core files. Modules live in the modules/ directory and hook into the system via a clean event-based architecture. Full developer guide included.

🎨 Theme System

Separate templates for the storefront (templates/default) and the admin panel (templates/admin). Fully customizable with Smarty.

🤖 AI-Friendly Codebase

FriSay ships with AGENTS.md and AI_CONTEXT.md — structured context files that help AI coding tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot understand the project architecture and generate accurate modules or customizations.

Installation

No manual SQL imports needed. Just upload the files, point your browser to /install/ and follow the wizard:

System requirements check
Database credentials
Site URL + admin account
Optional demo data

Done. The wizard writes config/env.php and config/installed.lock automatically.

For local development with WAMP, drop the project into www/frisay/ and open http://localhost/frisay/install/.

Live Demo

Want to see it in action before installing?

Storefront: https://fyazilim.com/fshop/
Admin panel: https://fyazilim.com/fshop/admin/
Login: admin@fyazilim.com / admin123

Why Free?

Because small businesses and independent developers deserve good tools without a subscription attached. FriSay is my way of giving something back to the open source community that I've benefited from for years.