osCommerce Review
- The Customer's Perspective: How osCommerce works to create a positive shopping experience
- The Merchant's Perspective 1: How osCommerce works to allow effective selling on the Internet
- The Merchant's Perspective 2: How osCommerce works to allow you to administer your Shopping Cart
- Strengths of osCommerce Explored
- Customizing the osCommerce template
- Weighing Up the Options
- Disadvantages of osCommerce
- Advantages of osCommerce
- Final Comments
- Legal Stuff
osCommerce Demonstration
Attitude has two osCommerce demonstration stores available for evaluation. One, highlighting the full feature-set of osCommerce, the other, showing how osCommerce can serve simpler shops with smaller product ranges.
Want to Sell Online?
Attitude offers three specific services to help you create and grow a great shopping site specific to your business and its customers!
Attitude can assist you in the setup, installation, and customization of your ecommerce site. Attitude's ecommerce solution of choice is osCommerce.
osCommerce Installation - Shopping Cart installed for only US$49
One of the main strengths of osCommerce revolves around community developed contributions that:
- save time and money when developing your site
- allow you to benefit from new features and ideas
The osCommerce website describes contributions as developments "... provided by the community which are in the form of project add-ons, feature updates, language packs, and extended modules."
osCommerce contributions are designed to be easily slotted into an existing osCommerce installation and provide specific enhancements or capabilities.
Currently there are around 3000 community made contributions available for download from the osCommerce website that either expand or enhance the base osCommerce product.
Many of the contributions center on expanding the capabilities and usability of osCommerce. For example, some contributions allow for the store to be connected to new payment systems. Others concentrate on the delivery side of the business. For example, osCommerce shipping modules calculate shipping costs for a particular country's postal system.
There are also contributions that help the merchant to administer their site (for example making it easier to update product prices) or to sell more effectively to their customers (for example customer wish lists within your store, or the ability to create and operate an affiliate scheme).
Remember that not all contributions are created equal, and a developer or the osCommerce forums can often provide a valuable check on the quality of a contribution.
Examples of Common Changes
- Add gift voucher systems
- Allow customers to purchase without an account
- Disable reviews
- Add wish lists
- Set up affiliate schemes
- Provide facilities for wholesalers
- Add category descriptions
- Add facilities for bulk management of products and orders