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
No inbuilt way to password protect the administration area of osCommerce
There is no inbuilt way to password protect the administration area. There are a number of easy enough ways to do this, but they aren't supplied in the default installation of osCommerce. Information on about password protection can be found on the osCommerce site, or you can discuss it with whoever installs your cart.
osCommerce is not template driven
Although osCommerce is not template driven, there are stylesheets and you can also quickly change the shared header, footer, left and right column files. Even so, changing how the site looks may not be as fast/flexible in osCommerce as in a template driven solution.
Customization without a developer may be slow
If customization is required and you don't use a developer, it can take time to make changes to code. While this is true, you don't have to do your own customization. It is cost effective to use or extend the work of other osCommerce users, or to find a developer who has experience with osCommerce, like Attitude.
The attribute system
osCommerce has a limited attributes system. For example, by default there is no stock control on attributes and no SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) identifiers. If you are heavily reliant on attributes, you may may need to seriously look at modification or consider using another cart system.
Limitations of large product catalogs
Large product catalogs (perhaps over a few hundred products) will require modules for the input/management of data if product information is changing frequently. A catalog of over a few hundred products may need modification to elements of product administration, and very large catalogs (maybe ten thousand products, depending on the server) may need modifications so they can be searched and browsed effectively.