The Merchant's Perspective Part 2

It is important to ensure that any visitor to your online shop is met with an intuitive and easy to use environment. It is equally important that you, the vendor, uses a similarly user friendly and constructive system to administer and control the shop.

Administering Your Shopping Cart

The day-to-day administration of osCommerce orders is simple and largely intuitive. Once authorized, the vendor has a free hand to set up, modify and organize the store to their liking.

Shopping Cart Configuration

Configuration of the cart can be separated from cart administration. The configuration side of osCommerce can take more effort to learn, but you're less likely to perform it frequently. This is because configuration tends to happen only on initial setup or if something major, like shipping costs, is being changed. This means the actual day-to-day administration of your shopping cart is relatively easy.

Some of the capabilities osCommerce provides the vendor include:

• Ability to update customer records.
• Ability to view and update order status. The status of orders can be changed, from 'pending' to 'delivered' for example, and comments can be added. The status and comments associated with an order can be optionally emailed to the customer directly from the Administration area or made viewable in the customer's My Account area.
• Control over the addition, removal and modification of categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and product reviews.
• Control over the shop's catalog structure.
• Systems for reviewing reports on both customers and their purchases.
• Control over how shipping costs are calculated for each purchase. Modules that are installed by default with osCommerce allow shipping charges to be calculated based on the number of items purchased, by weight, or as a flat rate. It is also possible to specify different rates for different geographic locations. Support exists for the US postal service, UPS and Federal Express. There are many shipping modules available on the osCommerce site.
• Control over the way payments are processed. Multiple payment methods can be installed, giving customers a choice of payment options. Modules that come preinstalled with osCommerce provide support for AuthorizeNet, Paypal, Secpay, Worldpay and other major realtime credit card processors. Modules also exist to receive credit card data for offline processing and to provide support for payment by Money Order or Check. In addition to this there is a large and growing number of payment module contributions available on the osCommerce site.
• Support for multi-currency shops and the ability to update exchange rates manually or via connection to currency exchange rate servers.
• Support for multi-language sites. Language support is available for English, German, and Spanish. More languages are available from the osCommerce site.
• Backup tools to safeguard the store's data from computer failures.