Shopping for Shopping Carts: OsCommerce

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One reason why I started using osCommerce is because it has already received wide patronage giving an impression of reliability. Since it’s an open source, downloadable-for-free software, it’s very suitable for people who are on a tight budget. Being an open-source software, it is also very flexible because there is always room for customization. And, if problems arise, since it is well supported by its developers, I always have people to ask. However, it took me some time to do the customization especially if I do not get any help from developers. Thus, even if it’s for free, since customization is not that easy, I still have to shed some money to hire somebody to customize it for me.

Getting started using OsCommerce is a breeze because of its automatic web browser installation and upgrade procedure. I especially like the fact that I can make quick and easy changes in the layout. On the downside, since there are no templates available and I can only edit the footer, the header and the right and left columns, I do not have much room in design creativity. Thus, if you are looking for software that offers a lot of templates, then I do not recommend osCommerce for you. However, the features of the software come in default in a complete out-of-the-box solution and it has an object oriented backend making changes easy to do. Aside from these, osCommerce widens the range of my possible customers since it’s multi-lingual (English, German and Spanish speaking users) and multi-currency.

As for security, even though it’s an open-source software, I did not have to worry because osCommerce provides a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for my customers. The downside comes in the administration side. It does not have any built-in password protect for the administration area. I still have to go to the osCommererce site or ask the people responsible for my website to add password protection.

One of the best things I like about osCommerce is that it does its own optimization for my site. It presents catalogs, newsletters, reviews, and features for products related to what I am advertising. Yet, the osCommerce shopping cart is not so effective with large catalogs. If I have more than a hundred products and if I frequently change some information about the products, I would need to modify some elements in the product administration and have modules to manage the data. For catalogs that have thousands of products, some problems in searching and browsing may arise.