OSCommerce- product review
I have done a few OSCommerce installs now and it gets easier with each one. While OSCommerce is a great ecommerce package, true customization is an arduous task. One must be fairly well versed in PHP code and be able to sleuth through the 200+ files to find where to make changes. It would be nice in future releases if the layout and skinning could be CSS or template based.
Things I like about OSC:
- Simple to install and has most usable features loaded
- There are a good variety of contributions (add ons) that do various tasks. Most are easy to add.
- The admin interface is fairly easy to understand. Adding products is mostly intuitive.
- The designers have covered all of the basics in the order flow from customer registration to shipment confirmation emails.
- It runs on a mySQL database which gives me the ability to run queries against the data.
- There is decent forum support
- Shoppers user interface is intuitive and easy to follow.
Things I don’t like about OSC:
- cumbersome PHP design. Needs more separation of function code and display text.
- base design is ok, but needs a simpler way to skin the page and replace items.
- difficult to turn on/off features. you have to comment or remove from code to turn off boxes
- lack of real integration with shippers. This may be an API issue more than an OSC issue.
- The products attributes system. It is cumbersome if you have a large store.
- lack of product level shipment pricing and other similar price affecting features.
Overall it is the best package I have seen out there for FREE. I’m sure some of the expensive hosted ecommerce solutions are easier to use and their template systems are probably more flexible. For an overview of the OSCommerce product visit oscommerce.com.
When you combine it with a powerful hosting solution like the one by IPowerWeb,you get a robust store which can hold hundreds of products and has the bandwidth suitable for hundreds of shoppers per hour. I have only run into problems with this store when someone was trying to download the store contents and exceeded the maximum number of queries in an hour. IF you have a high volume of customers you might consider getting a dedicated host server.