To make an ecommerce website function properly, the shopping cart must be full proof. The shopping cart should have an eye soothing user interface, should work seamlessly and be secured. If you are looking for a shopping cart application which can easily fulfill your requirements, OSCommerce can be of help for you.
What is OSCommerce?
Open Source Commerce or OSCommerce is a software program that helps with online store management. You can use it in a web server that has MySQL and PHP installed. You can download it for free with a GNU General Public License.
The first version of OSCommerce came in 2000 and was released under “The Exchange Project.” Harald Ponce de Leon is the founder of this application which is incidentally one of the oldest PHP based ecommerce setup and management application.
Different OSCommerce Versions
There are three different stable versions of OSCommerce available online: OSCommerce 2.0, OSCommerce 2.3 and OSCommerce 3.0.2. These three versions are more or less independent to each other (Code wise). OSCommerce 2.2 was found to be vulnerable to security loopholes and on November, 2010, OSCommerce 2.3 was released to patch those up. OSCommerce 2.3 also has some social networking tools integrated and is developed based on the Table less Web Design approach. OSCommerce 3.0.2 was released in August, 2011 and has an object oriented backend and template system for changing layouts easily. You can also include administration area username and password configuration during the installation for better security.
OSCommerce Hosting
If you are not able to install OSCommerce properly in your server, you can always opt for the OSCommerce hosting services. You’ll find numerous companies providing OSCommerce hosting and you should go for one that’s reputed in this industry. The cheapest doesn’t work best always.
If you are running an ecommerce website and your site goes down at some time even for a few hours, you will be missing out on sales. So, uptime of 99.9% is important (It’s virtually impossible to guarantee 100% uptime).
See if the technical support team helps you with the OSCommerce installation process. If you face problems, they should complete the installation process for you.
Check if the hosting provider is giving you the OSCommerce add-ons or not. Mostly these add-ons include: numerous OSCommerce templates, OSCommerce optimized servers with different PHP versions installed, features like SSLs, Merchant accounts etc.
If you have experience with using OSCommerce, please share how did it fare against its competitors such as Batavi, Zen Cart etc. through the comments feature. I, on a whole, found it pretty good for ecommerce websites and as claimed in the official blog of OSCommerce, more than 14000 live websites use this for running their ecommerce platform properly.
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