OSCommerce Shopping Cart Review

In March 2000, the e-commerce product osCommerce was launched in Germany by Harald Ponce de Leon as The Exchange Project (which is still available from some online sources). osCommerce is officially under development, yet the Milestone 2.2 release is considered stable.

As one of the early PHP-based open source shopping cart software products, osCommerce is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) free software license. Consequently, number of e-commerce derivatives of osCommerce have been created, such as Zen Cart, CRE Loaded, Suocommerce, and osCMax.

Functionality and Features

You download the product from the osCommerce Website, from which point you may proceed to configure it. A demonstration page is accessible from the Website.

General Observations

osCommerce MS2.2 provides a basic set of functionality that meets some of the more common needs of online businesses. Beyond the basic functionality, osCommerce can be augmented, through either community-supplied add-ons or custom coding to meet your unique business requirements. Features offered by OsCommerce include:

• Compatibility with PHP 4 and MySQL, portable to version 5.

• Compatibility with the more popular Internet browsers.

• Multicurrency; multilingual English, German, and Spanish

• Unlimited number of products and categories.

• Web-based administration module.

• Database backup and restore.

• Temporary and permanent shopping carts.

An osCommerce-based site requires integrating the design since a template system is not incorporated. (Third party osCommerce templates are available.) Designs must be hand-coded or a template system installed. Limitations Since its release in 2003, a number of issues regarding its functionality have been identified by the user community and recognized, in part, by the development team. For example:

• osCommerce lacks a plugin system; add-ons are difficult because they modify the core application.

• Third-party programming support is required for any significant customization.

• PCI compliance does not apply to manual credit-card payments.

• A shipping module for UPS is no longer standard.

• No other options are available is an order qualifies for free shipping.

• Image thumbnails are simply reduced full-size images, negatively affecting bandwidth.

The main criticisms of osCommerce stem from security issues regarding the need for unchecked PHP code and loose file or directory permissions. By not comprising a plug-in architecture, osCommerce requires that developers often take already forked (derivative) versions, perform diff command checks, and merge in new code.

Thus, very careful attention is needed for add-ons. Lack of solid configuration integrity over possibly many code revisions causes many developers to migrate to an e-commerce solution with a more rigorous and simplified plugin architecture.

Support and Documentation

Technical support is through online knowledge base and user forums only; no phone or email support is offered by the osCommerce itself. Like product hosting, you will need to make arrangements with a third party for live human support… or else develop your home-grown experts.

As a collaborative project, OsCommerce enables community members to actively participate in developing documentation for the levels of OsCommerce users. As with most open-source products, the documentation occurs in conjunction with the development community’s discussions.

Conclusion

Free software is always tempting, but for most installations, you will need to spend considerable internal and third-party cycles and ducats for assistance in implementing and maintaining a capable but highly complex, technical system.

Rating 2.5 stars (out of 5)

If you have dedicated and abundant geeks, the ranking improves slightly, yet reviewers point out a fair number of additional, major built-in limitations.

A full-featured, usable, top-ranked e-commerce solution can be found with Premium Web Cart, which is built on the latest Web technologies and brought to you in an affordable suite of options.

Best Wishes,

P.S. If you're very proficient with html, PHP, javascript, SQL data bases, etc., and have a high product count store, then OSCommerce is likely one of the best solutions on the market for your application.

If you're looking for more than a basic shoppingcart, are not interested in running and maintaining your own server, and customer support is important to you, then take a look at my #1 rated ecommerce shopping cart & marketing solution.