Oscommerce A Viable Ecommerce Solution !

Ecommerce has become the buzz of the day !! TheRequirements : osCommerce utilizes Open Source
Internet success stories revolving aroundsolutions to provide a free and open e-commerce
Ecommerce, Online selling or shopping has beenplatform, which includes the powerful PHP web
increasing day by day and the late thinkers are losingscripting language, the stable Apache web server,
a huge market.and the fast MySQL database server. With no special
The advent of online payment gateways,requirements, osCommerce is able to run on any PHP
improvement in Supply chain management and4.1+ enabled web server running on Linux, Solaris,
paucity of time to go to the physical stores haveBSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows
been the root reasons for the growth in onlineenvironments.
business. But just thinking about one's ownFeatures : -
Ecommerce site makes one shudder due to huge· Oscommerce is template based and offers
investments required. The branded or customizedcomplete scope of customization.
Ecommerce solutions start at exorbitant price and· The Backend to manage the site offers
the maintenance charges also come out be prettysupport for unlimited product categories and
high.products; both virtual and physical. Multilingual, multi
So, when the opportunity is so attractive andcurrency support, database backup and restore
investment potential low, open source solutions comefacility, stock availability, invoices and customer
into sight. The open source solutions have changedrelation management are inbuilt modules.
the way web based sites and softwares are running.· The Frontend offers customers to browse
The community development, open source nature,complete catalog with ease, wishlists, personal
low cost of ownership (virtually free) and high ROIaccounts with purchase history and multiple billing and
are basic ingredient of Open Sourceshipping addresses, and many other user friendly
Solutions.osCommerce (available as free downloadfeatures to make the overall shopping a nice
from is the most comprehensive and popular openexperience.
source Shopping Cart system on Internet. It has a· Payment module covers numerous offline
huge list of features and is probably the mostpayment processing (cheque, money orders, offline
versatile shopping cart solution and offers vast rangecredit care processing, ..) and online payment
of customization choices for the on-line storefrontprocessing (2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net,
owners depending on their need at a very affordableiPayment, ..)
price. The basic script can be downloaded totally free· The shipping and tax module fulfils almost all
with complete source code. The costs ofthe major requirements.
customization and hosting are the only implicatedApart from these features, there are thousands of
costs which when compared with other solutions, willcontributions developed by efficient developers and
be meager.osCommerce is an online shopcompanies. The online forum support on at is very
e-commerce solution that offers a wide range ofpopular and no nonsense forum where any post
out-of-the-box features that allows online stores toregarding any query, error gets answered. The
be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is releasedcommunity development and maintenance has played
under the GNU General Public License. osCommerce isa major role in developing such a huge success of
a complete online store solution that contains both aOscommerce.
catalog frontend and an administration tool backend,So, the basic shopping cart enables one to start a
which can be easily configured over web.readymade Ecommerce site in minimum time and
osCommerce was started in March 2000 and hasminimal costs.
since matured to a solution that is currently poweringWhen all else fails, so has your hard disk send it to a
6,204 registered live shops around the world.technician for servicing.