[edit] Brief Description

[edit] Wiki description

Description

osCommerce is one of the most popular open source e-commerce applications. It was launched under the GNU General Public License in March 2000 and its success is now guarantied by the big active community that is coming with improvements suggestions, solutions and plugins.

Now, osCommerce is more like an e-commerce framework solution, not only used to setup and maintain, but also to make stores with unique requirements.

Being an open source solution its competitors are other free applications or the low cost ones. For example, good alternatives for osCommerce are:

• Shopsite Pro (available at $75)
• Neogia (open-source)
• Zen Cart (available at $44,95)

System requirements

osCommerce is written in PHP programming language and it uses a MySQL database and because of that it doesn't have special server requirements. It can run on any PHP 4.1 (or later) web server installed on a Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OSX or Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Product statistics

In november 2007 there were:

• Live Stores: 12,737 - the directory of stores using osCommerce: http://shops.oscommerce.com/
• Add-Ons: 4,394 - the directoryof Add-Ons: http://addons.oscommerce.com/
• Community Members: 158,098

Features

General functionalities

• multilingual offered by default in english, german and spanish
• automatic web-browser based installation and upgrade procedure

Design and layout

• template system
• the template structure allows to make easy layout changes and to integrate the design of an existing website
• supports dynamic images

Backend features

• supports unlimited products and categories
• the categories, products, manufactures, costumers and reviews can be easily added / edited / removed

• supports physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
• secured login for administrators
• backup and restore for the database
• statistics for products and costumers

• print invoices option
• multicurrency support
• supports banners (with statistics provided)

Customer and frontend features

• orders stored in a database
• costumers can view an order history and a status of the current orderings
• temporary shopping cart for guests
• quick and advanced search available
• product reviews
• secure transactions (SLL)
• bestseller lists (global or per category)
• breadcrumb trail

Product features

• descriptions (HTML allowed)
• dynamic product attributes relationship
• control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
• customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails

Payment features

• offline payment accepted (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing)
• online payment accepted (2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net, iPayment)
• administrators can disable certain payment services based on a zone basis

Shipping and taxes features

• weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
• real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx)
• free shipping based on price and destination
• administrators can disable certain payment services based on a zone basis
• flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
• different tax rates for different products

Awards

Internet Professionell magazine compared 6 open source online-shop solutions in the following areas: installation and support, backend functionality, frontend functionality, and performance. osCommerce won the competition with a 94% rating.

Communities

1. http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/osc-announce - osCommerce mailing list - Public Announcements
2. http://forums.oscommerce.com/ - osCommerce Community Support Forum

See also

1. http://www.oscommerce.com - Official website
2. http://www.websitetemplatedesign.com/ osCommerce templates
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscommerce - osCommerce on Wikipedia
4. http://www.oscbooks.com/ - osCommerce eBooks
5. http://www.oscommerce-templates.co.uk/ - osCommerce templates and skins
6. http://oscommerce-chemo.blogspot.com/ - osCommerce - Chemo's Blog
7. http://www.linux.com/articles/45216 - Article about osCommerce on Linux.com