Looking to build a ecommerce site, is OScommerce good?

Looking at using OSCommerce for a site in which i will be selling various types of products and need the capability of giving spefic customers discounts. Any recommendations??? Thanks!

 

Oscommerce is a great program and there is a huge community for it.

Once of my largest clients uses oscommerce, and they deal with $100,000+ daily in sales. It's very manageable and quite powerful.

The main downside is that you need to do alot of customization or get community contributions setup to get alot of the good features.

But there is a company called Cre that has taken oscommerce and added somewhere around 100 or so of the most popular contributions and released it as a whole new product called CreLoaded OsCommerce (www.creloaded.com).

I prefer oscommerce personally. I have used over a dozen other carts.

One that I've wanted to try is Pinnacle Cart, but its' quite expensive ($600 license) so I haven't tried it yet.

 

Excellent, thanks!! I like OSCommerce so far. I'm wotrking on finding the addons.

 

You can also look at zencart - it is forked off OScommerce and supposedly has a wider development community. This is my choice for our new ecommerce store.

The template system is supposedly easier to modify.

 

OScommerce has a lot of support and plug ins. The cart is also easy to cart.

 

When using oscommerce: look for the simple template system. It's a hack that makes the template design way easier. It gives you the template in a html format and it's very simple to use ...

 

Both Oscommerce and ZenCart are good.Some people do like OC while others like ZC..I haven't tried ZC yet but I'm very satisfied with Oscommerce .

 

how does x-cart measure up to oscommerce ? I don't mean to change the topic guys

 

I personally didn't like the back end administration of zencart, but I last tried it over a year ago so it's probably made some improvements since then. Overall it's a solid cart system, just not very easy to manage like osc is.

 

Neither of them is very optimized !

 

Is it possible to change the whole visual aspect of OsCommerce to make it look like anything BUT an OsCommerce ?

I have seen a lot of website using this type of layout. They work fine and have most, if not all, the options I m looking for but are quite boring graphicaly in my personal opinion.

I know you can play around with the colors and fonts but is it possible to change where some options are in the layout ?

I know how to write in HTML but I haven't tried PHP yet, will it be hard to set up an OScommerce ? I am totaly ready to start learning PHP tho

 

Possible?
"Yes, but..."

I found the learning curve on major design changes pretty step compared to some other open source programs (I'm not a pro)

/Great shopping cart.
//Better design would be nice
///Does anyone else here have trouble getting the osCommerce 'banner rotator' to work properly?

Edit: Zen cart makes it really easy to add 'extra web pages.'
osCommerce needs special coding or mods to do the same.

Overall, I have much more experience with osCommerce, and it is a great program.

 

Thanks everyone. Does anyone know how to install contributions for OSCommerce? I cant seem to get them working

 

Probably easier to implement with a host that provides this as a control panel add-on.

 

this is what Vger on the OsCommerce forum said
http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=162231
_______________________

Here's the quick install guide.

1. Create a blank database via your web hosting control panel.

2. Download the osCommerce 2.2 MS2 zip file from the downloads section of www.oscommerce.com, unzip it and extract the 'catalog' folder.

3. If you want your shop to be available at http://www.yourdomain.com/catalog then upload the whole of the catalog folder to the root directory of your website via FTP. If you want the site to be available at http://www.yourdomain.com then just upload all of the contents of the catalog folder, but not the folder itself.

4. Make sure that the permissions on all of the folders are set to 755, and if that does not work then set them to 777. Make sure that the includes/configure.php file and the admin/includes/configure.php file are set to 777 for the duration of the install. Once the install is complete reset to 644, 444, or 400 depending on your server setup.

5. Then go to http://www.yourdomain.com/install and begin the install procedure. Your DB Server will probably be 'localhost', your db user name and password (for mysql access) will have been provided to you by your web hosting company. The name of the database you already know - because you just set it up. Do not enable SSL, elect to store sessions in the database and not files (untick the box), and do not enable persistent connections.

6. After the install create a folder called 'backups' inside the 'admin' folder (via FTP), and delete the install folder. Reset permissions on the two configure.php files.

7. Password Protect your 'admin' folder using the Password Protect feature in your web hosting control panel.

Away you go!

Vger
______________________________

after that I have no idea... hehehhe just found out what oscommerce is about an hour ago...

 

I have it all downloaded and working. ITs just the damn contributions I cant figure out. For example the contrib CGDiscount its says to apply the "diff" patch or use "MS2 patched files" of this file. I don't understand what to do, anybody able to tell me what this is asking me to do and how to do it?