What is osCommerce
osCommerce (“open source Commerce”) is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.
OsCommerce was started in March 2000 in Germany by project founder and leader Harald Ponce de Leon as The Exchange Project.
osCommerce Features:
- Compatible with all major browsers.
- Multi-lingual English, German and Spanish by default.
- Automatic web-based installation.
- Unlimited number of products and categories.
- Automatic setup of e-commerce payment systems: Authorize.net, 2Checkout.com, iPayment.de, PayPal.com, PsiGate.com, SECPay.com, and TrustCommerce.com; Many other add-on ecommerce payment systems, off-line (manual) credit card payments) and on-line payment processing.
- Multi-currency support via manual update from exchange rate server.
- Support for dynamic images (one image per product).
- Supports physical products as well as product downloads.
- Web-based administration module.
- Database backup and restore.
- Temporary and permanent shopping carts.
- Secure transactions with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support.
- Many shipping options including by weight, price, or destination.
- Real-time shipping quote integration with UPS, USPS.
- Zone-based shipping options as well as a free shipping option as part of Order Totals Module.
- Full tax functionality, included compounded taxes, different zones for different products
OsCommerce advantages and Disadvantages
OsCommerce advantages
- Amongst these various advantages of work in favor of osCommerce shopping cart is the fact that it can be obtained at a very cheap cost and in fact there are many websites from where it can be downloaded without spending a single dollar.
- But this alone is not the only reason why osCommerce shopping carts are as popular as they are today. There is well known for their flexibility and customizing it and integrating it to any website should not normally be a difficult proposition.
- Any person with reasonably good designing skills can make the required modifications. Hence that particular software is very popular amongst business entrepreneurs who also have some bit of computer programming and software development.
- Upgrading of an osCommerce shopping cart can be done quite easily and most of these upgrades are available freely for download and integration with the existing application that is running on your website.
oscommerce disadvantages
- However, as is the case with any of the product, service or software application, more than people see some disadvantages with osCommerce shopping cart applications. The lot of problem is lack of technical support. This is often probably because most of the open source shopping carts that are available in the market are freely downloading.
- Hence, getting any kind of technical support or guidance is next to impossible. While it is more flexible application that benefits of the same can accrue only to those customers who have some basic knowledge about programming and writing of codes. Normal individuals who want to be entrepreneurs using osCommerce shopping cart may find the going tough.
- The updates of the software have to be monitored manually and hence this could prove to be a big problem over a period of time. Security is that area of concern which also inhibits many users from trying this particular software.
- Since this is freely available software, usage of the same is quite high. While that is good news, it also can be a downside to it. Delays in this transacting using this application are not very uncommon and this could be attributed to overloading in the platform more often than not.
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