osCommerce Review
- The Customer's Perspective: How osCommerce works to create a positive shopping experience
- The Merchant's Perspective 1: How osCommerce works to allow effective selling on the Internet
- The Merchant's Perspective 2: How osCommerce works to allow you to administer your Shopping Cart
- Strengths of osCommerce Explored
- Customizing the osCommerce template
- Weighing Up the Options
- Disadvantages of osCommerce
- Advantages of osCommerce
- Final Comments
- Legal Stuff
osCommerce Demonstration
Attitude has two osCommerce demonstration stores available for evaluation. One, highlighting the full feature-set of osCommerce, the other, showing how osCommerce can serve simpler shops with smaller product ranges.
Want to Sell Online?
Attitude offers three specific services to help you create and grow a great shopping site specific to your business and its customers!
Attitude can assist you in the setup, installation, and customization of your ecommerce site. Attitude's ecommerce solution of choice is osCommerce.
osCommerce Installation - Shopping Cart installed for only US$49
One of the important strengths of osCommerce is that it is an open source shopping cart. This has a number of important implications.
Firstly, open source software costs nothing to buy. Open source software is freely distributed by the authors to whoever wishes a copy of the product. osCommerce can be downloaded for free by anyone from the osCommerce website at the osCommerce website.There will be costs (either your time or developer fees) related to installation, support and customization, but the software itself is free.
The second major benefit of open source software is that the software code can be modified; that is, anyone technically capable can examine the software code and improve or modify it as they see fit. According to the Open Source Initiative, when people have access to programs like this it leads to a situation where:
"people improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs [problems]. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing."
For osCommerce this leads to two great advantages.
There is a huge community of people devoted to improving and developing osCommerce, and anyone with the technical ability is welcome to provide improvements and expand osCommerce. This community has seen the resolution of hundreds of bugs and the implementation of many exciting and useful enhancements, making osCommerce a stable and feature-laden software package for selling online.
The open nature of osCommerce's source code also allows for a great deal of customization, and also allows for integration of other open source code. Both of these strengths will be expanded upon elsewhere.
For more information on open source and osCommerce visit oscommerce.com, or for further information on open source software in general see the Open Source Initiative.