OSCommerce Open Source Ecommerce Software
Discover how OSCommerce with CYOP's open source and cloud based ecommerce services allow businesses to increase sales, improve customer service, and lower costs.
OSCommerce Open Source Ecommerce
OSCommerce Ecommerce Shopping Cart
OSCommerce, which began in early 2000, was one of the earliest open source ecommerce shopping carts and as such has spawned a number of forks including both Zen Cart and Magento.
OSCommerce is a complete online ecommerce store that consists of both a catalog front-end and an administrative backend that simple to install and manage. The OSCommerce shopping cart runs on PHP and MySQL and is packed with features:
Administration
osCommerce comes with a user-friendly administration panel that include menus allowing you access to configuration functions and tools to set up your site:
- Secure access via unique UserID's and Passwords for PCI compliance; security can be increased by use of an .htaccess layer
- Configurable dashboard
- Configuration menu to setup basic store parameters including:
- Store name and address, emails, Logo, etc.
- Minimum and Maximum values for various functions such as key fields, displayed records and so on
- Image management
- Customer details allowing optional collection of fields such as DOB and Gender
- Product details allowing Admin to control which columns display in a product listing
- Stock Control settings
- Basic shipping parameters
- Settings for performance such as Logging, Cache, GZip compression and Session Control
- Support Multiple languages & currencies
- Database backup utility which can be removed, once live, for increased security
- File manager to allow you to edit source file which can be removed for increased security
- Language file manager to allow you to edit text for fields labels and emails which can be removed for increased security.
- Action record so you can track who logged into Admin.
- Server information tool so you can see all settings for php and MySQL to assist trouble shooting
- Directory and File Permissions Check to monitor file level security
- Version Checker to check for updates.
Product Catalog Management
The admin menu includes a Catalog menu that allows you to
- Add/Edit Manufacturers (Brands/ Suppliers)
- Add/Edit Categories with the ability to have unlimited sub-categories
- Add/Edit Products
- Copy / Move Products from one Category to another
- Link a Product to more than one Category.
osCommerce has no limits on any entity so you have unlimited categories, products and manufacturers. However it is a good idea to consider the impact on your site design and navigation when the number of categories become too great in terms of number or levels.
It also allows to manage product options in terms of:
- Add/Edit Product Attribute Definitions such as color or size
- Assign Attributes to Products
If your site design allows your customers to leave reviews, then you can also see your reviews and edit or disapprove.
For more information on OSCommerce and CYOP's other open source ecommerce solutions, please contact us or signup for a FREE Business Process Assessment.
Ecommerce Consulting & Implementation
CYOP employs a proven ecommerce design and development methodology that includes a detailed requirements analysis to effectively discern feature/function requirements before any programming efforts begin which minimizes deployment time and necessary re-work.
The CYOP planning process includes development of a basic Functional Design, a Gap Analyis to determine custom development efforts, a Data Migration Strategy to ensure data from current systems can be effectively migrated to the new system, and a Systems Interface Design to describe any external systems that need to be integrated and how that will be accomplished.
CYOP's ecommerce integration services invovle a coordinated technical programming and development effort combined with sound project management to effectively bridge the gap between the client and the programmers and to ensure business objectives, and not just a programming exercise, are achieved.
CYOP leverages free open source software to build for our clients an ecommerce website that is highly customized for thier specific business and that they OWN. Because the finished application is owned by the customer who has full access to the souce code, there is no vendor lock-in and the application can never be obsoleted since with a large community of open source programmers able to ensure ongoing development and support.
Because we understand how critical your ecommerce web site is to your business, CYOP Hosting is dedicated to providing reliable, business-class web hosting solutions with the highest levels of quality, service and support available in the industry. CYOP offers both shared and dedicated hosting plans and all of our web hosting servers are located in state-of-the-art data centers with superior levels of security, redundancy, and fault tolerance. High uptime guarantees and SLA's make CYOP the perfect host for your ecommerce store and critical cloud based business applications.
How To Design & Build A Successful Ecommerce Website
If you're looking to build a successful ecommerce website, it's wise to invest significant time in planning to minimize the money spent on unnecessary programming and re-work since a little bit of planning up-front can avoid a whole lot of problems later!
Here are ten tips to create a successful ecommerce website:
- Try to minimize the number of products and focus on a niche market. Don't try to be like Amazon and attempt to sell everything. You can always add more products, or additional stores once you become successful with the products you start with.
- Develop a clear goal for every page and design the page with that goal in mind.
- Clearly display your contact information and make it easy with several ways to contact you.
- Put a strong call to action on each page.
- Make the checkout process easy.
- Keep the cart contents and current total in the cart visible.
- Highligh featured promotions to drive traffic to certain pages of the website.
- Provide layered navigation to make it easy for users to search, sort and filter for things they're looking to purchase.
- Provide ways for customers to save their cart for later use and share shopping cart pages with friends and family.
- Provide multiple shipping options and allow customers to calculate shipping costs right from your web store.