OsCommerce as a beginner ecommerce site?

When I started creating an ecommerce website, I had consulted my friend 3 years ago on what would be a good choice to start with. He told me to use OsCommerce because it is open source, free and customizability. I only had knowledge of html and did not understand PHP or MySQL and I failed miserably at utilizing OsCommerce. Now fast forward 3 years to 2007 and I am again tasked to create an ecommerce site. My wife had encouraged me to give it shot and to learn PHP and MySQL. I already knew about OsCommerce from my previous experience and so I spent the next month building an ecommerce site off of OsCommerce milestone 2.

My second time around is much more successful as I have become more patient and not necessarily rushing into things. Please note that if you are thinking about setting up an ecommerce site with OsCommerce, you will need to have knowledge of the PHP and MySQL and understanding the web development environment as this involves setting up a server and database. You can also choose a good web hosting to sign up with and they may have OsCommerce as a PHP software solution that will install on-the-fly for you. If not, you will take the steps I took such as downloading it, unzipping, upload via FTP, install through a browser, creating a MySQL database and correcting all the notice messages on top such as CHMOD your configuration.php and deleting the install folder directory.

Once installed, I saw a host of demo products on the catalog (front end) of the store and I went to the admin (back end) to change settings such as product categories, products, etc. After I fine-tuned the settings such as adding products and making sure everything works the way I wanted it to, I now had an OsCommerce site that is generic in looks as it resembled many others. Another note is that administration portion is not secure so there is no admin login but this has been corrected for OsCommerce RC version. As far as customizing the layout and feel of the site there are many steps to take manually such as uploading replacement images that come packaged with OsCommerce. However, the site still felt generic to me so I looked for template systems and the great thing about OsCommerce is its contributions available for download. The contributions became my best friend as I added mod after mod because of the many missing functions that were not available for OsCommerce right out of the box. Doing so requires going to the OsCommerce code and amending it with instructions given by the mod/plugin author.

After a couple weeks and countless hours of tinkering with different mods and plugins, I was satisfied with my website. Some notable contributions I added are:

• STS (simple template system) – lets you setup layout via HTML
• Admin Login – much needed security measure from others accessing your backend
• Info Box Skins – lets you create a box layout so it looks different using .jpg’s

There are many other contributions I attempted to add but as I did more and more research regarding building an ecommerce site, I stumbled on new PHP solutions spawned off of OsCommerce; namely Zen Cart. It is basically OsCommerce with many much needed plugins added to it out of the box.

In the end, I feel OsCommerce is a good package and its potential is limitless but it has many missing features out of the box and the customizing can be frustrating for the novice beginner. You can save yourself some time and try out easier ecommerce solutions that will probably be easier to use. I do not regret spending all the time on playing with OsCommerce as it has definitely helped me understand PHP and MySQL.