Hosting Ecommerce sites with OSCommerce
By Paul Halfpenny

Amazon, eBay, Last Minute; all of these sites have profited from the online e-commerce revolution. They’ve embraced emerging technologies, and defied the dotcom bubble-burst in a way that only strengthens their positions in the internet world.

And even more important, they’re all making a profit – although not as high as they could expect considering their turnover, and the market fluctuations that they have had to endure; but despite a competitive marketplace, falling stock prices, and increases in online fraud, they have overcome the major issues associated with e-commerce and turned fledgling companies into global brands.

So if they can pull through during the darkest of times, surely the time is now right, with a stable online economy and open-source technology, for you to start selling online?

Of course, the first place to start is deciding what to sell. But for the purposes of this article, we’ll accept that you have already passed that stage. So now you need to decide on how you are going to develop your online store.

Essentially you have a couple of choices:

1. Build your own ecommerce store
2. Purchase a product that you can use on your desktop
3. Customise a pre-built solution

Any of these choices are valid, but many businesses have constraints. Firstly, small and home businesses generally do not have the skills to create and maintain their own stores. Secondly, financial resources can mean that paying for software is not viable.

So that leaves you with the final solution – customising a pre-built solution. However, most e-commerce solutions actually cost money, which is something that you cannot afford, and if you purchase a template site, it generally means that you are limited in what you can achieve.

OSCommerce meanwhile, negates all of these issues in a single fell swoop. It is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License.

Like I said, OSCommerce works out of the box. That means that after one simple upload and installation, you could build your own store without needing to know or change any code.

Founded by Harold Ponce de Leon in 2000, OSCommerce was been designed from the ground up to be accessible, open and community driven, adhering to the principles of the Open Source movement. It now powers over 3,000 active ecommerce stores.

Driven at the backend by MySQL, OSCommerce is a PHP application that requires only basic Linux hosting space, and the ability to use a MySQL database. Installation is via a wizard, and administration of the application is handled via an online GUI that allows you to add, remove or update your products, the store layout, your payment and shipping options, and extras such as banner management and member logins.

It does, doesn’t it? But there’s more. Due to the open-source model of OSCommerce, developers have direct access to the source code that their stores. So if you are have knowledge of PHP and MySQL, or just want to learn, you can take a look at the code that is powering it and understand how it works.

In fact, this is one of the major reasons why OSCommerce has such a successful base in the community. Many users have developed their own extensions to the core of the application, and created their own contributions in the form of project add-ons, feature updates, language packs, and extended modules. The most popular contributions consist of discount classes, affiliate add-ons, and different payment gateways – in essence, everything you need to compete in the marketplace.

This means that whatever your level of knowledge or experience, OSCommerce has something to offer you. Even if you have no coding experience and would not know where to start with adding a contribution to your store, you will still have a stable, free, customisable website that you can use to sell your products.

In addition to that, the forums are packed with users that can offer support, advice, and tips along the way. http://forums.oscommerce.com/ is a hive of topics and posts, making it likely that if you have a question, it has been answered already.

It has to be said that OSCommerce is not the major player in the store-building market, but it certainly hold its own. Actinic for example offer a good range of proprietary ecommerce solutions aimed at providing small business with all they need to design, build and control their own web stores.

Actinic applications run from the desktop, and offer a number of pre-designed templates to get started with. They are secure and are backed by a company that can offer support to new users or developers that create sites for their own clients.

However, it is the principles of open-source that work in the favour of OSCommerce. With any proprietary software, you are constrained by the features that the developers built into the version you are using.

For instance, what happens if you find a new payment provider that is offering a great deal on credit card transactions? Will that be supported by the last version of Actinic that you bought? Probably not. But with OSCommerce the chances are that if a contribution does not already exist, you or another member of the community will be able to create or adapt a contribution and add it to your store.

What happens if you add a new range of products that take you beyond your product limit in a proprietary piece of software? Well, you will generally have a choice – pay an upgrade fee to the software company, or remove products to make space. With OSCommerce though, there is no limit to the amount of products you can add.

We mentioned earlier that OSCommerce is available as an open-source product. Because of this, many companies offer their own shopping cart solutions based on the core code but with a number of additions or upgrades.

At Hostway, we’re known for developing tools for our customers that are already showing promise and extending them to help them reach a wide consumer audience. Therefore, when we wanted to create our own Ecommerce service, we decided to use the core code of OSCommerce to implement our
Merchant Manager application.

Like OSCommerce, Merchant Manager has an online GUI interface to handle administration of the store, but we’ve used the extensibility of the original application to make it even easier to set up your store, including wizards to guide you through the key options, and new shipping and tax options. This means that our service is ideal for customers that want to take a first step in ecommerce and need to know that they have the support behind them.

Chain Reaction Web has followed a similar path. They sponsor the CRE Loaded OSCommerce edition which is a base install extended with 50 popular and useful contributions. Further to this, they have formed a new subsidiary dedicated to Open Source development and commercialization, Chain Reaction Works, Inc, to take OSCommerce programming and support to the next level.

CRE Loaded is now up to version 6.15 with a beta of 6.2 currently in progress. They have a wealth of free downloads and resources on their site and their forums are busy with community members adding new contributions and offering advice.

OSCommerce provides everything that you need to set up your own ecommerce store and create a successful website to increase your revenue. Thanks to its strong community support, its GPL philosophy, and the fantastic features that it offers to users, OSCommerce is one of the key reasons why the open-source model is key to the development and growth of ecommerce and the internet in general.

This means that no matter which route you take, there are sufficient resources in the OSCommerce community to mean that whatever your experience level, you will have support and backing all the way. And what better way to learn about coding or website-building than doing it yourself?

OSCommerce is readily available to download from www.oscommerce.com and whilst you are there, take a look at the vast range of contributions that are ready to add to your store.

Merchant Manager – Hostway offers stable and reliable ecommerce hosting, with all the support that you can expect from a world-class hosting company.

CRE Loaded – a community product, CRE Loaded does the hard work for you.