OSCommerce in action
By Rob Sutherland
What's the best way to use the Web to sell products? A good open source
option is OSCommerce, a shopping cart package that uses Linux, Apache, MySQL and
PHP (LAMP) software. Because it's open source, companies that use it can
customize it themselves to better meet their needs.
I spoke to a variety of companies that use OSCommerce. They sell everything
from girls' socks to embedded software, and their business models run from
mom-and-pop through full-blown manufacturing/distribution operations. In
general, they had good things to say about the software. They noted that
OSCommerce has been around since 2000 and has a large user community and a huge
collection of contributions -- packaged sets of code modifications or
documentation -- which is both a blessing and a curse. Many of them have made
changes and additions to the code, which they then contributed back to the
project. Some other positives that they pointed out:
- OSCommerce has the ability to create optional product attributes, such as
color and size.
- The Web-based administration panel makes it possible for relatively
inexperienced users to add and maintain product info.
- Both sales taxes and value-added taxes (VAT) can be configured for a variety
of scenarios.
On the other hand, these companies had some issues with the software as
well:
- The Web-based admin program can be cumbersome, especially the product entry
and update pages, which have a large and confusing collection of options.
- The handling of images is confusing.
- Branding is complicated. It's hard to locate where things need to be changed
and to ensure those changes can be carried over to new versions.
- The large number of contributed packages and their varying quality can be a
problem. Picking the ones that will work best for the business and maintaining
them can be a real time sink. Ensuring that you don't install conflicting
changes or overwrite existing code can be frustrating.
Some of the companies I spoke with offered more specifics. Everything
Tights, an online-only retailer of girls' socks and tights, had
no experience with PHP or MySQL when they first started using OSCommerce, but it
had no problem setting up the software. Owner Mark Russell says his company
would like enhancements, such as the ability to do global updates and similar
mass operations through the Web backend.
Subrosasoft writes and sells backup and utility
software for the Macintosh platform. Like Everything Tights, Subrosasoft's owner
Marko Kostyrko had no problems with installation but had to modify the base
package, in his case to handle users' downloads properly.
Batch
Tech provides e-commerce solutions using OSCommerce and Zencart,
another popular shopping cart program. Owner David Hardesty has been involved
with OSCommerce since it began. He finds it one of the easiest e-commerce
packages to install and set up. The only real drawback he sees is that the tax
system is written from an international point of view, and can be confusing to
U.S. users.
Element
Computers retails an embedded Linux office server, and supports a
network of resellers through the use of a content management system (CMS) called
Mambo. It has integrated OSCommerce with Mambo so
that they share common graphics and product data and appear to be one site. The
company's main frustration is the lack of global functions to allow, for
example, mass discounting of prices and export of groups of data in
Quickbooks/CSV format.
Although OSCommerce is relatively easy to administer, customization and
integrating changes can be extremely complex for new users and developers. The
companies I talked to solved these problems in one of three different ways:
- They learned enough LAMP administration skills and PHP/MySQL and Linux
concepts to install contributed packages and customize the base package. The key
in this case is to make good use of the community as a training and support
resource.
- They already had the necessary skills as IT professionals, and picked up
expertise from the community and contributed back.
- They paid a professional to undertake the work for them. If you choose this
approach, make sure that you can communicate well with whomever you choose, and
look for a consultant who's honest and stable. Make sure that he's prepared to
deal with things besides coding and technical support; you'll need good copy and
graphics to make your site stand out, plus someone who can explain things in
terms you'll understand.
The most common complaint I found from OSCommerce users was the same one I've
heard about other e-commerce packages. People weren't aware of how much work
would be involved in getting everything put together. They would get to a
certain point, hit an unexpected bottleneck, and be unable to keep going. The
majority of the work involved in getting any e-commerce package working is to
organize your products, take attractive pictures, write solid descriptions, and
learn to work with the package and make it part of your business operation.
Every implementation will run into these problems, and everything takes longer
and costs more than you plan for it, whether it's proprietary or open source. If
you take a step-by-step approach, by putting only a portion of your inventory
online at first or picking a small set of features to implement, you can avoid
getting overwhelmed.
A key to success with OSCommerce are to first analyze your business and
carefully look at operations. Make sure that you have or can obtain the skills
you'll need to customize the software for your needs. Set a clear goal that will
let you select only the correct enhancements for your situation. Keeping
OSCommerce running and updated over time will require you to carefully track
your changes and work out methods to keep it updated safely, such as installing
a local version on a server in your office (or even a Windows workstation) and
transferring the entire package to your ISP only after testing rather than
updating things on the fly.
If you keep these points in mind, you'll find that OSCommerce can help move
your product. |
