OsCommerce An Introduction

osCommerce is the popular open source shopping software used by many small and medium-sized businesses to conduct their transactions online. It is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution. This project was started in March 2000 and has since matured to a solution that is currently powering 1,413 registered live shops around the world. osCommerce brings you many features that, in the past, only expensive, high-end software packages offered.
osCommerce project was the idea of Ponce de leon which he started as an example resource study of how an online shopping system works and it was know as "The Exchange Project". Since it's introduction, the project was a main attraction and has been able to put a team of dedicated users together to advance and realize the project.

In December 2001, the project was renamed from The Exchange Project to osCommerce to show its maturity and to strengthen its presence in the Open Source community. Not only does a dedicated team exists that directs the project, but also a thriving community where members help each other out, contribute work and features for the project, and participate in the development of the project. The Customers can access osCommerce at the catalog section and the other administration end will be submitted to the expert teams and community members who knows how to configure the whole system.

osCommerce is a system that had the features ready for most online stores, could be customized for each customer's requirements, and was always being developed and improved by the core developers and community of osCommerce users. When a visitor arrives at your store they are interested in an easy and secure way of shopping. osCommerce has been designed to the interests of the customers. The software have a user friendly stores with a shopping cart model in a secure manner. The customers enjoy some tools such as they can look into the status of theirs order, provide detailed information regarding their order been processed or shipped, they have full access to their history of purchase, email notification of product updates and product discount offers.

Some of the other useful features are also included like "what is new?", which allows to display new products to the customer when they enter the site. Through reviews a customer can gather information about quality of a product form other customers who previously purchased the same products. Email newsletters provide up to date information transfer to customer about new products and discount of any goods. Method of payment can be installed according to the choice of customer. Multi Currency and Multi Language supports add advantage to osCommerce.

Today, osCommerce has been taken to the next level, moving towards an e-commerce framework solution that not only remains easy to setup and maintain, but also making it easier for store administrators to present their stores to their customers with their own unique requirements.