osCommerce
August 4, 2009 by: admin
osCommerce is an open source e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the- box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs involved. You can easily install osCommerce on your website with the help of the Fantastico auto-installer. Although the oscommerce is not the “ultimate” e-commerce solution, it is by no means “basic”; with the capabilities of customizing to meet the specific needs of ones own business.
osCommerce Website: Click here to visit website
Price: FREE
Latest Version: osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 2a
Community Support: http://forums.oscommerce.com/
Simply the best.
The vanilla osCommerce is good but once you start adding the contributions there is no competition. This is simply the best ecommerce solution out there at the moment.
Thumbs Down
I was totally disappointed with this offering. It may have a huge number of features but the software and the user guide seem to have little to do with each other these days and most insanely theming your site means editing the code a;; over the show. Update and loose all your changes – that is not for me. All in all I found it to be a bloated mess on the inside while still looking OK from without. A total turkey IMHO, bogged down with trying to be all things to all men.
Nice but not flexible
osCommerce has plenty of features and works does a good job at what it does. However, if you want your site to look different than the default, prepare for many, and I mean, many days/weeks of work since most HTML is hardcoded in a very nasty way.
I’d reccommend using a project such as cpCommerce instead as it is designed to work with templates and is highly customizable. It has nearly all of the features that osCommerce has too.
Stay away from osCommerce like the plague – the entire design is tabled and the code is mashed in with the layout. (IDK about the Alpha release, but it’s been in Alpha for 2 years without an RC so it shouldn’t be used in production).