What is osCommerce And Why Do You Need It

A Headache for Store Owners

So, you would like to have your own online store and you don’t know how to get started. Will it be expensive? Will you need to hire web designers or an expensive solution to create that store? How big is the job? And how to manage your store if you have thousands of products, categories and different attributes.

If you don't want to spend a fortune on the software to create your online store and you do like to experiment with your own web development you might consider doing it yourself with open source shopping cart software. You don’t need to hire a developer and designer to do this stuff. It’s easier to use open source shopping cart. Let’s talk, for example about osCommerce.

What is osCommerce and Why Is It Really Great

osCommerce is the leading open source online e-commerce solution that is available for free. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.

It can manage multiple currencies, support a wide range of languages and work with many payment programs. New features and functions are added all the time because there's a community of users that collectively and individually work to improve this evolving program. It's a powerful piece of software that can hook up with most payment gateways and accomplish just about anything you need in an ecommerce cart.

The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve and attract a large community to the solution. This ensures the ongoing development of the project at its core level. Moreover, extensive contributions provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set.

What’s bad. Don't forget that you won’t have free 24/7/365 support when you have problems with your store based on osCommerce shopping cart. You are at the mercy of the community and the knowledge base.

How to Get Started

All you need to get started in selling physical and digital goods over the internet is osCommerce shopping cart. It embraces everything, from the Catalog frontend that is presented to your customers, to the Administration Tool backend that easily handles your products, customers, orders, and online store data. Simply download osCommerce to your computer and follow the installation guide. When this step is over, you can customise it with the design. And that's it.

Optimize Work with Your Online Store

When you’ve installed your osCommerce store, we suggest you to get Store Manager for osCommerce. You’ll ask: Why do I need this software? The reason is that Store Manager is a great time saver. Imagine how much time you need to update thousands of your products, categories, prices, orders, etc.? And with this software you can update all this stuff in a blink of an eye. Store Manager for osCommerce is a payed extension, but for $149 you’ll have lifetime license and 6 months update service. The other advantage is MagneticOne Support Team that will help you resolve any problem of your store management, if any. And this absolutely is for free.

Conclusion

In summary, if you want a low cost or free solution and are willing to put time and effort into learning the tool and contributing to the open source community, you can use this to your advantage. Take Store Manager for osCommerce and let your business bring you only benefits.