OsCommerce is an online solution for E-Commerce that is currently under ongoing development by the open source community. This means that it is continually worked on by those in the industry who understand its need and are able to experiment to find out the best solutions. Through the open source community, information is shared in order to provide optimal assistance toward solving both common and uncommon problems that may arise. It also allows store owners to set up, run, and maintain their online solutions with little to no effort, which enables them to concentrate more on the business aspect than the technical issues.

The best part of OsCommerce is that it is free. There are no licensing fees or costs involved, which is often one of the most attractive characteristics of open source solutions. OsCommerce combines open source solutions together to provide a free and open E-Commerce platform, which includes the PHP web scripting language, a stable Apache web server, and the MySQL database server. This scripting language is powerful and the server fast, which allows for more seamless transactions to take place.

There are no restrictions or special requirements with OsCommerce, and it is, therefore, able to run on any PHP enabled web server, along with a variety of supported environments. This broadens the spectrum for OsCommerce to work on several operating system environments and in multiple situations.

OsCommerce began in 2000, and has now matured into a solution that is currently powering a wide variety of online shops around the globe. The services it offers are helping business owners in many ways, and are making it easier for them to concentrate on keeping their business up and running, while serving a constantly growing number of customers on a daily basis. It has also made it easier for potential customers to find businesses, and to purchase products and services more quickly and efficiently. It is serving both the business owner and the customer in ways that will only help E-commerce get better.

First of all, whenever you launch a shopping site the most important thing that you should take care of is the layout. Why? Simple. Who does not enjoy entering a website that has a nice, smooth design, something that catches the eye and makes the surfing interesting? Also, the layout should be clear and easy to work with. But the next question is, how can someone realize this when the knowledge about html is little or the sum of money is not very big? The solution: oscommerce templates.

Easily to use and to update without any developed web designing skills, for many beginners this kind of web templates are the perfect option. They are already made so you can, in a way, preview the look of your site. Also they can be easily modified and updated, and moreover, they have no errors, so there won’t be any worries concerning a line or a box not being where it should.

Oscommerce templates are made by web design specialists and put at your disposal in several shapes and colors. There are many such templates that can be found over the world wide web. Anyway, even though you must pay for them, the price is lower than if you would pay a web designer to create a personalized page.
This would also take much longer and much more stress might be involved because the final result may not show up like you hoped or thought. On the other hand, oscommerce templates give you the exact image as how your page will look.

The diversity is large and for all the possible purposes. Keep in mind that if you decide to launch an online shopping site, the layout you choose must be accessible and clear, the information you give must be specific and trustful. The design should be simple and neat. Some persons may consider a very complicated web layout as being hard to use.

As a conclusion, I want to say that it is not a shame to use an oscommerce template instead of hiring a web design team to create your own shopping site design. These web site layouts are made for you to use and are actually created by specialists to ease the work, mostly, for the beginners.

Before starting your own shopping website you should think what you really want to do, how your site should look, and then choose from the large number of web templates, the one that fits better. Good luck.

Make your own osCommerce store

If you have enough spare time to learn the system properly osCommerce will reward your dedication. You will be able to create a very versatile ecommerce system in only a few months, even if you’ve never done web development before. The huge online community is a testament to the flexibility of osCommerce and helps to keep you on the right track. If you get stuck on anything just ask in the forums and someone will jump to your rescue. Bare in mind that to get help you first have to show you have done your homework, don’t just ask for help from the very start without reading the documentation. Read the manual and check the knowledge base as they are both great resources for someone just starting with osCommerce. Once you have become comfortable with the osCommerce way and have learnt the basics of the system and how to modify the code to your needs you should start looking at the thousands of contributed modules available. There are currently around 4000 modules or addons that have been contributed by the community. These can take your site to the next level and instructions are usually very easy to follow.

After you have done this you will probably be in a position to start contributing your own custom code and addons to the project. This is the way open source software flourishes and your involvement in the project won’t go unnoticed.

Speak to the professionals

If you don’t have time for all this exploration and learning then you need to speak to the professionals. We at Freestyle Systems have our own code base that we have been working on almost constantly for many months. We have worked out the major kinks in the default installation and can provide robust ecommerce systems for a very reasonable fee. When you hire a professional company to do your design and development they unlikely to leave you in the lurch like the template designers. We at Freestyle Systems pride ourselves in creating extremely robust osCommerce systems for our clients. If you want the benefits of a solid, effective ecommerce solution but don’t have the time or manpower to go it alone, come and speak to us. We will be more than happy to answer any of your osCommerce related questions.

Word of warning

Just because a company seems professional it doesn’t mean they will give your business the attention it deserves. Take some time to explain what you want in detail and see what they have to say. If they are only prepared to give you a brief answer to your questions then don’t trust them. They will no doubt follow this attitude through to the design and development of your site. We see this all the time and it’s a real shame. You will know when a company is the right choice by the attention to detail they give in response to your query.

But in fact, there is a pretty quick and easy way to integrate osCommerce with your website.

Note: This article assumes you’ve already added your products to the osCommerce database.

Steps

1: Initialize the osCommerce variables

When a user first adds a product to your shopping cart, osCommerce assigns a shopping cart to them based on a cookie it sets. But before it will do that, it checks to see if a cookie named “cookie_test” was accepted. If it was accepted, it will assign a cookied named “osCsid” which will serve to uniquely identify your users. But if this cookie is not set the user will be directed to the infamous “cookie usage” page. For that reason, and some others, you must do the following to every page of your website that a user may go to.

At the very top of every page on your website, add the following code: . And yes, this means all of your .html pages will need to be converted to .php files.

2: Create your template

Take one of your webpages that you would like the osCommerce pages to look like and remove its content and keep only the essential design elements and navigation you need. Essentially, you’re creating a template for your website.

3: Customize the osCommerce pages

Take your newly created template and save it with the same name as the osCommerce page you want to customize. For example, if you want to make the shopping cart integrate with your template, name the page shopping_cart.php but ensure it’s in a different directory so you do not write over the original. Now, open the original file that came with osCommerce (shopping_cart.php in our example) and copy the code from the very beginning to right before the tags. Now paste this code to the top of the the page you created from your template. Next, you’ll want to take any of the javascript found between the tags in the original file and paste those in between the tags of your new file. Finally, scroll down your original file until you see the code. Copy the text between
and and paste it into the spot you designated for osCommerce output in the file you created from your template.

Now the page’s look should match your website well, but you may need to make some additional tweaks in your stylesheet to match any classes the osCommerce code is using.

Then just upload your new page and overwrite the original. Repeat this until all of the osCommerce pages have been customized.

4: Add osCommerce to your products pages

In order to allow users to add your products to the shopping cart, you need to do one simple step to be able to add the product to the cart. Open your products page and add the following underneath each item:

This form will allow a product to be added to the cart. It determines which product to add based on the value supplied in the [textbox] tag. Your products_id is determined by the value you specified for you product when you added it to
the database.

OsCommerce shopping cart allow you to add multiple products and organize them, run discounts and promotions, set prices in different currencies and accept payments through all most popular methods.

X-Cart is another popular and powerful solution. This shopping cart script has more than 100 features and it has a very demanded module that allows to deliver software products online.

X-Cart payment gateway supports over 60 different methods and the cart itself is very comfortable and easy to configure. The developers of the script offer installation and configuration services so that you can have a turn-key project in the end.

X-Cart is a commercial script offered in two varieties – Pro and Gold. The only difference between them is that the Pro version allows you to set up unique accounts for different merchants.

CubeCart is an open source script which is very similar to osCommerce and other shopping cart solutions alike. CubeCart needs your hosting to support PHP and MySQL. The script has extended configuration capabilities and can be connected to different payment gateways including PayPal and VeriSign.

Zen Cart is an open source product developed by a group of shop owners who know what they need in product implementing this into Zen Cart. Designers, programmers and ecommerce consultants help them on the way. This is probably one of the most user-friendly shopping cart scripts, though the functionality is still to be extended.

Shopping cart script named Agora is also quite a popular solution which is like osCommerce is often bundled into hosting providers’ Fantastico installation packs. It is one of the best shopping carts for beginners and has enough features to satisfy advanced users as well. Agora is famous for the excellent tutorials and support forums. Even if your HTML knowledge is not your strong side, it is quite possible you’ll be able to set up a nice online shop if you use Agora.

Of course, it’s up to you what to choose. It could be a wise decision to try all of the products described above and maybe some else to understand which of them offers the features you really need to create the online shop you think will be fantastic. Sometimes open source projects are more suitable than commercial ones. Sometimes it’s the other way round.

The best way to control your page titles and metatags for an oscommerce store is to download and install the header tags controller contribution. this will be the first search engine friendly module that you will want to download and use to start optimizing your site. I found the install to be complicated, confusing, and not work, until I found the full install that already had the modifications performed on each file. All you have to do is replace your old files with the new ones provided, and you will be ready to go.

If you already have categories and products, make a complete backup of your oscommerce template files. The best way to do this is to use your FTP program to download a complete folder to your desktop containing all of your site files. Then go to your oscommerce admin and make a backup of your database and save it on your desktop. Do this every time you are about to make major modifications to your site, and get used to it. The one time that you do not have a current backup of your entire oscommerce store, is the time you will be sorry that you did not.

Header Tags Controller allows for unique Header Tags for: Title, Keywords, and Description on a per page basis.

Download it, unzip it, and upload it to your oscommerce host with your FTP program making sure to overwrite the corresponding directories with the new ones. Because you are overwriting files, it is best to have none, or only a few categories and/or products at this time, that is why I pick this as the first module install for search engine optimization of your oscommerce website.

Now that you Header Tags Controller installed you will need to configure it:

1. Login to your oscommerce admin
2. Go to header tags controller in the left menu
3. Click on text control

This is where you will enter in the descriptive title you have chosen to be on your index page. Enter it for index.php.

You can also put a description that is a longer version of the title and should also be written in a way that describes the goods or service you are selling.

The keywords box is not necessary to fill in. The 3 major search engines Google, Yahoo, and MSN will ignore this tag and will determine what keywords you are found under.

Save your work.

Next, if you already have products at your site you will want to go to the ‘fill tags’ option at the left menu and click button ‘fill all tags’ for categories and products and press ‘update’ you will now notice that you have unique page titles for your categories and products pages, based off of the names you gave your categories and products. This may be a good time to evaluate the name you have picked for your categories and products. Once again keep in mind what people will be looking for.

If you have not added products and categories yet, now is a good time to start. Every category and product will now generate the metatags and page title that you give it. This is the first step in optimizing your oscommerce site to make it search engine friendly.

If you’ve successfully launched your osCommerce store, you’ve no doubt turned your attention to attracting customers to your site and making sales. Of course, your main focus is where your site shows up in the most popular search engine result pages, or SERPs for short. In doing searches for products you offer on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN, your site is probably near the bottom in the SERPs. So the question is, what simple changes can you make to improve your store’s ranking with respect to competing websites.

Among many other SEO modifications you can make to improve your site, like meta tag optimizations, targeted and keyword-rich product descriptions, etc., perhaps the first you should consider is Search Engine Friendly URLs. A “clean” version of osCommerce (one having no modifications or major configuration changes) doesn’t produce category, product, or manufacturer links containing relevant content or keywords. By default, these links point to a file with a database id in the parameters. Store owners do have the option to enable a pre-installed module for producing SEF URLs, but this doesn’t provide the customer, or for that matter a search engine, with a discernible URL in relation to the category or product. The scripting simply splits the parameters, reassembles the URL with forward slashes, and still suffixes it with the appropriate database id. Although the forward slash is more friendly to URLs than the question mark and many ampersands, the link is still non-descriptive.

That being said, there are many alternate contributions and/or modifications out there to relate your osCommerce URLs to category, product, and manufacturer names and descriptions. Having worked on many stores with previous modifications, I’ve seen every form of URL tweaking you can imagine. One such example includes creating subfolders within your website for each product/category, creating a small index.php file within each, and coding that file to redirect back to product_info.php for each designated product_id. This method does make page links more descriptive, but if you’ve got a lot of products and products, the task can become quite labor intensive.

Simpler, more efficient modules do exist for osCommerce. My personal experience is that the Ultimate SEO URLs (USU) and Search Engine Friendly URL (SEFU) contributions are the most stable. There are, however, differences between the two packages. The contributions, using different rewrite scripts, translated URLs as illustrated below.

• Ultimate SEO URLs

  http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=X

  becomes…

  http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/product-name-p-X.html

• Search Engine Friendly URL

  http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=X

  becomes…

  http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/category-name/product-name

The Ultimate SEO URLs and Search Engine Friendly URL modules both have advantages and disadvantages. Let’s compare the two side-by-side…

In comparing these modules, you can see the major differences are performance and compatibility. If you wish to install SEFU in your osCommerce store, test the standard “Use Search-Engine Safe URLs (still in development)” configuration setting. Set it to “True”, and test the links in your store. If you get an error message stating “Error: unable to determine page link”, you won’t be able to use this module. Also, both modules require editing of the root folder .htaccess file. If your host doesn’t allow this, neither will contribution will work.

Our experience with osCommerce stores in use on a variety of servers is that due to the caching provided by USU, overall performance does not suffer from the URL rewriting. Also, as an added benefit, this package carries the capability to perform similar URL rewriting for the Article Manager and Information Pages Unlimited contributions. Given these facts, we recommend installing the Ultimate SEO URLs module.

In conclusion, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of quality, unique, and keyword rich content in your product descriptions. Internet marketing experts all agree that organic content is becoming more and more important in search engine algorithms. Also, in addition to your product descriptions, that you can create great, relevant content by creating FAQ topics and articles like these within your osCommerce store.

We made a very simple MOD, which allows you to run osCommerce on any PHP powered server with disabled Register Globals including PHP4 and PHP5. This MOD also work with register_globals = On, so if your provider changes the configuration of the web server without your knowledge, osCommerce powered shopping cart will remain untouched.

You need to apply this MOD especially, when you are receiving one of the following messages:

MOD Title: osCommerce 2.2ms2-060817 Register Globals Off Workaround for PHP4 and PHP5
MOD Author: Jiri Stavinoha
MOD Description: Allow to run osCommerce 2.2ms2 on web servers with Register Globals Off or On (PHP4 and PHP5 compatible)

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

OPEN:

FIND:

BEFORE, ADD:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

FIND:

BEFORE, ADD:

OPEN:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

OPEN:

FIND:

BEFORE, ADD:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

FIND:

AFTER, ADD:

OPEN:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

OPEN:

FIND:

AFTER, ADD:

FIND:

REPLACE WITH:

SAVE/CLOSE ALL FILES

With some modifications, you can apply this patch to Zen Cart, osCMax and CRE Loaded too!

osCommerce is an extremely flexible and powerful plug-in shopping cart, catalog, and administration machine all rolled into one. It is open source–and therefore is available for private or commercial use free of charge under the GNU Public Licence, is widely used and supported, and is part of an extremely large online community. It consists of a catalogue front-end, which can be used in conjunction with your existing site, or as a stand-alone site in its own right; and an extremely easy to use administrative back-end interface.

It is available right now for download from www.oscommerce.com as a .zip package weighing in at just under 1.5Mb. Also featured on the site is the showcase section with links leading to sites implementing osCommerce, and the community services mini-site containing the forums and documentation.

The application is PHP based and connects to an SQL database, so your hosting vendor must provide compatible services. It also contains a little JavaScript and a lot of HTML, and is available for either Windows or Linux platforms.

There is no doubt that osCommerce is an excellent solution for anyone looking to implement an online store with the minimum of expense and hassle; it is ready to go almost immediately after installation. All you need to do is add your products using the back-end administration tool, and add some of your store's personal information (such its business address, policies and delivery details). If you’re happy with the layout and color scheme, that’s almost it. Go live, make money.

But what if you’re not happy with how it looks? Or want to add or remove certain features? The community services are there of course, but why read through countless online documents, or start a thread in the forum and hope that someone replies? This article will outline some of the basic changes that need to be made in order to customize the catalogue and shopping cart.

What to know before you make changes

Figuring out exactly which files play which part in the overall scheme of how the application works can take some time, especially if you’re new to PHP. Once you’ve installed it and taken a look in the file manager through the admin tool, you’ll appreciate what I mean. It’s made up of a multitude of files, modules and functions integrated seamlessly to form the catalog. Every file includes (as in server-side includes) at least five other files, and keeping track of what changes need to be made where can be a little complicated.

Before making any changes to the code behind the application, there are a couple of things of which you need to be aware. First, although the admin tool does contain the facility to edit live files using the file manager function, I would strongly recommend not doing this–for some reason, it seriously messes with the site. Any file to be edited should be downloaded and edited locally.

Second, the facility to upload files should be restricted to graphics files. Any code files need to be uploaded using an FTP client. Code files uploaded using the admin tool are given a permission of 777 (full read, write and execute), which will kill your site instantly and generate error 500 pages. The FTP client you use needs to have the CHMOD function, which not all FTP programs have (Cute FTP Pro does). Upload the code using your FTP software, then right-click the file you’ve uploaded and select CHMOD. In the CHMOD window, change the file permissions to 644 (owner read and write, visitor read-only).

Logo and colors

Now, first of all, you’ll probably want to remove the osCommerce logo from the top of the page and replace it with your own. This is easy enough and can be done manually by editing the header.php file in the catalog/includes directory. Open the file in any text editor (Notepad will do) and scroll down past the osCommerce declaration at the top, and all of the IF statements. In the first of the nested tables, there is a reference to the current logo:

Simply change the GIF name to that of your own logo (having first uploaded your image to the images directory of course) and amend the alt text (the text in single quotes). All done. There should be another osCommerce logo at the bottom of the page. Since you’re using open source software, completely free of charge and restriction, you really should keep this in place. Other banners can be added using the banner manager in the admin tool, which is also where the osCommerce one can be removed if you really can’t bear the sight of it.

Next, we deal with the colors. If your business already exists in the real world, you probably already have a color scheme. If you’re purely an e-shop, for the sake of individuality, you’ll still want to use your own brand of colors. Whichever scenario you fit into, color changes to the site in general are made solely in the stylesheet file which resides in the catalog folder. Download the file and open it in any text editor locally. Graphics, such as buttons and rounded table edges, will need to either be replaced or edited to fit in with your branding.

I won’t go through every selector and class in this file. A lot of them can be left as they are; the error message colors should be left the same for example, and to even be using an advanced application such as this in the first place I’d expect you to have a basic grasp of CSS. In order to change the look of the boxes that are set at the left and right edges of the page, look for the infoBox entries, of which there are four, and make any necessary changes. Other classes you will want to adjust, in order of appearance are; TR.headerNavigation, TD.headerNavigation, TR.footer, TD.footer, .productListingHeader, TD.productListing-data, TD.pageHeading, DIV.pageHeading, and TD.fieldValue. This should ensure that all objects on the page adhere to your colour scheme. Again, upload the new file to the catalog folder using your own FTP client and set the file permissions to 644.

Site content

As for your site's content, some of the information is added to your site using the admin tool (your products and their attributes for example), and some of the information is defined using PHP and environment variables. Some of the content is even hard-coded into the pages directly (although this is rarely the case!)

To edit the information that is defined in included files, you need to find the file that contains the define statement, not the file that contains the include statement. To change the Shipping & Returns information for example, you need to replace the file called shipping.php that is contained in the following directory:

You simply add your own text and any mark-up required between the single quotes in the following statement:

This will add your information using an include statement to the file also called shipping.php which is found in:

Most files in the catalog directory have a matching file in the English, Spanish and German directories which will contain the actual content of your pages. These are the files that need to be updated to change the default text.

InfoBoxes, step one

The infoBoxes are a versatile and dynamic feature of the catalog.  Different pages or actions will cause different boxes to be displayed, and one of the things you may want to do is create your own infoBox. This is a three-part process. It starts with the file that actually creates the infoBox. For this example, I’ll show you how to make a box called links.php, containing links taken from other areas of the site.

You may be used to using notepad to create HTML and script files. For working in PHP, you may find that one of the many specialist code editors that are available will help make your life easier. I like to use the excellent Xint text editor: it’s free, it has line numbers (useful for debugging) and it features color coding (which helps you sort your HTML from your PHP and your If statements from your XML).  It has a whole bunch of other features too, but these are the main benefits.

Whichever text editor you use, open it now and add the PHP declaration and an ID and date comment:

To keep with the consistency of the pre-defined boxes, the above statement should be kept intact, and comments used to mark the beginning and end of the box:

In order to give the box an appropriately colored heading bar, you’ll need to embed your box in a table and include the following array:

The names of your links can be changed of course, but essentially, once you have finished the code:

then saved the file as links.php, step one is pretty much complete. Upload the file in the normal way to the includes folder.

InfoBoxes, steps two and three

Next, you need to define the links you have just created. Provided your site is produced in English, you’ll need to browse to the following directory:

and download the English.php file.

Open the file and add the following code pretty much anywhere:

That will give your box its heading. Now define the links themselves:

The text inside the single quotes is the text that is displayed in the box as the link, and the text in capitals is the action that occurs when the link is clicked. In order for this to work, you will need to associate the actions with a PHP file, this is done using the filenames.php file that is held in the following location:

To associate an action with a page, simply add a line of code like this almost anywhere in the file:

Save and upload the files to their original locations, and proceed directly to step three, inserting the box on a page. You’ll need to download and edit either the column_left.php or column_right.php file, depending on which side of the page you want the box to appear. Both of these files appear in the includes directory also. Open whichever is applicable and simply add the following statement:

Save and upload the file, then open the catalog in your browser. Your box should be there in all its beautiful glory!

There are many more minor tweaks that can give your online store its individual personality, and the addition of a huge bank of downloadable modules and code to the community services can take things even further. I hope that I’ve given you enough information to get yourself going, and enough inspiration to use the application in the first place.

OsCommerce is different than normal shopping cart systems available in the market. This is an integration of stand alone catalog and shopping cart system which comes ready straight out of the box with a wide range of features.

Features like Customer login and shopping history, order status, shipping information, multiple shipping addresses, product rating and reviews, best sellers, payment processing, tax calculation are to name a few. In short, it is a complete solution for your virtual store front. It is very important to develop a Custom osCommerce Application which is customer friendly, represents your business and your store in the best possible manner which generates profit.

Customers should feel more comfortable about your product, or they will not buy it. It is a good strategy to give something for free as sample to try out. Our experienced developers can develop custom osCommerce Applications with additional features according to your requirement.