is OSCommerce any good?

blade007

blade007

blade007

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16 Jun 2003
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I'm looking for a shopping cart.

Oscommerce (and it's derivatives) are obviously the first ports of call. After visiting some forums, though, there's nothing but scorn .. "why anyone would want to use OScommerce is beyond me?"

reasons generally given are ... duplicate content, poor coding design (which affects spidering), and difficult to customise

anyone got an OSCommerce site ... and how's it going?
 
It is generally a nightmare from a coder's point of view, however from a user's point of view it (or its variations) are pretty good. Zen Cart is quite clean and straightforward to use, for example.

What OSCommerce and its variations do have is a huge range of add-ons, and of course no price-tag.:)
 
I started making a site with it, but found it confusing to customise.

I ended paying someone on getafreelancer.com to design it.

the site was www.faelsafe.co.uk which u can look at, but bear in mind it's a live site.
 
quite a good site there The_KID

I see you are using MOD Re-write too... nice

How easy it to maintain? like, put new products in, and print invoices etc.
 
I'm looking at Zen too, it's looks not bad, not bad at all.

Except the template I want to base it on, doesn't render properly in IE and all the text disappears (FFS!!)
 
blade007 said:
quite a good site there The_KID

I see you are using MOD Re-write too... nice

How easy it to maintain? like, put new products in, and print invoices etc.
Click to expand...


New product and invoicing etc is very simple. Its got built in features for those things.

Its more the custom modding of it I found difficult. I have custmoised sites before and can write and understand basic sql and php, but I found the coding of osc difficult.
 
We used oscommerce for a site and it was an absolute nightmare to do anything, we tried to strip it down as much as we could and we eventually got there.
 
http://www.scalesmart.com

Thats my site and its quite heavily modified. If you know how to code in PHP then you'll be fine. The hard part is adding various contributions nad getting them all working. There are quite a few contributions i have used on the backend as well as front end and also a lot of hacks that i have done.

We have added quite a few extra content pages and google seems to like them. I have a PR of 3/4 and very good listing for my keywords.

Good luck!
 
I had roughly the same problem with OScommerce, if you spend a lot of time working out where things are etc then its possible but in the end I ended up writing my own which worked like OScommerce but organized in a way that I can easily manipulate and manage.
 
those couple of sites above look quite neat. - very smart indeed.

I had a look at the code, though, and there's reams of it. All those tables and stuff .. i am more used to CSS and <div> coding.

I think I'm going to use Zen Cart, as its templates support CSS.
 
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