An OSCommerce Review
I give OSCommerce a C rating.
OSCommerce is an open source shopping cart for the web. It is free to download and fairly simple (but not without flaw) to install on a Red Hat Linux machine. I have now done two implementations of OS Commerce. The first was for a site that sells Tire Chains. The second site is one that sells camping gear.
Now, I don’t wish to offend anyone on the development team who spent long hard hours unrewarded without pay. I am using this program on two websites. I greatly appreciate your contributions.
Installation (B)
The installation was mostly straight forward. Create a website space in apache, add a subdirectory called catalog, and unzip the tar file into the catalog subdirectory. Remember to follow the instructions in the README.txt file.
My only issue came after installation, I had issues with certain images not wanting to display. My fix was an undesirable hack be removing some .htaccess files that were blocking access to the path. Check the logs for the paths that are being blocked. There is probably a better fix available - I simply was not able to find it.
Admin Console (B)
The console has a lot of good functionality. You can populate your shopping cart from within this console and manage your users. What I found lacking was the ability to have a backdoor to give discounts to individuals or to create orders bypassing the payment system directly used in the websites. Backdoor approaches for managing orders may have been nice; but not necessary as basic functionality. Working with Images I found to be tricky. I ended up taking a standard templated size for my product images of 428 x 300 and populated all of the product with that size.
Shipping Cost (D)
Certain modules exist out of the box; however, none of them were satisfactory to my needs unless I offered free shipping. I am creating a UPS Module which should most certainly be an out of the box item. My module is not yet ready for production use and it will probably be another two months from now before I will be able to get back to it to perfect it.
Credit Card Processing (D)
The Pay Pal module is very simple to implement. However, there is one huge flaw. If the user does not click on the very final link in paypal, the purchase will not get registered in the OSCommerce system; however, the purchasers credit card will get charged. That is really bad.
I tried signing up for payquake and all they offered was another Authorize.net payment gateway. PayQuake had no knowlege on how to use the out of the box module in OSCommerce and refused to support it. I personally refuse to go with Authorize.net as my experience with their customer service is probably the worst I have seen in a large company in my life-that is a topic for another day.
So I have concluded that I am having to piggybacking off of the out of the box credit card module with my own customizations to make it process credit card transactions in real time.
Basically, most non-programmers will be completely stuck at this point with no good alternative but to either switch shopping carts or pay someone to do some programming for them.
Theme Support (F)
Most open source web applications have strong theme support. This allows you to set up your own look and feel without disturbing application logic. Examples of this are Wordpress, Simple Machines Forum, and PHPBB–all of which have very good separations of display code from the application logic. OSCommerce display logic is very much embedded into the application logic. This causes two problems:
1. If you do know know php, then you will have a very difficult time doing any real customizing to your look and feel.
2. If you wish to upgrade to a newer out of the box version of OSCommerce, your look and feel will have to be redone. Upgrades in wordpress happen often for security reasons. It would be disasterous for the bloggers if thier themes were destroyed during every upgrade.
Customization (B+)
Some of the out of the box open source software programs are very rigid and difficult to customize. This largely depends on how much abstraction has been added. I personally hate overly abstracted programs because it takes longer to learn the abstraction then it does to just change plain old simple code. In my opinion, PHPBB and Media Wiki are examples of overly abstracted programs. Wordpress, Simple Machines Forums, and OSCommerce are not. As a result, it is not difficult to make a lot of basic changes that you or your client may desire in the shopping cart.
Conclusion (C)
If you do not have any PHP programming skills and you have no money to pay for a programmer, I would avoid this platform. Unfortunately, I do not have a good alternative for you. A friend of mine recommended Zencart. If you are a php programmer-or can afford one, with a little bit of effort, you can go a long ways with OSCommerce. It has its flaws, but it does work for me.