My perfect OsCommerce

OsCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available free of charge.

It can be a bit overwhelming for a new user to get to grips with it though & to find your way around all the features & make it work nicely for the Australian Market is a bit tough.

I have experience in setting up several stores using OsCommerce & I'd like to share what I consider to be essential addons:

Australian Shipping Module This module allows you to set different shipping rates based on weight, for each of the states of Australia.

Ultimate SEO URLs gives flexible, search engine friendly, and cross server compatible SEO URLs.

Purchase Without Account Allow your customers to choose the three following options at checkout time:

  1. Proceed Directly to Checkout (no account creation)
  2. Create a New Account
  3. Login to Existing Account

Even better than Purchase Without Account is:

AJAX checkout for OsCommerce will add an alternative way for your customers to checkout: a new single page AJAX-driven checkout procedure to your Oscommerce store.
(I've seen this in use on a few sites & although it's around $250.00 I believe it to be a worthwhile purchase, many shopping cart users seem to abandon the cart at the checkout page & this addition lessens that likelihood.)

Now to the design side of things, take a look through the Live Shops Directory; to be honest most of the sites shown are pretty bad :( They either simply use the default oscommerce template or the site owners have tried to add too much in one page ... just because oscommerce has a ton of features it does not mean that they should all be used at once & by everyone .. less can be more!

I've been selling OsCommerce Templates through my website as an affiliate of Template Monster for a while now & they are a great way to lower the cost of development.

They do have some truly fantastic templates, my advice is that you should look through all of them to get a feel for how a great oscommerce site can be displayed, it doesn't matter which category they are listed under, just look at the overall layout & then with some extra tweaking, fine tune the template to your needs..

You will notice that the best OsCommerce sites cut down on the amount of text & let the images of the products tell the story, for this you need to have high quality images to begin with & apart from the thumbnail you need another good quality image at a larger size.

Of course if you like any or all of my recommendations you could either install them yourself or hire me :)

I would be happy to obtain the Template & AJAX Checkout licences, install the addons for you, tweak the template to your needs & otherwise install OsCommerce using my experience of it.

If you would like to run any ideas past me just Contact Me or ask for a Free Estimate.

 

29.03.2008. 15:59

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