osCommerce

osCommerce is a free, open-source application for running an online store.

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See Also

• ZenCart is a shopping cart system derived from osCommerce; it is also free/open-source, but apparently more measures have been taken towards user-friendliness in the setup.

Evaluation

Minor annoyances:

• No admin-authorization system; you have to use http access control, or roll your own
• Appears to need register_globals to be enabled in PHP, which is a security risk

There doesn't seem to be a way to import data from (e.g.) QuickBooks, unfortunately.

Text displayed on the site can in fact be edited via osCommerce's web interface; you have to read what the default text on the front page says. The text settings are intermingled with PHP code, however, which may be daunting for some users.

Reference

• home page
• Wikipedia

Links

• Tech Solutions can interface osCommerce and QuickBooks (not clear whether they can do this for other people or just their own hosted clients)

Notes

• Lesson 1: When the install script gives you two seemingly-identical files to chmod, note that even though they have the same name and are in the same directory, they are not the same file -- the path for one has "/admin" in it.
• Lesson 2: Do not delete all the Manufacturers before adding your own. You will get the following error:

1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '-20, 20' at line 1 select manufacturers_id, manufacturers_name, manufacturers_image, date_added, last_modified from manufacturers order by manufacturers_name limit -20, 20 [TEP STOP]