Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I really wanted to like osCommerce. I mean, it’s one of the most popular shopping carts in use online and has a huge developer community building modules to do pretty much everything you can imagine. Plus it’s open source so you can download a copy for free, a huge deal when you compare to the prices of most other carts. Since you have access to the source you can customize EVERYTHING and there are several companies that are doing just that to great effect. I had a couple weeks to get my e-commerce site up and running and I was getting very frustrated with my inability to customize my Volusion website so I decided to give osCommerce a try.

One of the first hassles I ran into with osCommerce was trying to figure out how to do a secure install with my webhost. I don’t really know much about SSL and certificates and unfortunately my hosting company was of little help in this regard. I did manage to move my hosting account to the “secure server” (whatever that meant) and was ready to install.

The osCommerce software package out of the box has most of the features you need for an e-commerce site: product catalog, product categories, shopping cart, etc. However, I also needed the ability to create coupons and promotions, sell gift cards, and track inventory at the option level (i.e. t-shirts by size and color). Luckily there are some highly recommended “mods” available to do just these things. Perfect!

I had a little trouble following the detailed instructions required for installation, luckily BBEdit’s compare function saved the day. You see, to install most osCommerce mods you need to edit the source code for multiple PHP files by hand just to get them working. Missed a line of code or copied it incorrectly? Too bad, you probably just broke your shopping cart. Fortunately there is a huge community of volunteers out there willing and able to give support via the osCommerce community forums.

osCommerce has been around for several years (more than 6 years now) and there are more than 10K online shops using osCommerce today. Many of the software mods and add-ons have been around for almost as long, meaning you’ll need to catch up on a few years’ worth of postings before you ask your question on the forums (etiquette, remember?). Chances are someone else had the same problem or question as you but it’s nearly impossible to wade through all the back-and-forth contained in the forums. Then again, maybe you’re the first to encounter such a problem…

Since there are so many mods and add-ons available for osCommerce and there isn’t a central body coordinating all the add-ons, you’ll probably run into some compatability issues when you try to install more than one mod. With more than 2,000 mods available, you can do the math and figure out how many possible unique combinations one could come up with for their installation. I just needed 2 modules: gift card and voucher system + an inventory system. Even with just 2 mods I ran into issues trying to get the two to play nicely together. After 2 days of screwing around, I was done.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an amateur hacker hoping for a double-click install here. I just need something that I can see could potentially work. I was also quickly frustrated with the administrative back-end which paled in comparison to the commercial packages I considered. I never even made it to the point of customizing the look of my store but I imagine I would have run into just as many frustrations.

If you’re a web design and coding firm it might make sense for your team to take a few months to build a scalable working version of osCommerce with a robust templating system and the most popular e-commerce features built in (like Varien did). If you’re a small online business operator, stick with something cheap like Yahoo! Stores or even free like Big Cartel and save yourself the effort.

A few months back Joe and I started getting friend requests from strange women on MySpace. Now this in itself is not interesting or really all that unusual except for the fact that these messages would usually hit just after logging in to MySpace. Essentially if one of us logged in to check new messages or something, we would be hit with up to a dozen friend requests in the space of the 5 minutes we were online. It was as if the spammers had an inside track on who was online when. Not only that, on at least one occasion Joe clicked on a user’s name to view her profile and was quickly wisked away to a (non-Myspace) adult content site. Had the spammers taken over MySpace?

At the same time we also noticed spam coming through our Skype phone. We set up a Skype account for our business to make free long distance calls using the screen name messengerapparel (our company name). Now, several times a day, we get messages from India, China, the Phillipines, and Turkey offering us information on garment production overseas. The Skype spam is especially annoying because we somehow get pulled into random apparel chatrooms, requests for our contact info, and messages written in broken English all on our business phone. There must be some way to turn all this off but one would think the default configuration would keep the spam out a little better. How do you even search for random users on Skype, these guys must be pros!

It seems even the newest mediums of communication and expression quickly are hijacked by spammers for their own use. I would say mobile phones are next but in fact, that’s already been done (anyone else get the snakes on a plane text message?) If you think email spam is a big problem think again: spam will find you where ever you are!