osCommerce e-store

WPOnlineStore e-store for Graphicline

Finally, after several days trying e-commerce solutions, I am going to use osCommerce and WordPress for the PC store with the WPOnlineStore system.

As I mentioned, the Drupal 7 option requires several unstable modules; after running up a development Drupal system, there were clearly going to be some problems with the plugins that I don’t intend to spend time fixing.

WordPress commerce systems tried included WP E-Commerce, wpStoreCart and finally osCommerce which worked out the best of the lot, and is the easiest to set up as well requiring just a shortcaode added to a single page to create a full online store.

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osCommerce is highly configurable with lots of functionality, and provided the appearance I was looking for anyway. A WordPress theme, probably Mystique, will be used on the front end; it looks good on the testing server, and matches some of our other themes (as well as this blog).

The Mystique theme is the Ajax powered version 3.1 from Digital Nature which also offers numerous options. Possibly using this theme is overkill as the WordPress part of the production store will be very basic, not much more than a front end for the shop.

The latest WordPress version will be used, version 3.3

osCommerce SSL Support

Another useful feature, osCommerce supports SSL (secure Socket Layer) adding security to the site for financial transactions. Although not required at the moment as only PayPal and Online transfer payment methods will e used, should the need to accept credit cards directly arise, the basics are already in place.

Other e-commerce systems tested:

Zen Cart, Uber Cart for Drupal (very nice system when the Drupal 7 required modules get a bit more development and are stable), and Cube Cart were tried  as well.

Cube Cart was a serious contender, however I wanted to stay with the Open Source principle of free to use, and Cube Cart is commercial software.

osCommerece was also installed as a stand-alone installation for testing.

wpStoreCart interesting, lacks supporting themes

This is an interesting and simple to use system, but lacks  suitable themes. Only a couple of themes work with the system, most lose the very functions are the attraction. I don’t have time to build  a theme or adapt an existing one to use the plugin with…

WPOnlione Store e-commerce System Used for 6 months

WPOnlineStore / osCommerce was used for six months on this site (up to 7 July 2012) – The following remarks are now history

I am looking forward to the next stages of the build of this online shop; installing and setting up the live site, then setting up the product catalogue. (After 6 months I can say WPOnline store osCmmerce for WordPress is a great easy to use system)

Several hundred products to capture over the next 4 weeks, should occupy the time over the holiday season. Then at the same time will be a full series of product support pages with greater details.

One of the very difficult tasks facing an e-commerce site builder is to convince search engines to rate pages high in SERP. I will take a more time consuming route by adding full product detail pages for all the main items based on information value – hopefully Google Panda will treat this as well as it does the other content on my various websites and this blog.

Related articles

• Graphicline E-Store (graphiclineweb.wordpress.com)