Setting Up an ECommerce Website: Installation & Basics

After close to a month of research, exploration, and a lot of procrastination, I’ve come to a decision on the shopping cart solution I’m going to be using on my new online store. I’ve decided to go with OSCommerce for several reasons: affordability (free!), expandability (lots of plug-ins aka contributions), support (huge forum support community), and gut feeling (gotta go with the gut, right?).

I’m still lacking in proper information for Getting Started Setting Up an ECommerce Website, but I figured I’d learn as I went.

Here’s How Far I’ve Gotten With My eCommerce Website:

• Created a subdomain to put store onto: http://store.biggerpockets.com/
• Installed shopping cart onto new subdomain. (set up database, uploaded files, ran through install software)
• Initial steps customizing and configuring cart (I’ve filled out the basic info, but there is a ton of information that I’m not sure about. This is going to be tough to figure out!)
• Secured the administration panel through CPanel (OSC does not come with security for its admin panel)
• Replaced the OSC logo with the BiggerPockets logo.
• Started to look for any templates I could use to modify the cart (I’m not finding too many good ones, though)
• Begun to look for useful plugins (known as contributions for you OSCommerce newbies); here’s a decent list.

I realize that it is not much to look at, however, for me, the hardest part of setting up a script/application is deciding on using the application itself. I think the process will go fairly smoothly from here. I’ll keep you all in on the progress of things!

Related posts:

1. Getting Started Setting Up an ECommerce Website: Finding Info
2. Finding Free Open Source Shopping Carts and Other eCommerce News
3. Easy eCommerce with Shopify; Hosted Online Store Solution
4. What are SSL or TLS Certificates? An Explanation of Web Security Protocols for ECommerce Sites
5. Exploring Wikis and E-Commerce