Subscribe Feed (RSS)Setting Up an ECommerce Website: Installation & Basics
May 2nd, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under eCommerce.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!
Is this shopping cart tool free? How is it possible? Do they advertise on your site in exchange for a free cart system?
Yep! OSCommerce is 100% free. There are others out there that are also free, but after doing my research, it seems that OSC is the best supported platform. I’ll continue to post about my experience getting my cart up and running . . . stay tuned for my adventures (or misadventures)
Josh,
I look forward to seeing how this turns out. I installed OSC on my wife’s website back several months ago, and before the whole thing was over, I just got frustrated and uninstalled. Not because of that cart in particular, but the whole experience got me a little overwhelmed. I hope it works great for you. If it does, I may give it another go!
Anthony – Now I’m starting to feel some pressure! Know that I tried this in the past as well, but stopped after getting frustrated also (I was using ZenCart then). I’m much more motivated and determined to make it happen now, though. Last time I was really just playing around.
Oscommerce is ok, but you need a lot of extra plugins before you hava a descent ecommerce solution.
Hey,
If I am honest osCommerce is good but outdated, there are better things out the for free also. If you try Magento you will see how much better it is. The system that comes with Magento has all the things you could want anyway. Be aware the hosting of it needs to be good cause it runs quite slow.
Thanks,
Richard.