http://www.myoscommercetemplates.com

http://www.myonlinetemplates.com

My particular gripe is that while oscommerce development marches on, template development doesn’t. You may find a perfectly suited template, only to find out that it is not compatible with your version of OsC, and that can be significant, given how clumsy and bloated OsC has become for code developers.

Here is my particular story to explain exactly what I’m talking about.

I’m running the latest and greatest version of OsC because it’s a new install and that is the version currently available, duh. I found the perfect template at the web’s largest paid template provider – you know the one, so I’m not about to give them free advertizing here. Their stock might well be huge, but not all templates are compatible with the currently available version of OsC. So unless you are using, or can find, an outdated version of OsC, this provider’s option to you is that if you pay them an additional fee, they will upgrade their obsolete template to work with the current version.

Part of me says, ok, fine, let’s just get this over with, but then I make the mistake of thinking logically and asking them a very important question: Once I pay this fee to upgrade your template to something currently useful, does this become the new version available to other customers? Or will you charge the next person an ‘upgrade fee’ as well?

The answer I got was more sales talk about how it would then definately work with the latest version, but my very pointed question was cleverly and blatantly avoided, no matter how many times I asked it.

So…. at the very best, I am paying their development fees for a product they will now be able to sell over and over again. At worst, I will have paid their development fee, but then so will everybody else who wants or needs the upgrade, despite the fact that the work has already been done and paid for. For all I know, someone may have already gone down this same road and paid to have it upgraded once already.

Incidentally, this is one of those vendors that leads you in with ‘free templates’ because they have two or three ‘samples’ available for download to try their product. Those may be free to download, but can’t be used because they are so heavily watermarked.

The bottom line to my story is that I have decided to leave the perfect template on the shelf, and have found a less perfect, though graphically modifiable substitute elsewhere from someone who doesn’t play these bait and switch games.

I just can’t believe that in this current economic climate, someone was willing to lose a ready, willing, and able buyer’s few hundred dollars because they were holding out for a few dollars more to provide the product they claim to provide to begin with.

So not only is it impossible to find a decent free template, but you cant even buy one at the advertised price once you’ve been lured in by the bait-and-switch shops.