osCommerce

Hi Sophie, I think you're spot on about re-inventing the wheel. Theres so many carts out there you'd be hard pushed to find one that doesn't fit your needs and if you've got the skills you can always build add-ons and tweak a little.

From what I've seen most users have been happy with oscommerce, although you might want to look at cre-loaded it's a suped up version of oscommerce, the templates look pretty good too. Theres also a STS (simple template system) for oscommerce, I've not tried it but apparently you can just drop the different modules into your own pre-built template.

All I will say is that I've just built a large ecommerce site, and the main criteria was the SEO side which is why I used a simple php system and stepped away from the database driven approach even after thinking about using url re-writes, mainly after the company owner said he'd probably only be adding a max of 5 new products each year it comes back to finding the best fit for the task at hand. Not only this but the php system I used allowed me 100% control over the look of the site.

I found this while I was looking for myself, hope it's not too much info but it'll certainly put your mind at rest that you've looked at a wide range of products.

Not tried 1and1 but if you're targeting UK customers try to get a UK host even if you have a .co.uk and 100% yes if you have a .com or you'll almost certainly find yourself missing from the Google UK rankings.

Hope that helps ............ Aaron

Hi Sophie,

osCommerce has its pluses and minuses. For an off the shelf e-commerce solution, it's not bad. The biggest plus is that you can deploy a site fairly quickly, and have a reasonable level of functionality right out of the box.

In addition, there are lots of developers out there familiar with it, so getting help or hiring someone to work on it for you is easy.

However, it does have a couple of big drawbacks. First, customising it visually is difficult - sure you can change the colours and layout, but because of the way the html is generated, the vast majority of osC installations end up looking very similar. It takes a huge amount of work to re-write all the html output components.

Second, it leaves a lot to be desired in the SEO department. There are lots of mods that attempt to address this, however one of the biggest hurdles is the use of tables for layout throughout, with very heavy nesting.

As for 1and1, I don't really like badmouthing ISPs, but whenever we've had to move domains away from them for clients moving to our hosting we've had a very difficult time, far more so than almost anyone else.

HTH
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www.symworks.com

0845 009 8230

UK web solutions

Since osCommerce is based on PHP and MySql, anyone who knows ASP and Access should expect some learning curve especially on the PHP side. There are a lot of subtle differences in the languages and expect a lot of PHP programming since making most changes to your osCommerce installation, even cosmetic ones, involves changing PHP code.

osCommerce should be treated as a base for developing your online shop, it should not be treated as an off the shelf system you just switch on and run with. There are a lot of things you have to do programatically to change the base osCommerce installation into a professional online shop, e.g. one of the many things you need to do is add autothumbnailing if you want good quality small images that can be enlarged to larger product images. This is done by installing osCommerce contributions, but it isn't as simple as running an install program, a contribution is basically a list of PHP source code and MySQL database changes you have to make as a programmer. Even if you go the osCommerce template route, where a template makes you think it is a finished shop, you still have to add these contributions since most templates are just the base osCommerce with a slightly different look, if you check live demos of the templates you will find that the thumbnails enlarge to pictures the same size as the thumbnails, this is to cover up the fact that an autothumbnailing feature hasn't been added. Installing contributions is even more difficult with osCommerce templates since the instuctions assume you are installing onto the default osCommerce installation. Don't forget that an osCommerce template is not a skin, it is a full default osCommerce installation which has been modified programmatically to look and operate differently. Contributions you may have to add for a professional shop include: autothumbnailing, SEO, product option stock control, payment modules (don't use the default PayPal module), more than one product image, discount vouchers, valid HTML etc. We know this because we have done this with our sitebuilder service, the online shop section of websites created with our sitebuilder uses our custom version of osCommerce.

Since 1and1 servers are based in Germany, make sure your domain is a .co.uk domain, otherwise if you have a .com domain it will be detrimental to your search engine ranking, there are some problems having non-UK hosted .co.uk domains too. Also check the PHP installation of your hosting plan, to see if it has GD extensions installed, these are required for autothumbnailing. If you want a fast shop, which is important for browsing, don't go for the cheapest hosting, since the cheaper the hosting, the more websites the hosting company stuffs on the server and the slower the pages load.

Whether your decision is a good one or not really depends on the type of shop you want, the types of products you want to sell, and how much you want to get involved as a technical programmer, and whether you are in the business of selling online or developing and maintaining an advanced e-commerce system. We certainly do not recommend this route for novices or for companies that don't want to take on the financial responsibility of maintaining their own custom advanced e-commerce software development project and the ongoing maintenance and financial responsibilities owning such a large system involves. Remember that as soon as you start making changes to the osCommerce code you end up with your own unique and complex system which you are responsible for. Our sitebuilder solution removes the worry of owning an osCommerce installation, our clients get on with their business and let us worry about maintaining the installation (e.g. maintaining, improving, migrating when osCommerce v3 is stable, etc)
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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
create, update your website today - the online professional site builder

Thanks for all that information. A lot of food for thought. I expect I will run with osCommerce for a while then get frustrated and change it. Although we don't have a large number of products they are constantly changing so I can't do a rewrite for every product.

As 1and1 didn't get an overwhelming response can anyone recommend a good host?

Many thanks

Sophie