"Did you had experience with OS Commerce ? If so, was it good or bad?"

We use our own custom version of osCommerce for the online shop part of our sitebuilder service, and we have a number of clients using our service, and our experience has been good.

I would only recommend going the DIY osCommerce install and customise on your own web hosting route for companies who have or can afford to pay for technical people or companies with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, osCommerce skills.

Initial installation isn't too bad, but osCommerce should not be considered a ready made solution, it should only be used as a base for developing your final system, and to do this, even making some simple cosmetic changes, requires making changes to PHP programming code. Customisation is not usually just the case of making cosmetic changes, there are also important contributions that need to be integrated (like SEO, autothumbnailing, product option level stock control) and other changes to make the system more UK friendly, requiring more code changes, to make the final system more professional.

"How tight is securityon OS Commerce site?"

The default installation is not secure, it has to be made to be secure. For instance the first thing you should do is password protect the admin directory. osCommerce can be made to be secure at various levels.

When considering security, the question sometimes arises of whether you should take credit card payments on your site, or send the buyer off to another site like paypal or worldpay to make the credit card payment. For small businesses we recommend that you send the buyer offsite to make the payment, that way the buyer knows that they are only divulging sensitive credit card details to PayPal or WorldPay, companies they know and trust, rather than divulging this information to a small business which they may have no experience or trust with. For this scenario your security measures do not have to be as stringent as those of say a PayPal or Worldpay site, since your site is not handling credit card information.

"Is it better to go for other ready-made solutions?"

Most definitely, if you do not have technical programming skills or cannot afford developer rates. With our service, we have already done all the hard technical work required to turn the default osCommerce system into a professional ecommerce system for UK businesses operating on a budget, so you don't have to worry about this.
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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
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