OsCommerce is a system that is continually being developed and improved by the open source community-thus the term OsCommerce. There are a lot of people, like programmers and designers, who are currently working on the development of this software. Their goal is to find the best solutions for making online shopping a hassle-free experience for both consumers and sellers. To continue such a cause, there are various OsCommerce contributions that you can download. These are add-ons and updates that you might want to integrate in your existing online store.

To give you a more concrete idea of what types of OsCommerce contributions you can incorporate on your site, here is a quick list of OsCommerce modules that you can benefit from.

Languages

One of the more important sections of OsCommerce contribution list is probably the language section. Every country in the globe has access to the Internet. If you started an online shop, you instantly ventured into the global market. This is why installing languages packs for your site is very important. There are a lot of packages that you can choose from including languages like Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and Russian. The list of language packs available can go on and on.

Credit Modules

There are more than 250 packages under credit modules contributions. You can find here direct payments gateways, points and rewards modules, coming-soon features, credit card number encryption and a lot more. You can even download a module that can give you order updates directly to your mobile phone or through SMS.

Images and Design

If you wanted to give your online stores some jazzing up, you can also incorporate your creativity by using images, templates and themes that you can instantly download. There are ready-to-use buttons, automatic thumbnails, arrow images, and other useful images you can add to your site. You can also install templates and themes for your online stores. There are various designs, layouts and colors that you can choose from that can coincide with your website’s branding.

Payment Modules

There is a lot of payment processors that you can use for your online store. You can choose from a number of payment modules and use them on your site for easy process of payments. There are modules specially made for Paypal, which is the most popular payment processor on the Internet. Other payment modules works with AlertPay, direct bank payments, Bpay and many others.

Reports

There are also a number of reports contributions that can help you organize your business. You can take advantage of customer reports, product sales reports, catalog listings, order tracking and a lot more.

Shipping Modules

Another important OsCommerce contributions that your online store needs are shipping modules. You can add in delivery tracking number on your customer’s order history, free shipping, international shipping and EMS shipping modules, among others.

Installing modules are relatively easy. You just have to download the packages in zip files, unzip them and upload to your website. Just a quick note, keep in mind that OsCommerce contributors may not offer support all the time. Use the modules at your own risk. Before installation, always back up your files.

Buttons are the most common elements of an online store. There are a number of downloadable buttons that can jazz up your site. You can choose from gradient, xp-interface, and even animated buttons.

If you want a certain look for your site, you can also browse downloadable templates that can add more personality to your site. Remember that branding is an important factor in establishing website recall. You can make your website quite unforgettable to your online visitors by choosing the right OsCommerce designs that fits your company name and the products you sell or the services you offer. You also had the option to choose a specific color theme for your online store. You can also download some CSS skins to add more spice to your storefront.

If you have some amount of creativity up your sleeves and want to create your OsCommerce designs, you can always do so.  If you want to design your own online store yourself, you need basic html or php knowledge because you need to edit some files. The basic files that you need to modify include the filenames includes/header.php, includes/footer.php, includes/left_column.php, includes/right_column.php, and stylesheet.css.

The first thing that you need to do is to change the default banner of OsCommerce that appears on your website header. You can log in to the admin section of your store and click on configuration, my store, and change show category count to “false”. Jump to tools and go to banner manager. Delete the existing OsCommerce banner and upload your own logo to the image folder on your website server and overwrite the image file oscommerce.gif.

You also need to change the name of OsCommerce and change it to the name of your online store. You open the file header.php and look for this string (DIR_WS_IMAGES . ‘oscommerce.gif’, ‘osCommerce’) change ‘osCommerce’ to the name of your website.

After changing these basic files, you can continue to modify the stylesheet.css file according to your preference. You can now download OsCommerce design plugins to add button images or to change the color scheme of your site.

Another option for you to make your online store more presentable is to hire a web programmer and/ or designer to modify the look of your online store. Make sure that you convey to the designer what you exactly wanted to your site. It might help that you show him a website that you might want to model your site from.

Without enough time, creativity, and effort, you will soon have a professional looking website that would not only impress your visitors but can also relatively mean a higher ROI for you.

Once you have your online store up and running, the development of your site doesn’t stop there. The open communities of web programmers are continually working on improving the software and adding in new features that you can incorporate to your site. These programs are called OsCommerce mods or modules.

OsCommerce modules can either be paid modules or you can download them for free. You can get a number of Oscommerce modules under the contributions section of OsCommerce.com. You don’t have to pay a single cent for these.  You need to download and install the modules yourself.  Take not that you are about to use these modules at your own risk, as most contributors do not offer support of any kind. For your website’s sake, always remember to back up your files for every new module installation.

If you want a more stable OsCommerce mod, there are web developers and companies who offer installation of modules at a cost. These companies develop their own line of programs. When something wrong arises from your module installation, you can always get in touch with them for support.

If you are no web developer, you can take great advantage of OsCommerce mods. They are fairly easily to install and get running. There are various types of modules that you can benefit from including credit modules, images, features, infoboxes, languages, order total modules, reports, payment modules, templates & theme, and shipping modules, among others.

OsCOmmerce mods can relatively make your site move ahead. It can add efficiency process customers’ orders and delivery. The user-friendliness of your site can definitely attract in more customers. Get to know how you can use OsCommerce mods to your advantage and you can possibly skyrocket your profits in no time.

One of the beauties of using an open source application is the community support from fellow osCommerce users which seems to go hand and hand with open source software these days.  Take a quick look at the osCommerce support forums and you will find hundreds of fellow webmasters answering each others questions at all hours of the day.

Not only does osCommerce perform well right out of the box, but being an open source application osCommerce is highly modifiable to suit just about anyone’s needs in an online shopping cart.

osCommerce contributions are one of the quickest and simplest ways to modify and enhance your eshop.  These contributions are in all essence little bundles of code which are designed to be added to your site to provide new features or eased functionality.  A wide variety of osCommerce contributions can be downloaded for free from the osCommerce contributions page.   These contributions were all donated to the community by other webmasters, and although many are quite useful one must remember they are free donations and quite possibly not tested in a wide range of conditions for extended periods of time and might need some tweaking to get them to perform properly.

Third  party development companies also produce a wide range of osCommerce contributions and modules including both paid and free contributions.    Many of these enhancements are extremely robust and well designed applications that have had a lot of deep thought put into their development to fill specific needs expressed by osCommerce webmasters.

A great example of a well thought out and quite useful osCommerce module that recently hit the market is know as Quick Updater by Concept Laboratory.  This particular osCommerce module was developed to reduce the time needed to make regular updates to your osCommerce product database by allowing you to update all your category and product fields across multiple products with a few simple mouse clicks.   Those of you with a big number of products or categories in your osCommerce eshop should consider giving this module a look.

The osCommerce shopping cart is by far considered among the most accepted scripts for online shopping carts available and has been proven repeatedly to be reliable.

osCommerce is a free open source shopping cart platform that is a solid choice for shopping sites of all sizes.

The greatest advantage about utilizing a shopping cart built on an open source application is the community support from fellow osCommerce webmasters which seems to go hand and hand with open source script like osCommerce. Take a quick look at the osCommerce member support forums & one are going to find plenty of fellow osCommerce programmers answering community members questions daily.

osCommerce performs quite nicely straight from its default download, yet it does not stop there. Open source software can be tweaked quite nicely to perform exactly as needed by each shop owners style .

Free osCommerce Contributions are regarded as one of the cheapest methods to change & improve your eshop. osCommerce contributions are in all essence small bits of code which are created to be installed on your website that provide interesting features or improved functionality for your members.

An immense assortment of contributions for osCommerce can be downloaded for free at the osCommerce website. The contributions on osCommerce.com were provided to the community by other webmasters , and granted many are quite unique you should try to always keep in mind they are free donations & quite possibly not completely tested in a wide range of conditions for extended amounts of time, & possibily require extra tweaking in order to get these free osCommerce contributions to perform nicely on your website.

Third party programmers also offer a wide selection of osCommerce contributions including both paid & free contribution types. Many of these enhancements & contributions are well developed creative applications that have obviously had a good amount of talented brain storming devoted to their development to fill detailed needs expressed to them by osCommerce webmasters.

Concept Laboratory is one such third party developer that produces various high end contributions. One particularly useful contribution that the crew at Concept Laboratory provides is referred to as the “Quick Updater”.
The Quick Updater for osCommerce radically reduces the time necessary to administer your database down to the bare minimum through the use of a user friendly interface which allows you to modify all your products and categories with a few simple clicks of your mouse. This unique feature is priced at a point for all online shop owners to afford & will ultimately save you from the intimidating task of having to open each product one by one to edit their data. A must for any website with hundreds of products.

How does osCommerce work?

Now that you may have found a way to stock all of the products and inventory that you may have, the next dilemma comes when actually uploading them to your own website. Webmasters and online store owners can take advantage of the completely free osCommerce software by integrating all of their products that they have to sell by using the templates provided by osCommerce. Even though this may seem difficult to do, it is very simple and the osCommerce software is one of the easiest templates and piece of software to use for this purpose. Not only is the osCommerce software compatible with any of the PHP versions, but the backend of the osCommerce software allows any store owner the ease of deleting, adding, and keeping track of all the products on his or her website.

The importance of the open source shopping cart that osCommerce has to offer even provides customers with the ease of buying products. But customers will not only enjoy the benefits of the open source shopping cart. Website and store owners will be able to see how many products were viewed and purchased through the osCommerce shopping cart products, which will allow them to make decisions about whether to keep their products or get rid of some of their inventory.

Benefits of osCommerce

If you are a webmaster and you are trying to decide whether or not to use the osCommerce shopping cart, among other products, the benefits totally outweigh the negatives by using their software. Not only will using this open source shopping cart be beneficial to customers as well as to the store owners, there is a large selection of free contributions that one can use with the osCommerce software, plenty of online community support in case you are having trouble, and many more great features about the software that are too many to name here.

However, if you are deciding on a piece of software that costs a good chunk of money, osCommerce is not only free, but their products, like the open source shopping cart software, offers great features that are too good to pass up. Webmasters should consider osCommerce the cream of the crop when looking for software to sell their products. Thousands of people are already using osCommerce, and you could be the next one to have success with your online store using this open source shopping cart!