oscommerce is a user friendly ecommerce store building program, to give you an idea of what it can do, let's look at the features offer by oscommerce :-
- General Features
- Completely multilingual with English, German, and Spanish provided by default
- Setup / Installation
- Automatic web-browser based installation and upgrade procedure
- Design / Layout
- Template struture implementation to:
- allow layout changes to be easy and quickly
- allow easy integration into an existing site, for example an online store complimenting a content site
- Support for dynamic images
- Backend Administration
- unlimited products and categories
- Products to categories setup
- Categories to categories setup
- Add/Edit/Remove categories and products as well as supporting info such as manufacturers, customers record, and clients reviews on products
- Support for physical goods (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
- secured Administration area
- customers communication via email or newsletters
- Easily backup and restore the database
- Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
- Products and customers statistics
- Multilingual support
- Multicurrency support
- Automatically update currency exchange rates
- Flexible product listing page, you can choose what to display, and in what order
- Static and dynamic banners system with full statistics
- Frontend Customer
- All orders are stored in database for quick access
- Order history and order status available to customer
- Customers can maintain their accounts
- Customers can setup own address book with multiple shipping and billing addresses
- Dual mode shopping cart, temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for existing customers
- Fast basic search and advanced search features
- Product reviews and comments system for an interactive shopping experience
- Forseen checkout procedure
- Secure transactions with SSL option available (require SSL cert to be installed separately)
- Hide / Show number of products in each category
- Store wide and per-category best seller lists
- Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
- Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation
- Product
- Dynamic product attributes relationship
- HTML based product descriptions
- Automated display of special offers
- Hide / Show out of stock product items and are available for purchase
- Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails / newsletters
- Payment
- Multiple payment capture for offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
- Support wide list of popular credit card payment gateway for online payment processing (2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
- Disallow certain payment services based on a zone
- Shipping
- Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
- Integrated real-time shipping quotes (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
- Offer free shipping based on amount and destination
- Turn off certain shipping services based on a zone
- Tax
- Flexible tax implementation based on a state and country
- Define different tax rates for different products
- Ability to charge shipping tax based on difference shipping service
With this long set of features and the flexibility of oscommerce, you can easily build many different types of online stores, you can take a look at the long list of live shops built with oscommerce, please take note that those are active live shops and individual website owners are doing actual online busines, you should not submit test orders at any of them. If you would like to test out oscommerce, you can register a new oscommerce hosting plan and install a oscommerce program to test it out.
