1.What Is osCommerce?
2.What are the Features of osCommerce?


What Is osCommerce?
 osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with absolutely no costs or license fees involved.

osCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable Apache web server, and the fast MySQL database server.



What are the Features of osCommerce?
Although osCommerce is still in its development stage, the available Milestone releases are considered to be stable with the following features:

• General Functionality
  • Compatible with all PHP 4 versions
  • All features enabled by default for a complete out-of-the-box solution
  • Object oriented backend (3.0)
  • 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 adaptive, easy, and quickly to make (3.0)
    • allow easy integration into an existing site (3.0)
  • Support for dynamic images
• Administration / Backend Functionality
  • Supports unlimited products and categories
    • Products-to-categories structure
    • Categories-to-categories structure
  • Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
  • Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
  • Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation
  • Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
  • Easily backup and restore the database
  • Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
  • Statistics for products and customers
  • Multilingual support
  • Multicurrency support
    • Automatically update currency exchange rates
  • Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
  • Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics
• Customer / Frontend Functionality
  • All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
  • Customers can view their order history and order statuses
  • Customers can maintain their accounts
    • Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
  • Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
  • Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
  • Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
  • Forseen checkout procedure
  • Secure transactions with SSL
  • Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
  • Global and per-category bestseller lists
  • Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
  • Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation
• Product Functionality
  • Dynamic product attributes relationship
  • HTML based product descriptions
  • Automated display of specials
  • Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
  • Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters
• Payment Functionality
  • Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
  • Accept numerous online payment processing (PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
  • Disable certain payment services based on a zone basis
• Shipping Functionality
  • Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
  • Real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
  • Free shipping based on amount and destination
  • Disable certain shipping services based on a zone basis
• Tax Functionality
  • Flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
  • Set different tax rates for different products
  • Charge tax on shipping on a per shipping service basis