Forum Moderators: buckworks
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[oscommerce.com...]
I have often considered osCommerce myself, but last time I researched it there were issues with the Session ID being presented to search engine crawlers. This may have changed, but I haven't read a reliable hack that people were implementing successfully. I am also concerned with speed as my site is based on static HTML. If I could get the performance of say webmasterworld yet have dynamic features, that would be ideal. But complex storefronts tend to be slower than I want, especially on shared hosts.
The downside of osCommerce is that it is a huge, complex script... Depending on the features you want to implement, it can be a bear to set up and customize. But, if you're comfortable messing around in PHP code, there isn't much it can't be customized to do... and the price is right if you can do it yourself, but there are also hundreds of people experienced in setting up osCommerce installations that will get it running for you for a reasonable fee.
Otherwise, I would go for litecommerce which can integrate into your site as if it were Mal's and you will get a storefront as well as a static html catalog.
This might help:
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I like OSC - but i like zencart even better (in fairness i have yet to use it due to the maturity and amount of custom code on my sites - but when we roll out the new server).
ZenCart is a fork of OSC but takes into consideration templetization (largely missing from OSC), incorporation of common user mods (there are a lot of them for OSC but sorting garbage from good could be a full time job), and just plain allows for stuff lacking in the original.
On OSC:
OSC with a bit of helping can be very se friendly - 8560 pages in google for one of our small sites of ~100 products - and I am competitive on stuff from product names to two of the most sought after one word phrases (our particular widgets are not the most competitive out there however so take that into consideration). The guy I am most worried about competitor wise is also using an OSC backend.
That said a lot of the reason we are competitive is custom modifications - for instance OSC does not have a sitemap - alot of the contributions I found were garbage - thus I made my own. Familiarity with php, mysql, and css is all but a prerequisite to rank decently, the above forum post is not (but it didn't hurt my site).
As an aside there are one or more hosts that offer what I think are very solid relatively SE ready OSC based hosting solutions - my aforementioned competitor uses one of these and a healthy dose of forum spam and is giving me a run for my money, sticky me if you want the URL for one such hosting package (said hosts are sponsors of OSC and thus are mentioned on their site as well).
