OScommerce and sales

[kc0eks]

Hello all,
I currently use OSCommerce for all of my ecommerce sites, and generating any sort of sale comes few and far between. I am wondering if this shopping cart program in your opinion is too hard for the average online buyer to use? I have added many contributions and it looks great (IMO) and I can check out just fine, but im noticing a lot of people exit on my shopping cart pages.

If you dont think oscommerce is a good idea, what do you recomend?

thanks all!

[Essex_boy]

I dontthink its too hard for people to use, its more than likly;

1: your listings i.e products, photo description or price
2: I have never found OSC to be overly spiderable so your visitorsmay be few and far between.

3: Your payment processor, are you using Paypal?

[mack]

I once helped out building a site with Oscommerce and to be honest I don't think it is ideal to be used as a stand alone site. You might want to have a think about perhaps creating static pages for each product. This may well help out from an seo point of view.

I would think along the lines of building a standard homepage outwith oscommerce, you can add the html for the drop downs etc to offer quick access to the cart system, but generaly build a static site for as many of your product categories as possible. Then when they click on buy sent them over to oscommerce. As Essex_boy said oscommerce is not the easiest of carts to spider. If you can offer as much spider bait as possible you may well be able to increase traffic and hopfully sales.

Mack.

[bird]

The standard checkout procedure with OSCommerce is very unfriendly.

- You need to register to buy something.
- You need to give your personal details before you're informed about the shipping costs.
- There are even more severe problems if your transaction is non-standard (eg. if the shipping and billing address is not the same).

If I have a choice between several sites as a buyer, then the one using OSCommerce will invariably lose.

[boxerman]

We currently use oscommerce on one of our sites and I would have to agree it can be setup nicely but seems to have issues depending upon you visitors.

our visitors are probably not the most web savy and we receive countless emails and calls each day asking how to check out, why do I have to create an account, etc...

There are some modifications with osc that can be done to help the checkout process (i.e. checkout w/o account).

Other issues we run into is on some visitors it does not let them update their address. I have yet to figure out why, but if they put it in incorrectly the first time, they can not change it. We track all activity and you can see customers clicking backl and forth trying to change their address 30 times before giving up and leaving the site. What causes this, I have no idea. It does not happen when I test and does not show any consistancy based on browser version, operating system, state etc...

Another issue with checkout as mentioned is problems shipping to a different address than the billing. Again, i have no idea why this happens but for some customers it will not let them ship anywhere but their billign address. Other customers, this is not a problem. Maybe it does not even have to do with the cart?

If anyone understands these issues, please feel free to let me know as maybe there is an easy fix I have overlooked?

We do not have the issue getting the site crawled. We have about 5500 pages indexed and all rank well.

We are currently looking for an alternative cart but have not found anything much better. x-cart looks nice but we would have to modify the checkout on this also.

[shahed]

I have been running 4 oscommerce sites and also maintain 27 clients oscommerce site. I have tried many other cart and none of them get close to what oscommerce offers. Everyday i find many contribution which I impliment and my business is growing.