OS Commerce - How good is it?

[crackity jones]

I have raised about $10k for a new site, (actually a little more, but that will be used for purchasing inventory and marketing), and from lurking on this site, I know that OS Commerce is popular.

What I would like to know is there an option a step above OS Commerce as a platform, or is OS enough. I hope to do $500k in sales this year and another $750k next year. Can OS accomodate that? Based on my average order size, that is about 10,000 orders.

[Robino]

I've set up a few OSC carts. One of my stores features over 5,000 products and makes over $1M per/year. You didn't really list any of your specific requirements though.

It sounds like you should be just as concerned about your server set-up.

[devildude8989]

I liked some of the more simple carts, however I did not try and customize either OSCommerce or the one I use now.

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld crackity_jones,
osCommerce is well deployed and well supported (by community of volunteers). That being said, it does take a significant amount of customization to get some of the more professional features. As a basic cart right off the download it's a great application. Will it handle the sales you're talking about? Without a doubt but as was pointed out - you haven't really described any functionality you're looking for.

[dvduval]

You should have no problems handling that volume. I have a store that does about 500k/year also. Do yourself a favor...find a good PHP programmer that knows how to customize OSCommerce. I don't know how many products you have, but even with customization, I don't see any reason this deployment should cost you more than $3000. I did mine for $1500, and it involved a lot of customization.

[golles]

I have just started a store using oscommerce. I did a massive amount of research before taking the plunge. I did all the customisation myself and used some of the contributions from the oscommerce site to add functionality. It took approx 12 weeks to finalise (including adding credit card processing etc). I have a base knowledge of PHP etc, so I would suggest if you have funds it may be quicker to outsource customisation if you not familiar with PHP.

In general I find oscommerce to be great - it does everything most store owners will need it to do, especially when you look into the amount of contributions available.

[jweighell]

Generally speaking, OS Commerce looks very good. I don't use it personally, but I know people that do.

I am not sure if it's particularly search engine friendly. It puts session IDs in the URLs, which don't go down very well with spiders. I believe there are things that can be done, although I'm not an expert with it, but it is something you'll need to look into.

[topgun]

There are simple hacks available to stop the session id from getting appended to the url