You can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year hiring a company to create and manage your website and online shopping cart. As a start-up business, you may not have the money to do this. Even if you're not a start-up business, you might not want to spend the money to do this. The great news is that you don't need to spend this money to have a website that looks like a million dollars. With a little insight and some hard work, you can create your online cart to help your business be a successful online entity ? and osCommerce is just the community to help you do so. How and why?



Collaboration and Contribution

First of all, osCommerce is based on the concept of open source software. This means that the software, codes and everything you need to set up your website and online cart is shared right on the site.

There is a section on the site called contribution. In this section, people who have designed codes to do various things on their websites ?contribute? the code to the group so that others who use osCommerce can use it for their sites as well. There are thousands of contributions already on the site ranging from themes and packages to images, checkout modules and shipping modules.

It doesn't stop there, however. The beauty of the contribution network is that people can take the codes that people have posted and tweak or alter them just enough to meet their individual needs. Rather than having a designer who sells a set code that the consumers cannot alter, the idea behind open source code allows each individual to alter the code to meet their needs which ultimately results in constant improvements in the developed code.

Community

osCommerce would not succeed without the sense of community involved in it. Along with the contributions, osCommerce has an active forum where members can ask and give advice as needed with other members. For example, if someone has designed their site but don't seem to be getting the business, they can post a request for feedback on their site. Members of the forum then look at the site and give suggestions for improvement. Additionally, when someone is trying to set up a specific feature on their site, they can go to the forum to see if anyone has done so previously. That way they don't have to necessarily start from scratch when it comes to designing the code for the features they want on their osCommerce site.

Customization

It is possible to take the osCommerce template, add in your product or service descriptions, set up your payment options and go live. It's quick and easy and will get your site running in no time and it will look okay.

Anyone who has had a e-commerce site, however, will tell you that you'll need to go a step further to make your website look great and be successful. The osCommerce templates are customizable so that your site looks like your site. You can change the images, colors, borders? whatever you need to change to make the theme of the site match what you're selling. So, when you sign on to osCommerce to be your online shopping cart, your signing on to have a site that fits your style, not just a cookie-cutter type site that easily and quickly fills in your product or service without consideration of ?what? you're actually selling.

Customer Service

osCommerce is also already set up to give you the tools you need to have an e-store with great customer service. You can choose which features to include on your site, but you don't have to design the features from scratch which is a great benefit if you don't have the technological background to build an e-commerce site from nothing. Some of these features include the ability to set up customer accounts which allows your customers to keep track of their orders, save their shopping carts, receive emails notifications about their orders, browse best seller lists and find out what customers doing similar searches have purchased.

Carts and Gateways

osCommerce also supports ten gateways for accepting payment which will allow your site to be versatile and open to a wider range of customers. So, even if you're a small business and don't have your own credit card accounts you can still accept payment from a variety of gateways allowing you to compete with ?the big guys?.

Even if your business isn't worth a million (yet) you don't have to let your customers know that. You can make your site look like a million with the features found on osCommerce.