Developing osCommerce websites in Montreal

In operation for six years now, osCommerce is a freely available open source ecommerce solution. According to the osCommerce website, it has become the most widely used ecommerce solution with tens of thousands of online stores and well over four thousand contributions that extend its functionality.

There are several reason why osCommerce has become the most ubiquitous ecommerce solution on the planet. For one thing osCommerce is:

• very customizable
• free and non-proprietary
• supported by a world-wide community of users and developers.

osCommerce can also be deployed with the following open source technologies:

• Linux operating system
• Apache web server
• mySQL database
• PHP scripting language

As mentioned elsewhere on this website, these underlying technologies (known as LAMP) are not limited by corporate interests, which together with osCommerce have made running an ecommerce website affordable to small merchants.

Beware of the indentured customer syndrome 

Of course, osCommerce is not the only ecommerce solution available. There are many others of varying quality. One reason why many merchants choose osCommerce is to escape the indentured customer syndrome. This is when the unsuspecting merchant gets involved with a proprietary solution, only to find himself stuck with expensive upgrades and/or overpriced hosting; that is, unless the merchant decides to start all over again. And how many merchants would want to do that after the time and expense put in setting up the system in the first place.

osCommerce, on the other hand, charges nothing for upgrades (although there is a cost for implementing an upgrade) and is available with many hosting companies. In this way, the merchant is free to make decisions and not worry about having to pay the corporate piper.

Totalnetqc develops transactional ecommerce websites with osCommerce.