OSCommerce is a very good e-commerce script and has a support network / user base that is extremely helpful. But when you download and install it you won’t take long before thinking “Surely there’s more?”. And there is - loads and loads of OSCommerce contributions that are (generally) free. Trouble with open source software is that any Tom, Dick and Harry can throw together some code and release it; there’s nothing worse than spending time with a fiddly contribution just to find it doesn’t work or is just plain bad!
Recently, I started from a clean install of OSCommerce and the following are some of the contributions that I thought were the best and I installed them to make my store work better. They are not in any particular order of preference because I wouldn’t want to run a store without any of them.
The OSCommerce universe is extremely dynamic with contributions being added all the time and I’ll be adding more when necessary.
As with all contributions BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP (both the code and your database).
Out of the box, the templating system that OSCommerce uses is…not easy, shall we say. A lot of modifications need to be performed in the php files to get anything sorted.
This is where STS is handy - when installed, by modifying just a few html files you can change the entire look of your site. It can take a while to get your head around the addon especially when you want to do things like add infobox contributions but it’s pretty easily done although the support thread is (at time of writing this) 45 pages long with over 4,300 posts so unless you risk re-asking a question it can be a trial to find the answer to something.
Product images for OSCommerce by default are just a single picture which slows down the category pages a lot and uses a lot of your bandwidth.
The way I use Dynamic MOPics is I have two seperate images - the thumbnail and a popup image. On the category pages (and elsewhere that a small image is needed) OSCommerce shows the thumbnail but in the product info page, when you click on the thumbnail, it brings up the main, large picture. This is handy as you can have two images that are different e.g. if you have a bracelet, the large image can be of the whole item but the thumbnail can be a closeup image of just a few links to hopefully make the product look better.
I never liked the checkout system of OSCommerce - there’s just too many pages and customers have a terribly short attention span. FEC (Fast Easy Checkout) cuts down on the amount of pages that the surfer has to navigate by putting most of the options together. It also has a “Purchase without account” feature built in which is handy. There are a lot of pages that get changed so this was the first contribution I installed and was able to just overwrite the original OSCommerce files.
For my stores I have a label printer that is perfect for address. In the olden days…I would have to copy the address from the admin pages of OSCommerce one by one and put them in the Dymo software to print out…but with Batch Print Center you can just generate all the labels required at the click of a few buttons and have a pdf created of the addresses to be printed to labels - handy when you have a load of orders you want the addresses for at one time. You can also use it to generate invoices / packing slips, etc. - a very handy contribution indeed.
This little contribution creates a RSS feed of your latest products. You can then submit it to feed aggregators or if you have blogs, have the products automatically imported. Easy to install but handy, in my opinion.
This most valuable contribution allows you to cross sell your products. Often you have an item that goes with something else - this addon links them together. e.g. you may sell a DVD player and want to give the customer a choice of adding a SCART lead - you can cross sell the items so each product is displayed on the others product info page.
This is actually a paid for contribution. I wasn’t sure about it to begin with after all, there’s loads of free contributions out there. But one of my personal bug bears is that OSCommerce creates so many duplicate pages which I’m sure isn’t good for Google. To check to see how many pages have been created on your site, take a look at Xenu which is a free piece of software that can create a list of links on a site - chances are, you’ll see many, many more links than you need. At the very least, it lowers the value of the product pages in the eyes of the search engines.
Magic SEO Url does it so that there’s only one URL for each product. It also uses a 301 redirect so that any page that is indexed currently will be redirected to the proper URL. When I first installed Magic on an existing site, I initially saw a reduction in traffic (where the old pages suddenly disappeared from Google) but within a week (and a few sleepless nights) I saw an increase in traffic because all the link juice that was flowing around my site was being redirected to a single product destination.
Sometimes customers spend a long time in your site, add items to their cart, create an account, go to checkout and then…just drop off the face of the earth. There could be a lot of reasons - they didn’t like your delivery prices, they weren’t sure how long it would take, wanted a different colour, etc. Normally you’d never know what the problem is as the vast majority never asks you but with Recover Cart Sales you can send out emails to customers who didn’t quite order and ask what’s up. Hopefully you can then sort out the problem with the customer or get feedback for the future. Info is important and this certainly increases sales and customer satisfaction.
It’s good to let google know where all your pages are and this contribution automatically creates sitemaps that you can then submit to google base. Install the contribution, tell google about it and then forget it - just how I like it.
==================================================
Hopefully this list proves to be helpful and if you have any suggestions on useful contributions to add then please leave a comment.
Martin
Technorati Tags: oscommerce, contributions
Leave a comment