5 reasons why oscommerce is a nightmare

What is Open Commerce?

From oscommerce.com: “osCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.

The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set.”

Why Shouldn’t I use it?

1) no separation of logic and presentation

Smaller applications can be created without separating logic and presentation, but when an application gets as large as oscommerce, there needs to be some kind of templating system in place.
A templating system can also be used to cache dynamic pages and improve the overall performance.A good, scalable system needs to be engineered from the ground up. It looks to me like it was hacked together with pieces of code here and there

2) difficult to integrate into an existing design

out of the box, the cart works fairly well. If you want to make any drastic design changes, you will run into major issues.

Although it is free, and this may be intising to many companies, the time and labor cost of updating the cart to suit your needs ends up being more than many of the commerical carts available.

3) security

a) Although it is updated, #1 makes it very difficult to make updates without having to manually open up each .php file and make the changes yourself.

b) By default, there is no password protection in the admin section. If you are not familiar with apache or basic authentication (which isn’t that secure), anyone can edit/remove/delete your product information.

c) When oscommerce was first built, the latest version of PHP was 3.0. Because of this, old and insecure practices were used to build the core of the system. An example is register_globals. I found a great guide here to run oscommerce without register_globals.

4) cannot have multiple sizes of image previews

5) admin navigation issues

a) hard to do shipping cost per item (with different items having different costs) per country
b) editing product descriptions seems a little awkward. overall, it looks like it was developed for a programmer, rather than a store owner.

commercial

cubecart – http://www.cubecart.com/
sunshop – http://www.turnkeywebtools.com/
miva mercant – http://www.miva.com

open source

interchange – http://www.icdevgroup.com/
magento – http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Another alternative to Oscommerce is a fork of the original project called Zen Cart.

Although it is based on Oscommerce, Zen cart fixes some of the issues above:

• The admin interface is secured with a username/password, which is encrypted in the database (SSL can also be used for further security)
• It runs without register_globals by default (no modifications necessary)
• XHTML template system
• A more advanced product management system

It is freely available and can be downloaded here: http://www.zen-cart.com/.