What is osCommerce

Open Source Commerce as known as osCommerce is an e-commerce tool. E-commerce is a growing domain and more people and companies are turning towards it due to which the e-commerce software is getting more advanced with each passing day. osCommerce is also e-commerce software that is why developers try to integrate more and more functions in it, and it is not simple software. In fact this software is a complete store management software program that helps in managing the whole store management work of an online site. This software is used on web servers that have PHP and MySQL.

Since the demand of osCommerce is increasing and more and more sites are integrating this software in their websites, that is why now with time various web hosting companies such as VodaHost has started this trend to integrate predefined osCommerce software in their module. This helps in meeting the increasing demand of this software and people have this ease to install it in a go. Instead of buying a web hosting package first and then getting the osCommerce and then installing it over there and solving the problems like compatibility issues etc, this step of web hosting companies has made the task much easier. There are various web hosting companies’ such as VodaHost that have e.g. Fantastico etc that has predefined osCommerce software integrated in the module and there are no separate efforts are required.

Although the integrated osCommerce software in the web hosting companies is much appreciated, however the reservation about it is the unavailability of the update. Since the osCommerce is a GNU licensed open source software that is why everyone has the ability to make the required changes and remove it if there are any bugs, so its updates comes frequently. But still the predefined software is much endorsed as many people want to have the stuff at their finger tips.

There has been various updates of the osCommerce in the market in a timely manner, in November 2010, version 2.2 was released that was better than all the previous versions, although it wasn’t much stable as it should have been, so the following release of Version 2.3 covered that drawback, and proved to be very stable version, the most recent update of osCommerce software was released in the end of March 2011 and it was the Version 3.0, unlike others it’s having an object oriented backend, and has the usernames and passwords defined at the time of installation, this function was not available in the earlier versions. The reputation of this software can be judged by considering that the fast that it is considered as a source for various other open source e-commerce software, like Batavi and Zen cart etc. Since it has a solid backend and very mature code that’s why others had considered it to be used as their main source.

In the recent future, with the increase of online businesses the e-commerce software will be more frequently used, more and more websites will try to incorporate this software and use the online store management software.