Does opensource mean something to you ? Well if you plan to open some kind of business on the web, make sure you consider what's out there free for you. the OsCommerce application is definitely a good and secure choice.
Of course, you might not be able to save the cost of a guy who knows about PHP and MySQL unless you are yourself familiar with those development techniques. There's kind of minimum amount of knowledge required not only to install oscommerce but also to customize it to your colors and logos. Also, the features of the shop can be greatly improved with very little work as thousands of user-built contributions have been made available to what is commonly called the 'oscommerce' community.
First, let me describe the basic features of Oscommerce : the default installation (we'll talk about default and customs later) ships as a full designed shopping web site, with a shopping cart system, customer account management (email/password protected for each customer), and many payment modules including the famous paypal. That's for the front end (public website). the backend, also in the default installation, is a full featured administration interface that allows you some level of configuration, plus all categories, products, clients/customer, orders interface. Another great feature of oscommerce is the language system, which duplicates any front end data for each language you choose to enable.
Now let's talk about a version. The current and stable version for oscommerce is 2.2 MS2. If you know an experienced oscommerce developper, let him go for MS3 which is in adavanced development stage and avalaible daily from the developpment servers of oscommerce (they call these CVS).
The MS3 is really good, and the MS2 kind of sucks. What should you choose ? Well luck you other versions are available, among which the creloaded is best : it is an enhanced version of oscommerce MS2 that ships with so many contributions that it would be too long to list all of them. I will just mention the templating system and the content management with a WYSIWYG editor. Here is the adress of this version of oscommerce :
http://creloaded.com/If you're looking for contributions and stuff for oscommerce, including a forum where you can discuss all sort of issues, the official web site is at
http://www.oscommerce.com/communityand our own contributions and tips for the MS3 are at
http://webxadmin.free.fr/index.php?p_i=24Good luck with oscommerce !
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