Review from THE MERCHANT’S PERSPECTIVE

How osCommerce works to allows you to effectively sell online.

Ways to Effectively Sell Online
osCommerce features a number of useful tools that allow you to more effectively sell to, and communicate with your customers. Some of these features include:

• “What's New”
  The what's new feature allows the vendor to automatically display new products to customers when they enter the site. This ensures that exciting new products easily get the attention and publicity they deserve.
• Product Specials
  It is possible to discount products displaying the old and new price. Product specials can be displayed randomly on every page. There is also a specials page which lists all products currently on special.
• Suggestions of related products
  When viewing product information, relevant products are displayed based on previous customers' purchases. The software selects products from the catalog to display that customers who have bought the current product have also purchased.
• Reviews
  Customers like to be reassured that the products a vendor is selling are as good as the vendor suggests they are, and a useful method to assure customers of this is the use of previous customers' reviews. Customers' reviews of a certain product can be displayed alongside the product description. This feature can be set to allow either anyone to review products, or only registered users. It is also possible to disable the review function entirely.
• Email Newsletter
  Communicating with shoppers is essential, and osCommerce provides an efficient method for periodic communications with registered users of your store. The newsletter system allows for vendors to compose a newsletter regarding news related to the store, new products, discounted products, and other matters of interest. These can then be sent it out to all registered shoppers. This is highly effective as the newsletter is only sent to interested shoppers who have registered to receive such information.

While ensuring that any visitor to your online shop is met with an intuitive and easy to use environment is important, it is equally important that the system for administering and controlling the shop for you the vendor is similarly user friendly and constructive.

Administering Your Shopping Cart - Online Store/Shop -
The administration of osCommerce is simple and largely intuitive. Access to the administration area of the store is password protected and once authorised, the vendor has a free hand to setup, modify and organise the store to their liking.

Some of the capabilities osCommerce provides the vendor include:

• Full control over the addition, removal and modification of categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and product reviews.
• Full control over the shops catalog structure, organizing the products from category-to-category.
• Systems for reviewing reports on both customers and their purchases.
• Ability to add and control product attributes. Colors and sizes can be specified and the customer offered a choice as they purchase.
• Systems to cope with Tax zones, classes, and rates.
• Control over how shipping costs are calculated for each purchase. Modules that are installed by default with osCommerce allow shipping charges to be calculated based on the number of items purchased, by weight, or as a flat rate. It is also possible to specify different rates for different geographic locations. Support exists for the US postal service, UPS and Federal Express. There are currently over 60 more shipping module contributions available on the osCommerce site.
• Control over the way payments are processed. Multiple payment methods can be installed giving customers a choice of how they pay. Modules that come preinstalled with osCommerce provide support for AuthorizeNet, Paypal, Secpay, Worldpay and other major realtime credit card processors. Modules also exist to receive credit card data for offline processing and support for payment by Money Order or Check. In addition to this there are currently over 120 payment module contributions available on the osCommerce site.
• Support for multi-currency shops and the ability to update exchange rates manually or via connection to currency exchange rate servers.
• Support for multi-language sites. Language support is available for English, German, and Spanish. More languages are available from the osCommerce site.
• Backup tools to safeguard the store from computer failures.