Review from THE CUSTOMER’S PERSPECTIVE

How does the Ecommerce engine works to create a positive shopping experience
When a visitor arrives at your store they are primarily interested in an easy and secure way to shop and purchase. The Ecommerce engine (Oscommerce) is designed with these interests in mind. It produces:

• user friendly stores with intuitive navigation,
• in a convenient Shopping Cart - Online Store/Shop - model and
• in a secure manner.

These three aspects work in harmony to provide customers with a hassle free shopping experience.
The Ecommerce engine provides highly visible and easily accessible product catalogs that allow customers to naturally and conveniently navigate towards the products that interest them. There are multiple ways provided for the customer to search and browse your catalog and find relevant products. The software can also provides suggestions about related products and can inform them automatically of new products.

osCommerce is a Shopping Cart - Online Store/Shop - model of e-commerce solution. This model makes use of the metaphor of a Shopping Cart - Online Store/Shop - which allows the customer to browse freely within the store adding and removing products at will until such time as they proceed to the check out and make final selection and payment of products. This is a popular and natural system that enhances a shoppers experience as they do not feel “locked into” purchasing a product, and are more likely to freely browse the store.

osCommerce allows secure purchasing using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt information between the customer and the vendor, this protects valuable customer information such as their credit card details, and makes them feel more comfortable purchasing from your store.

Customers also appreciate a number of tools that make the task of shopping and tracking past purchases easy.

• Purchases can be reviewed by customers so that they can track and monitor the status of their orders. Information regarding processing and shipping can be deisplayed and osCommerce can be set to email a customer whenever the status of one of their purchases changes.
• Customers can view the status of each order. The software provides the customer with detailed information regarding their order, including whether their order has been processed or shipped.
• Customers have access to their full history of purchases allowing them to track back through their past purchases.
• Customers can register to receive email notification of product updates relevant to them.
• An optional product review feature (which can be disabled by the shop owner) allows customers to review products and read the reviews of other shoppers.