osCommerce Review - An SEO and Design Analysis

OSCommerce is almost synonymous with ecommerce as it has been around since 2000. They are like the pioneers of internet commerce. The concept seems great; an open source, free shopping cart software that is continually updated and maintained by a community of programmers. For a time this was an excellent way to offer an online shopping cart. But times have changed since 2000 and OS commerce seems to be stuck in a time warp. Although they say they are updating their cart and have recently released version 3 of the software, it still pretty much feels the same, and lacks a lot of features that are important for an ecommerce retailer.

Managing The Store

After checking the admin in the latest version, I could see that it really isn’t up to the caliber of a modern shopping cart or CMS system. One of the first things I looked for was the ability to import and export products. I couldn’t find it and their admin interface was terrible with everything under one category drop down.

Now I know there are modules out there that will add a lot of functionality out there. But adding modules to oscommerce is about as fun as getting your teeth pulled. Not only that, once you start adding too many modules they can start to interfere with each other and completely break your system. Who wants to do that? If you are serious about ecommerce, there are a handful of free and open source shopping carts out there these days that are much improved over oscommerce such as magento or opencart.

SEO and osCommerce

Another nightmare waiting to happen! More modules, more modules and yes more modules.  Oscommerce has no SEO functionality out of the box and would require time, effort and a lot of programming skills to integrate some semblance of SEO functionality into an oscommerce website. Again, save yourself the trouble and use an alternative cart.

Designing for osCommerce

Designing for osCommerce is pretty straight forward. It is a template based system and open source so you pretty much have complete control over the look and feel of it, which is good. But be prepared to do a lot of work because the standard templates are very antiquated and will require a lot of creativity and restructuring of the template files to make it look nice.

But its FREE!

Yea, so is the garbage on the side of the road but you don’t see hordes of people digging through the muck to get old news papers. Sure you got one crazy old coot digging through the trash collecting bottles and cans to make a living, and that’s how I feel about using oscommerce to sell on the internet. It takes a certain kind of person to want to use oscommerce these days.

Bottom Line

Keep on truckin. Save yourself headaches. Save yourself time. Make yourself money.

Marketing Your OsCommerce Website

Contact us today or call 888-275-5301 for help marketing your OsCommerce website. Search Placement is an Ecommerce Marketing company specializing in SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click) marketing, and SMM (social media marketing) for online stores. We've helped hundreds of ecommerce stores take full advantage of the web and have experience working with every major ecommerce platform.