Before we dive into anything specific to osCommerce, let’s take a closer look at what the term e-commerce means, just to ensure we are all reading off the same page.
We define e-commerce as commercial transactions occurring over computer networks, facilitated by electronic applications.
Granted, this definition is pretty vague, but given the huge number of different businesses interacting over a variety of platforms and technologies all over the globe, it serves as a good basis for our purpose. In this instance, ‘commercial transactions’ can be taken to mean anything from buying and selling to marketing and distributing; ‘electronic applications’ means, in this instance, your osCommerce website.
Remember that it is crucially important that you plan ahead, and decide exactly what you require from your online store before you go ahead and begin building it. E-commerce applications are, by necessity, fairly complex beasts (even when most of the hard work has been done for us by osCommerce), and taking the time to learn about what you want from your application is time well spent.
Is there anything else we can say about e-commerce? Well, while there are many similarities between conventional and virtual enterprises since both have fundamentally the same goals, the differences can be devastating. Let’s say, for example, you have set up a conventional business, for argument’s sake, a bakery, and after one week you find that the new oven is not powerful enough to bake your bread quickly. As upsetting as it may be, you will probably have to go and buy another one. And while that problem has a painful solution, it is at least obvious.
This is where a conventional enterprise and a computer-based enterprise can vary greatly because, if instead of an incorrect oven specification, the virtual enterprise application accidentally utilized differing parameters (say, units of measurement) in some of its code, then it is entirely possible you could lose a $125 million Mars exploration vehicle just like NASA did in the late nineties. The loss of the Mars orbiter has, hopefully, highlighted areas where NASA’s processes need to be looked at again, but the point of this is that the fault was not immediately obvious until it was too late. For those of us without a few hundred million dollars in lessons to be learned, a little planning should help ensure our more modest efforts don’t suffer the same fate.
This brief section has highlighted what we mean by e-commerce and compared it with conventional commerce. However, the book is not intended to give you an in-depth discussion about best practices when it comes to planning your application. It is rather intended to help you achieve the most common and important tasks associated with running a conventional osCommerce Website. Of course, just because this book doesn’t discuss planning issues doesn’t exempt you from jotting down your requirements or researching your site.
Let’s continue…