It's easy to sit back at this stage and consider the site as fit to go live; but consider the revenue-generating possibility of banner ads, which we haven't even looked at yet. Normally, this might be a tricky thing to implement, but osCommerce ships with its own banner manager to help us out. As a result it is important that we look at this quite closely in order to make effective use of the tool and banner ads.
Tools are not all about adding functionality to your site of course. A useful tool, which is ubiquitous in the open-source world, is the phpMyAdmin tool for administering MySQL databases. If your host provides you with MySQL as part of your hosting package, you can be fairly certain that they will also make phpMyAdmin available for your use. If not, ask them why not, because you will find it a lot easier to work with phpMyAdmin than having to manually issue commands every time you need to query your database.
Let's begin with the banner manager...