When Tim Berners-Lee first decided it would be a good idea if his computer could exchange information with his colleagues’ computers up the corridor, he could scarcely have known that he was setting in motion, perhaps, the most profound change in the way mankind communicates since the written word. With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), communication underwent a kind of revolution that had an impact on our daily lives in hundreds of different ways.
Of course, it also wasn’t long before someone figured out how to make money from the Web and naturally everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Enter the dotcom boom and bust! Unfortunately, for the Internet and consequently Internet-based businesses, the dotcom fiasco hurt a lot of people who perhaps, buoyed up by bullish sentiment from investment houses and brokers who understood all too well the amount of money they stood to make, invested in something they didn’t fully understand. At the time, very few Internet-based businesses had shown that they were reliable, stable, and profitable. Nevertheless, the money kept flowing in and the new technology companies kept spending it—on what, no one was quite sure.
However, when the bubble burst, not all Internet initiatives collapsed. Some came through it a little worse for wear, but far more resilient, and many more learned valuable lessons about how to approach this new platform for commerce and trade. It is a testament to the exceptional value of the WWW that despite the massive losses made initially on this technology, it is now more or less taken for granted that businesses of any size require a presence on the Web: if they don’t have one yet, they are going to have one soon.
Today the world recognizes that being able to retail online to potentially billions of customers on a global scale is not the panacea it was first touted to be. Instead, a more mature approach needs to be adopted. It is now the accepted viewpoint that while having the ability to interact on the Web is a critical tool for success in today’s world, it is still just that—a tool! In order to be successful, your business still needs to be based on a solid idea, with a good demand or client base, backed up by either great products or great services. Just like the good old days.
By purchasing this book, you have implicitly given a vote of confidence to the Web and will, hopefully, be able to turn it to your advantage. Before we are able to begin working directly on the site, it is imperative that you are equipped with some basic information about life and business on the Internet.
This chapter discusses the following topics:
A brief history and motivation for osCommerce and e-commerce
The osCommerce community in general
Before we continue, it is important to realize that as things stand, our global village is still undergoing a revolution in communication driven by the giant leaps in the sophistication of both hardware and software alike. While it seems that everything is becoming more advanced and therefore complicated, the one thing to remember is that pretty much everything you see around us is here to make things easier. One of the best things about advances in technology is that they give everyone the ability to leapfrog stages of development. What this means is that the companies that invest a lot of money in order to be innovative and stay ahead of the competition blaze a trail that is decidedly easier for those of us without unlimited funding to follow.
A good example of leapfrogging is happening with technology in Africa. In many countries, poor infrastructure hampers business and communication. Luckily for them, laying hundreds of thousands of kilometers of phone line is no longer necessary, as it was for countries in the West seventy years ago. Nowadays, telecommunications companies install their own towers and the public has instant access to cellular or wireless communications. In ten short years, some African states have gone from utilizing ageing, outdated copper wire systems to modern cellular communications without having to invest their resources in research and development.
This idea applies very much to software application development and in the same way, we are going to piggy-back a ride on the work of others (in this case, the osCommerce development team) to arrive at a sophisticated and functional e-commerce website without having to re-invent the wheel. This is good news for everyone concerned, because it means that one no longer has to have a PhD in computer science in order to build and operate a fairly complex Internet‑based software application.
For a lot of us, the urge to dive straight into the building of the site is all but overwhelming because, after all, that is where the magic happens. Don’t do it! Instead, take a deep breath, grab a cup of coffee and read through this chapter before doing anything else. While it may seem like a drag now, it will save you a lot of time, frustration, and sanity later.
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…