Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Beginner Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

Using an easy-to-read and engaging style, this book introduces the fundamentals of osCommerce, and helps you build your first online store. It covers the out-of-the-box features of osCommerce, but it also shows you how to customize the application to your own needs. The book starts with the basics of downloading and installing osCommerce, or simply how to enable it on your Internet domain using the tools provided by your host. All of the most important configuration issues are explained, with clear instructions and advice to help you make the right choices. Once osCommerce is installed and configured, you will take a good look at how to work with your store's data including product information as well as other data which is responsible for keeping your site healthy. The all important topic of customization is also dealt with comprehensively. You will see how to develop attractive sites that will make your store a pleasure to browse and your products a pleasure to buy! Of course, no discussion on osCommerce would be complete without a look at how to obtain and treat payments. Using the modules provided with osCommerce you will be collecting money from your happy customers in no time! Once the reader has a fully fledged, and operational site it is time to look at deployment? an important topic for discussion if development has taken place on a development machine. The appendix will add a few tools to your armory and shed some light as to what is going on behind the scenes in case things go awry.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

About the Reviewers

Monika Mathé fascinated by anything combining logic and creativity, it seems that destiny found me in 1999 when I became a software developer and Oracle-certified database administrator.

It was a tough call to decide in which field to work, but landing a position in a marketing agency and working with everything from Oracle to SQL Server and HTML, ASP, and JavaScript was a fabulous decision I still congratulate myself for! I learned more about marketing campaigns, e-commerce, and CRMs than I had ever wanted to know, I mean, ever thought was possible!

I have also been taken in by the open-source community; I’ve become an avid believer in PHP (perhaps a bit less in MySQL), and definitely in a love affair with osCommerce. I believe almost anything can be done with it ... I challenge anyone to prove me wrong!

I am an active member of the osCommerce online community and know preemptively which questions will arise in new shop creation. Presently, I am creating as many new shops for customers as time allows, of course, while urging them to add as many custom coded modules as I see fit ... that’s dessert for me!

Theodore S. Boomer while recovering from an extended illness, I was on my computer searching for something to challenge my mind. I found HTML. At first it was very basic, but quickly it grew as competing browsers and then HTML editors progressed. I have supplemented my knowledge with additional learning through online communities, groups, some colleges, and books from Pack-IT, which have enabled me to keep an edge on software that I can incorporate to give me a competitive edge in design.

Now I have taken the many hours I have spent finding sources to complete client projects and consolidated them into my web design business and expanded to an Internet Business Technologies company that provides web development, web hosting, systems development, merchant card services, and high-speed Internet connections from entrepreneurs to Fortune 50 companies.