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Big g
07 Feb 2006, 03:57 PM
Hi

A quick introduction. Many moons ago I asked on another forum for someone to recommend a web design magazine. I was directed here. Thank you for the recommendation Rincewind. How’s the Pic?

Anyhow, I have a business idea that I need to set up an e-commerce site for. I was going to get a ‘professional’ to do this for me but, on trawling through the Yellow Pages, found that their own web-sites were often static, slow and just generally dire. I remembered this recommendation and decided to pay a visit.

I can’t give full details of my business idea just now but need to sell items with a low cost price and a low selling price. Let’s call the item a widget.

You can buy the widgets on the high street for around £1.50 upwards. Usually they are bought in quantities of one but there’s no reason why, if you’re organised, you wouldn’t buy five or ten.

On to my questions. The software OS Commerce is mentioned frequently on here as a good shopping cart program. This program is ‘free’ on the web. I haven’t spent a fantastic amount of time studying their web-site but - what’s in it for the OS Commerce people? Do they get a ‘cut’ of each sale? If this is the way it works then I hope it’s percentage based rather than a fixed amount.

Which payment gateway is best? OK, so that’s too broad a question but bearing in mind that customers may only be spending £5 - £10 per transaction, I don’t want to be have to pass on a large charge to the customer (I will still offer Pay-Pal though).

I notice that OS Commerce has a Linux and an MS flavour. Which is best? My likely hosting company charges more for MS than Linux. I know that ASP will only run on MS but are there other benefits?

And finally, I think, can I run OS Commerce on an XP Home operating system? XP Professional has a built in server to test web-pages but I believe XP Home doesn’t.


Thank you in anticipation. I’m sure I’ll have many more questions soon.

G

alvo
07 Feb 2006, 05:42 PM
OSCommerce is an open source software program. Why is it free? Check the Free Software Foundation at http://www.fsf.org/ for the hows and whys of free software. There are a lot of good (and some not-so-good) software available for free. Linux and Apache are a couple of the premiere free software programs out there, and they together run a large portion of all the web seervers in the world.

OSCommerce works equally well of either the Windows of Linux platform. Personally I only use Linux servers and that decision is based on factors other than price, so unless you're only confortable on Windows then choose the cheaper alternative.

Since I don't do any development in the Windows environment I can't tell you if OSCommerce will run on your local machine, but then you probably would be better off developing it on the server you're going to be running it on since it'll be set up differently than your local machine anyway.

The one thing I don't like about OSCommerce (and why I don't use it) is that it requires register_globals to be turned on in PHP which is a security risk (not a security vunerability, in that it's a risk only if there's poorly written PHP code on the site that would allow injection of errant information in a URL).