Migrating to oscommerce from modernbill

[tobiaseigen]

Hey folks,

 

My nonprofit organization, Kabissa, provides web hosting services to African nonprofits among other things. For the last four years we have been using ModernBill as our billing system, and Plesk as our server administration tool. ModernBill and Plesk play nicely together.

 

Now we are migrating to a new open source CRM (Joomla/CiviCRM) for a variety of reasons that I don't want to bore you with here (but all specs online for public perusal and use on the CiviCRM website and more details are in an announcement on the Kabissa website). Down the road we will be also be expanding our hosting services and may not be sticking with Plesk for hosting either.

 

Right now we are looking at oscommerce as a possible addition to our new system for dealing with the billing parts of our specs, replacing ModernBill. Has anyone else done this sort of thing already, and have advice for us? oscommerce appears to meet our needs in a number of important ways, but at the same time also seems to be missing quite a few things. Any advice on how trivial or difficult it might be to meet our specs with oscommerce would be most appreciated. We are happy to contribute back any progress we make to the community.

 

Things that appear to be very good about oscommerce:

• open source
  
• strong developer/user community
  
• actively being developed
  
• lots of contributions
  
• integrates with joomla (thru joomla extension)
  
• LAMP based (linux, apache, mysql, php)
  
• easy to install/configure
  
• easy to use (even our interns can operate it)
  

Things we need that appear to be missing or that I have not found right away:

• domain hosting ordering process (from domain whois through to ordering packages and addons - check out this hosting spec for details)
  
• typical hosting billing features like upgrade/downgrade, add features etc.
  
• recurring billing - we currently bill on an annual process - with invoices sent out by email with links to payment options. Other typical recurring billing issues like "cancellation" are also not available out of the box.
  
• free options - we currently offer free hosting packages ("starter" package on a Kabissa subdomain and limited disk space etc) as well as paid ones, but still require an annual renewal process to be completed to keep the domain hosting account active.
  

Would be most grateful for advice and suggestions!

 

Cheers,

 

Tobias

[xperience]

osCommerce is a shop - modernbill is a hosting and domain billing package.

 

I very much doubt osCommerce will do a good job of running your hosting business.

[tobiaseigen]

osCommerce is a shop - modernbill is a hosting and domain billing package.

 

I very much doubt osCommerce will do a good job of running your hosting business.

Hi xperience - thanks for the reply. I understand this already but was interested in finding out if anyone is using oscommerce for dealing with business needs like ours (though note that we are not a business - but a nonprofit that provides hosting among other programs).

 

As I dig into this however I am realizing that civicrm handles alot of the billing tool things (and really is what "runs" our business as you put it) and that what we are lacking is order forms, invoicing templates and so on. Maybe oscommerce is not the tool for us for this particular purpose.

 

Cheers,

 

Tobias