Is osCommerce right for me?

[TehTooya]

Hello,

 

I am relatively new to eCommerce development, but I read good reviews of osCommerce. I need to build a very particular site that fulfills a few set of criteria...

 

1. It needs to allow users to put up their own merchandise on the site.

2. If any user sells anything on the site, a commision is kept by the site... (so really... if user_x sells something for 100, they make 93, while this site makes 7.)

 

I was told that users should be able to interact with one another, which could be nice if osCommerce supported, but I can hard code that if nececsarry.

 

 

~Tyler

[MrPhil]

"Out of the box" osCommerce does nothing of that kind. What you are looking for is a "sell on commission" store, like eBay or Amazon. With a lot of pounding and bending of the code, you might be able to get osC to do something like that, but not by default. First of all, you need a way to register all your sellers as store administrators, but with limited powers (they can't touch some things in general, and can only add/edit/delete their own merchandise, and not some other guy's). I presume that all merchants use a common shopping cart -- how to figure out who gets what commission could potentially be done in osC, but might be easier in a spreadsheet outside of osC -- last month X units of item Y were sold for price $Z, and the commission rate is W%. Keep X*$Z*W% for that item Y, and pay merchant V the rest.

 

Look in the add-ons (contributions) section and see if you can find bits and pieces of what you need. If you're willing to do the grunt work of maintaining merchandise entries yourself, you could leave osC alone and just figure commissions on the back end (spreadsheet). Although more work for you, the advantage is no security worries and a more consistent appearance to merchandise listings.

 

I was told that users should be able to interact with one another

What do you have it mind for "users interacting with each other"? Currently, osC does not have any peer-to-peer communication. It might be easier to add a regular forum, blog, or chat room to your site. The only downside is that it would require separate registration from your store -- perhaps you could do something to integrate registrations?