osCommerce Templates

Featured Template 4th September 2011

admin — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 20:16:20 +0000

We’re offering 10% off the featured template, usual price of $140 but we are offering it for $126. This template is designed and ready for osCommerce 2.3 and comes with a Photoshop file for you to edit various images if you require, or you can use it straight out the box.

Featured Template (week beginning 15/08/11)

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 07:42:45 +0000

For this week only we are offering a 10% saving off the following template. Usual price is $140, however we are offering this for $126 until Monday 15th August. This template has been developed for osCommerce 2.3, and comes with both the PHP template files and the Photoshop PSD file to allow you to edit various aspects of the design to add in your own logo.

New osCommerce eBooks added

admin — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:12:06 +0000

As some of our regular visitors may have noticed, we’ve had a little tidy up with this site with a new design. We’ve also updated the prices on the osCommerce eBooks and tutorials available, and have also added some new ones:

3 free eBooks should give you a great idea of the quality of the writing and what you would get in the paid ones. They’re absolutely great value for money and some of them are essential for all osCommerce store owners!

osCommerce and Accessibility

admin — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:02:18 +0000

It has been a legal requirement for UK websites to be accessible since 1999. All websites are expected to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure their websites accommodate all users, regardless of ability or disability. It’s estimated that at any one moment, 20% of online users are disabled in some way. This may be a temporary disability, such as a broken wrist, or a permanent disability, such as visual impairment. Just because someone is registered as blind, it doesn’t mean they can’t still see but perhaps needs to rely on a screen reader to help them with text on a website. If your website is not developed to respect this possibility then you are stopping this visitor from using your site, potentially losing a customer and every friend and family member that customer knows. Not to mention, they can make a claim against you and you could be liable to pay out compensation and be forced by a court of law to either remove or change your website.

Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine spiders are programs written and ‘sent out’ by Search Engines such as Yahoo to read and index your website into their search database. These spiders can be considered blind and deaf as they cannot read the contents of an image or a flash animation at present. Therefore by ensuring your website passes accessibility for the visually impaired and hard of hearing visitors, you ensure that the search engine spider gets the same information. This improves the exposure of your website to the spiders and will often improve the potential ranking and visitors via the search engines.

We offer two eBooks for sale which can give guidance and code on how to help you improve the accessibility and SEO of your osCommerce site.

Graphical Cover Creation Software

admin — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:37:01 +0000

If you sell digital products on your site such as eBooks or software, then I’m sure you know they sell better if you give them a graphical look. However this can be quite time consuming to do well. DIY Covers is a suite of photoshop actions to save you the time and effort and produce amazing results. You can create professional looking eCovers within minutes.

The price of this is $97 however for a limited period you can get it for $67 from AIS by Sarah. You can also get the trial version from this site, which includes one eBook action for you to try out and see how easy it is to use.

Losing Orders?

admin — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:59:10 +0000

Somehow, on occassion, orders don’t get through to the admin from the payment processor. I’ve managed to stop this myself with Protx by switching off JavaScript. I would have thought that Protx would update osCommerce automatically but it seems that it still requires the customer to return back to the website before the order is updated and my client is notified.

So with this in mind we needed something to allow her to view unpaid orders ie. orders that hadn’t officially been paid for but in theory should have because the customer clicked to pay. After a bit of searching and testing I came across orderCheck, a contribution which creates a temporary version of the customer’s order before they leave your site to pay. If the customer pays and returns successfully the temp order is removed and appears in the Orders section, however if something goes wrong the order is still clear to see in the orderCheck section. It’s almost identical to the Orders section and allows the client to update and ‘push’ the order through manually if and when needed.

We’ll be installing this on all the osCommerce stores we maintain, simply because it saves any problems and hassle of having to work through the database and the basket information to work out what someone’s paid for. Afterall it doesn’t sound professional having to ask a customer what they ordered.

Featured Products

admin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:28:22 +0000

We’ve just finished redoing an existing site with a new design. Sometimes it’s harder working on an existing site than just setting up a new one, as the existing one tends to carry alterations and so you have more to work around. One option the client wanted was not to have new products on the front of the site but to be able to select which ones were displayed. After a quick search we came across the Featured Products contribution.

This is quite a nice contribution as it gives the owner a greater control over what their visitors see when they first reach the site (providing they enter via the front page of course!). I’ve not found any problems with it yet and it was easy enough to incorporate it into the new design.

New Site Ready for Launch

admin — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 23:22:49 +0000

Well the new site is finally ready for launch. We’re just waiting to hear back from Protx to make sure they’re happy with it all and then the site will go live. The client is a big believer in AdWords so the initial visitors won’t be hard to get. Hopefully if she can make a few sales and recoup the initial outlay of cost, perhaps next year I can SEO her site and make it more appealing to the search engines as osCommerce in its default form is not so great. I’ll be going into the various SEO updates that you can do to improve your website later.

Dynamic Site Map

admin — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:47:58 +0000

Today I suddenly realised the client had asked for a Site Map when of course osCommerce doesn’t come with one. A quick search on the osCommerce site and I came across Dynamic Sitemap. This is perfect for the job. I added it on within about 10 minutes and then ran through the configuration of the page. You get a page under the Tools section of the admin to allow you to choose who sees the pages within the sitemap, whether they’re not shown at all (such as the Checkout Success page) or whether they’re just shown to account holders (eg. the Lost Password page). The sitemap is printed out in two lists, one of the various pages available, all of your static pages plus the various cart pages, along with a list of all of the product categories. The anchor text for each page is pulled from the Header title defined under the languages/your-language directory eg. languages/english. All files within the directory are read and offered for the Site Map, and as they’re read every time, any new pages will automatically be picked up.

This is a pretty good way to get your site well indexed within the search engines. It gives them a page which isn’t using a dynamic URL (ie. a URL with a question mark and extra variables in) which they have more trust in. Then the search engine spiders will follow these links and get deeper into your site, indexing the category pages thus giving you more scope within the search engines.

Very easy to set up and a great feature to have.

Protx Module

admin — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:37:58 +0000

After a recommendation from a well versed osCommerce user I downloaded the Protx Form payment module and installed it on the new site yesterday. The form itself was very straightforward to add, however getting it to work with Protx is another matter.

I’ve configured it with the correct merchant name and what I believe to be the correct password (although this has come from my client so they may have their wires crossed) however on trying it out today I got the VSP Error Screen. Unfortunately Protx don’t seem to offer much info for the integration of their system on your website. I looked through their PDFs and couldn’t find the answers I needed, and the Protx form readme file doesn’t tell you much. So I’m a bit stuck at present and am going to have to trawl through the forums on osCommerce.com to see if I can find an answer, unless anyone here can give me one!