In the climate of the retail market today, many shop owners are discovering that rather than endure the heavy over head expenses and costly set up of a traditional ‘brick & mortar’ store, they can find more success running an online shop. Of those who choose this route, there are many who prefer the OS Commerce shopping cart script due to its ease of use, full featured front and back ends, and the amount of OS Commerce templates available to help store owners truly customize the look and feel of their own site. The simplicity of online retailing makes it an attractive alternative for both pre-existing shops with a physical store front and online only businesses that cater to their customer base by leveraging the web’s power to keep a business going 24 hours a day while still providing a quick and efficient way to serve customers regarding any issues they may have.
The fact that this particular shopping cart script is open source is definitely a plus. Since that means you pay nothing to use the shop, plenty of people have discovered that a simple experiment of trying their store has netted them sales right away. That could be a very good part of the reason that nearly 12,000 online shops currently make use of this script. With the right OS Commerce template, a store can make a real splash with its own unique visual brand and help itself establish dominance in its chosen niche market. Since the community that exists in the forums on the OS Commerce site is such a diverse and helpful one, shop owners are likely to turn to it for help. Thus, very few people who choose to set up this particular open source solution for a shop ever experience serious difficulties in establishing their store.
When it comes to making your installation of this script look precisely how you want it to, the process is fairly easy and you have a couple options that should give you good results, depending on your skill level. Those who are newer to customizing php scripts and other code oriented tinkering will probably find that the OS Commerce tutorial form of customization works better for them. This is easily found in a program called STS (Simple Template System) that allows a shop keeper to customize the front end of their shop, the part that shoppers see when they visit your store. This program works similar to the way that a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor would, which means that you will not need to be proficient in any particular coding in order to customize your shoppers’ browsing experience. The back end, the part of the store that you see when you log in as shop owner, is much easier to customize and the installation of OS Commerce will explain that process to you so there is no need for any real guidance there.
If you do choose to edit the shop by hand using a php editor, the files you will want to edit are located within the /includes/ subdirectory of your OS Commerce installation on your server. You can edit the following files, so long as you have some knowledge of how php and, more importantly CSS, works:
right_column.php
left_column.php
header.php
footer.php
Keep in mind that this method is only recommended for more advanced users. STS is the best solution for those just starting out. No matter which way you choose to go, customizing your OS Commerce shop really is a snap!
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