In fact, you could say that Batavi is the real osCommerce 3.0 (the version we were all waiting for but that never came).

Batavi certainly has the “blocky” appearance that is prevalent in osCommerce and its offshoots – some people like that, some don’t, but never mind if you don’t like it, Batavi has a fully flexible template system so you aren’t stuck with it. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many live shops to look at to get a feel of what can be achieved, but the ones that are linked to on tha Batavi website look OK, except that 3 of the 4 don’t seem to have SEO-friendly urls for the product pages. These days it really shouldn’t be an option  – you need all the help you can get to get traffic to your shop.

A look round the administration demo showed the software to be reasonably straightforward, although one thing did stick out – there is no “add new product” button. Hovering over the “Products” item in the Content menu brings up a flyout sub menu with several options, but it is not immediately obvious that you need to ignore the sub menu and click on  “Products”. At least there is a good wysiwyg editor for the product descriptions – developers of other ecommerce software please note – small business owners often want to know things like “how do I put a heading on that product in big red text?” Answering  “Ah – you need to know html to do that”  just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Features:

• Fully flexible template system including pages/boxes groups layout and page access limitation
• Full content management including menu’s, texts, mails, pages etc
• Robust architecture to process very large numbers of products, visitors, customers and orders
• Customer-/group specific pricing, payment or shipping modules
• Related products for cross- and upselling
• Unlimited product segmentation to present products
• Product-price rules for pricing large product volumes
• Fully automated integration with product content providers: ICEcat interface available
• Interface for multi warehouse and multi supplier/distributor (incl stock and purchase prices)
• Advanced batch import and export facilities

To be fair, Batavi is still a beta product at v0.9, even though there are a few live shops already using it. Batavi is a promising project, but unless you are happy to use a beta version software and accept that there are known bugs which are still being fixed, then for the time being for a production site it might be best to consider other free ecommerce software.

OSCommerce is included in several web hosting packages. This means it can easily installed on your website with the click of a button.

OSCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable Apache web server, and the fast MySQL database server.

With no restrictions or special requirements, OSCommerce is able to run on any PHP enabled web server, on any environment that PHP and MySQL supports, which includes Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows environments.

All the web pages are created dynamically from the MySQL database and the design templates on the web server.

OS Commerce does not require any software to be installed on your own computer – the entire administration of your shop is carried out via your normal web browser, by logging on to the admin section of the website.

Extending OSCommerce

Over 5,700 add-on modules have been produced by developers all over the world to add extra functionality – extra payment service providers, business to business ecommerce functions, group discounts, etc.

This shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this type of software. If a particular feature that you need to implement is not present in the standard version, the chances are that someone, somewhere has written a “contribution” that does just what you require. However, because these are written by different people at different times, they may not necessarily work with other contributions that you may have installed to provide some other feature.

Installing OSCommerce contributions

Installing contributions is not always straight forward either. Installing one contribution on a fresh copy of osCommerce is usually just a matter of uploading the new files provided to your web server. In most cases, these will replace some of the existing files with new versions.

When you come to install another contribution to your now modified version, things become more difficult. You cannot just upload the new files provided by the contribution as they will again overwrite the existing files on the server, which will undo some, but not all of the changes made by the first contribution. Result – a broken website.

In many cases you will need to copy and paste the new bits of code from the contribution files to your existing files. This can be a major operation, as in some cases there may be over 100 files that need to be changed or added. You need to be fairly comfortable with editing PHP files in order to do this successfully.

OSCommerce Loaded Versions

Due to the these difficulties, a number of “loaded” distributions have been made available by different people. These have various important or popular contributions ready installed and configured so that they work together. Popular loaded distributions include CRE Loaded and OSCMax.

Open Source Shopping Cart

OSCommerce was started in March 2000, so it has been around for a considerable time. It seems to have been stuck at version 2.2 for most of that time with little or no core development taking place. However, in recent months, work on the long-promised version 3 seems to have re-started.

Because osCommerce is open source, developers are able to use  and modify the code to produce a new product. There are also a number of shopping carts which have used OSCommerce as a basis for a new cart; the best known of these is ZenCart, another new cart which looks promising is Batavi

These all try to make the software more usable by ordinary shop keepers, rather than just by the hard-core types.

Actinic is a desktop-based ecommerce solution and is based on a Microsoft Access database; the software needs to be installed on your own machine (it is not necessary to have Access installed). The requirements are:

• Windows XP (service pack 2), Vista or Windows 7
• 1GB RAM (2GB for Vista or Windows 7)
• Minimum 1 GHz processor recommended (2 GHz or faster for sites with over 5000 products)
• Internet Explorer 6 or higher
• 120MB available hard disk space

This means you have a physical copy of the software, with manual, with support available from the manufacturer. The software works in a familiar, Windows syle, with drag and drop editing and an Explorer-type interface

The website can be run on a Linux, Unix or Windows server.

The administration of the shop is done on your own machine, the software then creates the web pages automatically from the product database and design templates, and uploads them to your web server.

One of the benefits of this is that the website is search engine friendly, as it is made of static webpages created by the software with static page names.

Orders are downloaded automatically to the order processing system using a built in ftp connection.

Built in Order Processing

Actinic Catalog for business to consumer ecommerce features a built-in order-processing module which deals with orders by phone, fax and post as well as from the web. With this, you can track payments from customers and payment service providers, print packing lists and invoices, and produce a number of sales reports.

Actinic Business for business to business ecommerce features sophisticated discounting, customised pricing schedules for individual customers, customer-specific store content and customer account management.

Actinic comes with a number of built in shop templates that you can choose from and get running straight away, additionally you have the option to choose colour schemes.

Custom Actinic Template

It is also possible (and in fact desirable) to have a custom template rather than use one of the built in templates – you don’t want your shop to look exactly the same as several other shops! Unless you are very experienced with Actinic, or willing to learn, you ideally need to get this done by an Actinic specialist.

Actinic Express

Actinic have announced a new product – Actinic Express, which is a fully hosted online shopping cart system. It includes everything you need to sell on the internet. Whether you are a new start-up, or an existing business looking to expand online, Actinic Express will get you trading on the internet, fast, for a low monthly payment.