Bringing New Perspectives to osCommerce (Exclusive Article)

For a long time, starting an online business was considered a difficult task. It required deep knowledge not in marketing or online marketing but in various tech fields. If you were not a tech guy, you needed a huge budget allowance for design and programming. Even if you did not plan to use original scripts on your site, a practice which would reduce budget allocations for design and programming, ready-made scripts and solutions still had to be purchased. As a result, only individuals with some technical knowledge or a definite budget could start an online business.

osCommerce (circa 2000) is different. First of all, osCommerce is an open source project, which means that you can use it free-of-charge. Secondly, it offers everything (design and programming parts) in one package. Though it still requires some basic knowledge in how the Web works, this knowledge is not of the sophisticated kind and can be easily obtained in a couple of hours.

The real problem with osCommerce which has remained unsolved for many years is design. By default, osCommerce has a simple, neutral design. This is really good as a default design, but if we are talking about a serious approach to online business, your site (store) should not be neutral. It should meet customers' expectations on how your shop should look. Otherwise, customers will not believe in you and will avoid making any purchases at your shop. For example, if you are seeking summer goods like swimwear, you expect to enter a site tastefully and appropriately done in warm orange, yellow, red and maybe cool, swimming-pool blue colors but not abysmal charcoal black or cold gunmetal gray. And this is only a color scheme issue. There are many more design issues that come into play!

Going with an original design raises the same old issues of skill and talent. After beginning your own unique project, you soon realize that you almost have to be a professional designer in order to create eye-catching design for your customers, design that is trustworthy and stimulating and will encourage shopping and buying. Getting effective design surely requires deep web design knowledge - a wide skill set and at least a little talent - or a handsome budget to pay someone else for his or her training and intuition.

Let's face it original design costs a lot, so in most cases it is not the solution for starters who often have tight budget restrictions. And while it is true that lots of web development companies offer alternative design services for osCommerce, in general they tend to treat an osCommerce design project as any other project and regrettably charge about the same for it. All is not lost, however. There is a solution: go with osCommerce templates.

With osCommerce templates, you can easily change the look of your shop in minutes. Literally dozens of osCommerce templates can be found on the official osCommerce site, and many people use them. The only problem with these templates is that they were not designed by professional designers but by tech guys, which means that these templates have very poor or no design at all.

Indeed, overuse of the "official" osCommerce templates has given the osCommerce-based online community an overall cheap and cheesy look. If only professional designers and experts worked together on the official osCommerce site! Unfortunately, osCommerce does not offer the platform for realizing this potential solution since it is open source, and open source has one very prominent limiting reagent: the activity of its users who are as well its developers. Apparently there are not many professional designers interested in osCommerce. So, osCommerce has for a long time suffered from unprofessional design.

What the market needs is a company (or several companies) that could guarantee consistent delivery of fresh osCommerce templates that are both affordable and of premium quality. Such a guarantee would require determination and discipline, effective use of wide and deep resources, ensuring that quality is not sacrificed for the sake of creating an end product that is affordable for most users. Not every company can afford such a commitment, and the largest templates vendors have stayed away from this niche for a long time. Yet the growing popularity of osCommerce has not gone unnoticed. In fact, the rampant growth osCommerce has more than impressed one of the biggest players in the website templates market - Template Monster.

In response to the unchecked growth coupled with the unmet needs of the osCommerce community, Template Monster has begun, and will ceaselessly continue, producing osCommerce templates.

How does Template Monster's decision influence the growth of osCommerce? In other words what can a big industrial vendor bring to the open source project?

The first thing this decision brings to osCommerce is professionalism in design. Template Monster's professional design team is world renowned. So if Template Monster is to design osCommerce there is no doubt that these designs will not have any bugs in color scheme, layouts or other design elements. Besides providing prime quality design work, Template Monster also offers 24/7 professional support for all their products, including new ones like osCommerce templates.

These are the two main features that Template Monster now gives to users of osCommerce. From now on, anyone who uses (or plans to use) osCommerce for his online business can get guaranteed, quality design and professional support, if they make a purchase with Template Monster, of course.

Such a commercial addition to this open source project will result in a burst of osCommerce popularity, because the Internet community will get not only a free solution but also a professional design for their online business. Additionally, osCommerce customers who choose Template Monster will gain all the other bonuses that a big company can offer to its clients, things like 24/7 tech support.

Now it is possible to get more without paying more. With Template Monster, anyone can start an online business with a design that not only saves his budget but also makes his business stand apart from its competitors.