osCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.

The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set.

The services provided on the network of osCommerce support sites are continually improved to match the growing community the project has attracted in its 5 years of operation. Today, this community consists of over 62,000 store owners, developers, designers, and enthusiasts, and over 2,700 community made contributions that help make the project succeed.

osCommerce utilizes 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 special requirements, osCommerce is able to run on any PHP 4.1+ enabled web server running on Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows environments.

Features:

Although osCommerce is still in its development stage, the available Milestone releases are considered to be stable with the following features:

•  General Functionality
•  Compatible with all PHP 4 versions
•  All features enabled by default for a complete out-of-the-box solution
•  Object oriented backend (MS3)
•  Completely multilingual with English, German, and Spanish provided by default
•  Setup / Installation
•  Automatic web-browser based installation and upgrade procedure
•  Design / Layout
•  Template struture implementation to:
•  allow layout changes to be adaptive, easy, and quickly to make (MS3)
•  allow easy integration into an existing site (MS3)
•  Support for dynamic images
•  Administration / Backend Functionality
•  Supports unlimited products and categories
•  Products-to-categories structure
•  Categories-to-categories structure
•  Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
•  Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
•  Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation (MS3)
•  Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
•  Easily backup and restore the database
•  Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
•  Statistics for products and customers
•  Multilingual support
•  Multicurrency support
•  Automatically update currency exchange rates
•  Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
•  Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics