Configuring the OS Commerce Catalog Engine
Configuring the OS Commerce Catalog Engine
This is a series of how-to’s that walk you through all the necessary steps to set up your OS Commerce engine to make it look like your own store. Most of it is how to swap out their images for yours as well as altering the style sheet. There are several smaller tasks that I find equally important like changing the links to point back at your site instead of their dummy links. If you find this helpful please feel free to drop $5 bucks in the bucket.
Out of box (I love saying that) the engine is set up as a dummy catalog. This is more helpful than having it come as blank because now at least you can see what lever changes what aspect of the catalog when you go digging into the code and admin features. It should be noted that adjusting just the admin features will get you up to speed with a full blown working engine, it just needs to have some clean up as far as the appearance is concerned. I will walk you through both aspects step by step.
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The first step is to login to the admin section located at oscommerce/catalog/admin. This gives you a page of about 8 sections you can use to control the features of your catalog. Start by going into the first part CONFIGURATION, “my store”. This brings up a list of fields you can easily change to fit your personal info. Values like “store name” and “country” are easy to switch.
There are several other sections of the Configuration section. Most do not need to be adjusted. “Product listing” is a good one to go into and look around. Here you can determine which aspect of the product is displayed such as model and make. Usually “0” means no and “1” means yes when it comes to filing out values.
There are some values in “customer details” which I turned off. I don’t really want gender, date of birth, company and suburb showing. State is ok, but I took it off too.
Next we move onto the CATALOG section by using the categories and products admin features. I found this section to be straightforward. It’s best to start deleting their existing categories and add your own. Once you have your categories you can begin to add your product. This is the bulk of what the catalog does so you’ll probably spend most of you time here. And of course once you have product you can always go back in and edit it as well as add both more categories and products. There are several spots for graphics but we’ll cover all that in Part 2, which deals with changing the look of your catalog.
The Products Attributes allows you to tag on additional info about a product. At first I found this section confusing as to its purpose but if you are selling products like shirts, which have different sizes and colors, it makes perfect sense. All you would do is create a new option name as size and then in the option value field located to the right, you would insert your sizes available like medium, large and x-large. The third box labeled Products’ Attributes is where you can enter different prices for the various options. So if size XL is more than a large you can enter the extra amount at that point.
Our next admin feature is Manufacturers. Hear you can enter the makers of your products. This field basically just shows up in the product description and you have to assign it to each product in their respective editing pages.
The remaining admin features in the catalog section are “reviews, specials, products expected.” Reviews allows you to browse the reviews people (or you!) have submitted for products. Products Expected allows you to keep track of what items are out of stock and when they are due. The Specials feature allows you to select products that have a sale price. It a cool feature which will put the slash mark through your list price and adds a specials box to the right side.
Lets move on to our next section the MODULES. The first admin feature is Payment. This part is entirely dependant on what type of processing you are set up with. Oscommerce has given us several options. The most basic one is check/money order. If you have no other way to process credit cards, you can always take a check or money order. The easiest and cheapest module to use will probably be Paypal as it’s relatively cheap to use for a seller and free for a buyer. Lots of people who make online purchases have Paypal accounts. This will make your online transactions even easier if you have a PP account. Cash On Delivery works too but usually has a high fee.
After payment is the Shipping feature. This part is tricky as it entails knowing ahead of time what to charge for shipping your goods. Again, eCommerce is one part showing the goods and one part delivering the goods. Good eCommerce sites know how to fulfill orders. The easiest route is to have a flat rate set but you may wish to simply have a flat rate per item set up instead to cover you incase people order multiple goods.
The Order Table is a ranking feature that allows you to change the order of your customers subtotal. In its default state, it is currently set up to make the most sense so leave it.
The CUSTOMERS section is your address book of existing customers. The locations/taxes section allows you to make new zone and states. I would leave this alone unless you wanted to add counties or something more secular. For the most part it is fine. If your state requires you to charge tax, you should go to the Tax Zones feature and add your state’s tax.
Localization allows for you to add different currencies for your catalog. It comes with US and Euro, which should prove to be enough.
Under the reports section you will find a variety of traffic logs and product reports. Most will be self explanatory and there is nothing to configure in this section.
The TOOLS section offers a large variety of helpful devices for running your catalog. There is a Backup feature. There is an ad server feature called Banner Manager. This allows you to upload banners to rotate on the site and track the amount of times viewed. Perhaps the best tool given is their File Manager. This allows you to go into any file in the engine and edit the code. Very cool feature if you don’t have the ability to open and work on PHP files and then reload them back to the server.
For more info on the admin features you can always check with the Knowledge base.
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