How to Add Products to Your Store in osCommerce
Open source and distributed under the GNU GPL, osCommerce is a powerful e-commerce platform that gives you a wide array of customization options, including a sophisticated plug-in architecture. What has made osCommerce so successful, however, is its simplification of database management. Managing an e-commerce database can be quite difficult, but with the osCommerce, creating, editing, organizing and deleting products is all accomplished through text entry and a few button clicks.
How to Add Products to Your Store in osCommerce
• Log in to your activated osCommerce account using your username and password.
• This video tutorial assumes that you have a valid osCommerce installation and have logged in.
• Upon logging in, the system will navigate you to the main page of the osCommerce control panel.
• The main area of this control panel hosts a series of clickable categories and actions.
• Locate the category labeled Catalog and click it.
• The first action in the Catalog category is Categories/Products.
• So by clicking it, it automatically takes you to the settings page for Categories/Products.
• A new osCommerce installation has a default list of categories, which you should see now.
• Typically, there are four default categories and zero products: Books, Hardware, Software and DVD Movies.
• Beneath the category listing are two buttons: New Category and New Product.
• There is also an edit panel, which appears whenever you highlight an existing category.
• The edit panel hosts an Edit, Delete and Move button.
• Click Edit to change a category or product name and other details.
• Click Delete to delete the category or product.
• Click Move to move a category or product. Categories can have subcategories.
• To create a new product, highlight the appropriate category and then click New Product.
• If you do not select a category, osCommerce will place the new product in the root. You can move it later.
• On the New Product page, you can edit product name, image, quantity, availability details and so forth.
• Note that the editing page is quite long; you may need to scroll down to see it all.
• In the bottom right-hand corner is a Preview and Cancel button.
• Click Preview to see how the product will appear to the customer.
• Click Cancel to cancel the new product creation process.
• In the bottom right-hand corner of the preview is a Back, Insert and Cancel button.
• Click Back to return to the editor.
• Click Insert to create the product.
• Click Cancel to cancel the process.
More about osCommerce
Once an e-commerce site is up and running, the most common tasks are the adding, deleting and editing of a small number of products at a time. This is what osCommerce does very well, and the editing interface is very fast and easy to use. Sometimes a store will need to deal with a large number of items, especially during the development stage or when adding or removing a new vendor. For this, users have a number of options. Either they can work directly on the database via SQL, PHP or other technology, or they can install an osCommerce add-on that adds batch or other product functionality.
