osCommerce Blog

I went to the dollar store today and found shelves of missed marked back to school items containing the below price tag:

(1 FOR $0.00)

I have never seen so many products at one time incorrectly marked at $0.00! This is an excellent reminder to all osCommerce store owners to check their prices to make sure that none of their products are incorrectly priced.

To be on the safe side I suggest adding “ANY $0 PRICED ITEMS ARE NEW ITEMS AND ARE CURRENTLY BEING PRICED AND ARE TEMPORARILY NOT FOR SALE” to the conditions of use page.

While reviewing multiple live shop submissions, I have noticed several things:

When writing a description write about something unique about your site that makes your store stand out from the rest of the stores in the category. I see too many one sentence descriptions that have little to no thought put into them. A better description will also help us determine the correct category to place your site under.

Please make sure that your site has all required information filled out (Shipping and Returns, Privacy Notice, Terms and Conditions). Also make sure that the links to these pages are easy to find.

I have also noticed several broken links as well as sites that do not even use osCommerce.

Following these guidelines should assure that your site will be approved for the live shops directory much faster.

I have recently noticed some general trends when reviewing OsCommerce sites. Many OsCommerce shop owners forget to do the following:

Change the rollover color of their links to match their stores color scheme.
This can be done here: catalog/stylesheet.css

Change the buttons to match the design/color scheme of their store.
This can be done here: catalog/includes/languages/[Your Language]/images/buttons

Change the icons to reflect their store design.
Right click on the image you wish to replace. Most of them are named table_background_default.gif or something along those lines. Once you get the properties, look at the path and then upload your new image in its place.