osCommerce is about 8 years old now - quite a respectful age for a software product. Many businesses use osCommerce for their Internet sales. And it works pretty well, and supports their growth. But the “official” version developed by osCommerce.com is out of date and, on its own, can not compete with the present day’s rivals, such as Magento and X-Cart, and others.

We share strong beliefs in the 3.0 version of osCommerce, but realistically - upgrade to the latest (not yet available!) version will look more like re-development of an existing web site for almost any online business relying on osCommerce today. More than that - the features that are to be released in version 3.0 - at least from the store owner’s point of view - are already available in other Ecommerce solutions and new osCommerce will just catch up with them.

So, why do we believe in osCommerce and why do we offer it to our customers? There are three main reasons here. Quite simple ones.

Our experience in providing businesses with Ecommerce solutions of various scale based on osCommerce is the first reason. We know a LOT about how to build successful online stores. Our customers shared their knowledge with us during all 6 years since we have created our first osCommerce site. And we have accumulated it to be able to re-use that experience again and again.

Community of osCommerce developers is the second reason. It not only produces great add-ons to osCommerce, but also offers help to everyone - a developer or a store owner - in case assistance or just an advice is needed. Support is always there. Even if the osCommerce team will not produce a new version in the next year or two (and it has been like that already for the last several years) - the osCommerce community will keep moving the project forward.

Total flexibility is the third reason. We just like it, and use it on every custom project to provide our own customers with Ecommerce solutions tailored to fit their exact needs.

These are the three reasons why we keep using osCommerce for almost all our projects, and why we believe in its future. We believe the osCommerce project will continue to develop further, providing flexible and successful solutions to the business.

It’s a bit too late to write about osCommerce this Friday evening, but it’s a not bad idea to finish this business day (and this week!) by reviewing a very common problem that some of our osCommerce customers face, and a solution to it.

I’m talking about the situation when Google indexes category pages and doesn’t index individual product pages because it considers them not so important. Hence end customers, even if they look for exact product name in Google, will most probably find links leading them to product listing pages (category pages) where it might be hard to find a particular product. Product listing pages are likely to change with time, so a product which was there one day isn’t necessarily going to be there another day.

The most obvious solution recommended by SEO specialists is to try to extract product pages from Supplemental index and put them into Google’s Main index. This is achieved by either re-writing content of the product page making it more unique and keyword rich, or by adding a link to the individual product page from another page of the web site which is well ranked by Google. The result is not guaranteed though.

We have come up with a solution, which is not exactly an alternative to the above. It rather attacks the problem from another angel. The idea behind it is really simple: to give the customer what he or she is looking for, even if Google doesn’t want to do it. So, if the customer is looking for a particular product, but Google has only noticed that product name on some product listing page and brings the link to the product listing page in search results - we are going to redirect the customer to the desired product page anyway!

To do this, we extract the referral URL and then extract the keyword used by the customer. Then we check osCommerce database to see if there exist 1-5 products there that match the desired keyword. We then either send the customer to the originally clicked URL or to the Advanced Search Results page where the customer can see all matching products listed.

This way, no matter which link of the web site is indexed by Google, if it comes up in Google’s search results when the customer is searching for a particular product - the customer will be always given the product(s) he or she wanted to find.

Hence the conversion rate from visitors to actual customers will improve.

This method works very well when prospect customers are likely to search products by their model number or commonly used product name.

If you try this method - please write us back as we are always keen to know how our ideas help you to improve your osCommerce online stores!

P.S. one important note for osCommerce web masters - please do not forget to always implement 301 redirects as otherwise Google and other search engines may identify this technique as a SPAM SEO one.