Toy Retailer sings praises of ability to customize osCommerce

[mandy]

When Simpson first launched outside of eBay in 2002, setting up a shopping cart wasn't a cut-and-dried operation. "Everything was pretty manual," he says. "There were a lot of application service providers to help." Simpson thinks he may have gone through them all as he tried to find the right fit and keep up with Ty's Toy Box's rapid growth and evolution. "This year we realized that we were growing faster than the technology companies we were using."

Part of the problem was that proprietary companies were unwilling or unable to keep up with Simpson's feature requests. "We found that we were competing with their other clients for getting fixes and functionality. We were paying license fees and percentages of sales. That was frustrating. We wanted to start putting the resources into something we could call our own. We decided it was time to take matters into our own hands."

Simpson found a couple of open source developers and consultants, Jeremy Pryor and Stephen Mowry, and contracted with them to come up with the perfect ecommerce solution. "When people first began to use ecommerce stores, a lot of people spent a lot of money coding their own shopping cart solutions," Pryor says. Then came the era of pre-packaged shopping carts, but now "we're entering a new phase. We're beginning to see the potential for a resurgence of people bringing it back in house, but using open source solutions. It gives the best of both worlds."

Pryor and Mowry began with osCommerce, a free, open source application, and started customizing it...

full article: http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/feature...f560709093