With Niora’s “OSC to CSS” contribution and osCommerce’s 2.3.1 upgrade, one may wonder at the need for another “tableless” rewrite of osCommerce. Frankly, we were overjoyed at the prospect of finally being able to retire “CSS osCommerce,” but, here we are again with Version 3.0.0.

Why is CSS osCommerce different than the other solutions?

Different objectives. While osCommerce has always been concerned with appealing to a common denominator of users and Niora’s “OSC to CSS” has been about making osC tableless, Rasa Design Studio has concentrated on an osCommerce that helped with established marketing techniques and strategies.

Our original launch of CSS osCommerce, therefore, had less to do with making the application tableless and more to do with an overall strategy of marketing and conversion. Our later versions added features that either streamlined owner operations, made the application easier for non-programming designers and consolidated code that was hopelessly redundent. Tableless design, then, was only one part of a significant series of core code changes and CSS osCommerce version 3.0 is our best rewrite, ever… and is based on osCommerce’s best rewrite.

Is CSS osCommerce the best version of osC for your development team?

OsCommerce does it’s best to be “all things to all people” and its adoption of a (mostly) tableless structure helps. Rasa Design Studio’s CSS osCommerce, however, was developed with marketing-driven projects in mind. We believed that design and marketing ideas should drive programing instead of programing constraints limiting design and marketing objectives. That said, we don’t mind if our marketing bias shows.

The best answer to the question is that low-budget shops that don’t stray far from existing contributions and design templates will find it cost- and time-effective to stay with osCommerce Classic. Projects that demand complicated new functionality may find CSS osCommerce to be more flexible and the coding structure more intuitive.

What is the cost?

Rasa Design Studio is releasing CSS osCommerce 3.0 for a flat $30 price and opening up support on our site with a new forum. Custom modifications will be billed at competitive flat rates.

In general, Seven Stone eCommerce is an answer to clunky “shopping cart” applications that emerged before the needs of shop owners was fully understood. While current applications have grown in power and sophistication over the past several years, they are often Frankenstein monsters built on a core architecture that predate Ajax popularity and sometimes, as in the case of osCommerce, even predate the power of Google.

Seven stone, then, was conceived, not merely as a shopping cart eCommerce application, but as a ‘business’ application with the ’shopping cart’ as only one key component of a larger, online business. Storefront design, marketing, operations, sales, customer relations management, Human Resource, shipping and receiving and other ‘divisions’ of a modern, growing business should be contained under one roof with all elements able to talk and interact with all of the other elements.

Whether a business starts out as a single owner-operator business, or a financed company with hundreds of employees, the framework for running all online business should be contained within a single framework and should be flexible and modular enough to grow with the business.

The idea has been there ever since my work integrating osCommerce with OrderMotion. A proposal written for Atria to study BlueNile.com’s usability and the rise of Ajax solutions has made Seven Stone eCommerce much more of a possibility. With frameworks such as Cake and Symfony, the actual building of Seven Stone has become the new priority of Rasa Design Studio.