osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution under on going development by the open source community. Its feature packed out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with absolutely no costs or license fees involved.

osCommerce combines open source solutions to provide a free and open e-commerce platform, which includes the powerful PHP web scripting language, the stable apache web server, and the fast MySQL database server.

With no restrictions or special requirements, osCommerce is able to run on any PHP enabled web server, on any environment that PHP and MySQL supports, which includes Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows environments.

A variety of companies use OSCommerce. They sell everything from girls' socks to embedded software, and their business models run from mom-and-pop through full-blown manufacturing/distribution operations. It has been around since 2000 and has a large user community and a huge collection of contributions -- packaged sets of code modifications or documentation -- which is both a blessing and a curse.

Source: IT Managers JournalPrashanth RaiOpen Source, Store Front, E-Commerce

Other positives that they pointed out:

• OSCommerce has the ability to create optional product attributes, such as color and size.
• The Web-based administration panel makes it possible for relatively inexperienced users to add and maintain product info.
• Both sales taxes and value-added taxes (VAT) can be configured for a variety of scenarios.

• The Web-based admin program can be cumbersome, especially the product entry and update pages, which have a large and confusing collection of options.
• The handling of images is confusing.
• Branding is complicated. It's hard to locate where things need to be changed and to ensure those changes can be carried over to new versions.
• The large number of contributed packages and their varying quality can be a problem
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• Picking the ones that will work best for the business and maintaining them can be a real time sink. Ensuring that you don't install conflicting changes or overwrite existing code can be frustrating.