Products in osCommerce are usually grouped in categories. Categories can have child categories, forming a category tree. Products in osCommerce may belong to one or several categories, making the navigation either easier or, on the contrary, more cumbersome depending on how well the category tree is built.

The category name would usually describe products that belong to that particular category. The category name should not be made too long, otherwise it can break the layout of the osCommerce category tree. Having said that, for the sake of SEO it's better to use related keywords in category names, so that search engines sould associate the keywords from the category name with the corresponding list of products.

Even though it would be enough for customers if each sub-category used its own name, for the sake of SEO it is better to include the name of a category of higher level into the name of a sub-category. For example, a website that sells home appliances would rather have the following categories: Cookers - Range Cookers - Electric Range Cookers than Cookers - Range - Electric. This approach will make category names look similar to the queries that prospective customers use in search engines to find products sold online on the Internet.

Alternative Categories

Some online stores may need to use a special alternative category tree to ease the navigation.

This feature doesn't come with the default installation of osCommerce, and would have to be implemented separately. Or instead of adding yet another copy of the category tree, two top categories can be chosen to contain a category tree each. Then, the category tree box in the front end would need to be modified to display only sub-categories of one of the two top categories chosen earlier. So effectively, having both category trees still managed in a regular osCommerce way in the back end, the online store will get two separate category trees in the front end.

Online merchants can get sample code with plenty of useful information in Monika Mathé's book Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook published by Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-84719-090-1).

Alternative categories can be used in many ways. For example, an online store that sells cakes, pastries, and cookies could have two category trees. One would contain common categories that would split the product catalog by product type, like "Cakes", "Confections", "Cookies", "Deserts", "Dietary", etc.

The second category tree would group certain products from various categories by the occasion they are good for, like "Birthday", "Wedding", "Anniversary", "Thanksgiving Day", and so on.

Depending on the nature of products being offered online, brands (or manufacturers) can be more important or better known to prospective customers than categories, and it can be more convenient for customers to navigate through the product catalog using brand filters than categories.

osCommerce has built-in support for product manufacturers (brands), and can display a filter by brand in the front end. This functionality can be extended further by:

The "Shop by brand" feature doesn't only make the navigation and product selection process easier for customers, but is also beneficial for SEO as it associates well known brands with categories and individual products of online store.

In some cases, brand navigation can have more than one level. Then, the top level brands (like for example, "Casio"), will have sub-brands (like for example, "Casio Baby-G" and "Casio Futurist").

If a significant number of products belong to each brand in the online product catalog, the "Shop by brand" feature can evolve into so called "brand stores". Each major brand gets its own front end (or mini-store).

The following osCommerce contribution could be of help when implementing the mini-stores functionality: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1730.

A special sub-domain or domain name can be given to a brand store to better explain to customers and search engines what sort of products are offered by the brand store. For better brand recognition, even the look and feel of the brand store can be changed to match the look and feel usually associated with the selected brand or with the corresponding products.

Along with grouping by category or brand, products can be grouped or filtered in several other ways, making it easier for customers to find what exactly they are interested in and what they can afford buying.

Such filters can be used to fine-tune search results, making the selection of products in a category or brand narrower.

Filters by Price

Filter by product price is one of the most popular and obvious to use for customers among additional filters. It allows the Administration of the online store to set up several price levels, and then the customers can choose this or that price level to get the list of products within the price interval.

This helps customers limit their product search results to those products they can afford, or to those products they think are good enough as their price lies in a certain price range.

It's important to note that price intervals can be different depending on the type of products that are sold online. For example, an online store that sells MP3 players and game consoles would most probably have two different price interval sets for those two product types.

Also, to make them look nicer (or as it's sometimes described—friendlier), price filters would very much depend on the currency chosen should the online store support multiple currencies.

Price filters can be added to one of the side columns:

or put in the top of the middle area of the page with te Product Listing—in the latter case it will make sense to make them applicable to the specific product range only. There is an osCommerce contribution that implements price filters functionality: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1276.

Filters by Additional Properties

Products of many types are very well described by technical specifications, or by a set of properties and property values. Sometimes, it makes it much easier for customers to understand how a product can address their needs to look into its technical specification rather than its marketing description.

Additional properties and their values can be added into the database and assigned to products in order to better describe those products, and highlight the most important features and specifications of the products.

For example, for a website that sells TV sets, one of the main properties of a product will be its size in inches—for example up to 20", up to 29", up to 39", up to 49", and over 50". For a website that sells digital cameras, one of the most important product properties would be the number of megapixels—up to 3, up to 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and over 9 megapixels. MP3 players may have two key properties that define them (besides other additional properties that each and every product may have). Those would be memory capacity in GB (under 2GB, up to 8GB, up to 30GB, up to 60GB, and over 60GB) and type (music, music + photo, music + photo + video).

Properties (or features) should also be well described themselves, to give the customer an idea what actually this or that feature can be used for, and what this or that value of a parameter means. In the example with MP3 players, the description for the "capacity" property could tell the customers about different types of data storage solutions used to store audio, video files, and images in MP3 players, and description of each particular value of the "capacity" property (like 2GB, 8GB, etc.) could tell customers about how many songs, on the average, could be stored in the memory of such MP3 players.

Therefore, on the Product Information page, in the list of properties (or features), the names of the features can be made clickable, and a specially designed pop-up window with detailed description of the property or property value can be displayed to help customers to make their choice.

Properties and property values can also be used as filters. Such filters would be applied to Product Listings (either category or search results) and the online store would extract properties and their values from all listed products. Filters would be built dynamically depending on the products that are in the listing, and would allow for narrowing the Product Listing to just a few products matching the selected filters.

When a Product Listing page first opens to the customer, the customer first of all sees products displayed at the beginning of the listing. The customer will more likely add one of the products displayed in the top of the listing to the Shopping Cart than a product located in the middle of the page or in its very bottom or on one of the following pages of product listing, if all those products are very similar, simply because the customer doesn't need to scroll the page down or switch to another page of the Product Listing to see those top products.

This works very similarly to how search results in search engines work—the top several links in the search results listing have more chances to be explored by users than all the other links because of the way the page is constructed and because of the way the customers look at the page.

Products that are more often displayed in the top of the product listing have more chances to be sold. It is possible to improve the profits generated by an osCommerce online store by manually defining products that will be displayed in the top of the Product Listing.

It makes sense to put products with the highest margin (the difference between the cost price and sale price) that are currently in stock to the top of the product listing. This way customers will be buying such products more often, and even though the turnover of the online store may remain the same, the generated profits will grow higher.

Such products can be also highlighted with a certain color or special icons to make them easier to notice even if the customer changes the sort order from the default one.

There are at least two methods by which products can be selected in the osCommerce Administration panel. First of all, it's possible to install a special contribution that would allow marking certain products as "Featured". Corresponding contributions can be downloaded from osCommerce website at http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2283 and http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4066.

Secondly, it is possible to employ a more flexible solution, and instead of having featured and non-featured products, have a special sort order (or importance index) assigned to each product, so that products with higher sort order (or the more important ones) get closer to the top of the Product Listing independent of whether it's the category Product Listing or a search results Product Listing. A special contribution for this can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/911.

The second method is better as it allows for a more accurate and flexible management of the product catalog.

Some customers may be interested in the latest additions to the product catalog, especially if the online store sells some very tangible products or products where updates to the product range happen often.

Products recently added to the product catalog can be highlighted as "New products" either with a color and/or a special icon. This highlighting can be preserved in any Product Listing so that newly added products would be easy to find on all pages.

Sometimes an online merchant would like to have some of the previously added products highlighted as "New" either because those products sell very well, or there have been many additions to the catalog recently, but not all of them were so important compared to the products added to the catalog just before the latest additions.

In such cases the "New" flag can be made editable at the product level in the osCommerce Administration panel, so that the online merchant has full control over the new products. Sample code and more information on how to implement this and other useful features can be found in Monika Mathé's Deep Inside osCommerce: The Cookbook published by Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-84719-090-1).

Products do not necessarily have to be in stock when the customer goes through the Product Listings. Some products may not even have been introduced to the market by the time the customer sees them in the Product Listing and wants to buy/pre-order them.

Instead of "Buy now" or "Add to cart" such products should have the "Pre-order" facility.

Also, the customers should be told if some products are currently out of stock, and, if it's possible to say, when the products are likely to be back in stock.

The osCommerce Product Listing is sorted by name by default. Products can also be sorted manually by the Administration of the online store if the corresponding feature is implemented.

osCommerce allows for the sorting option to be set by customers. A customer can click the header of one of the columns (product name, price, date added to the product catalog, etc.) and the product listing will be re-ordered accordingly.

But what if the product listing page doesn't have any columns, or if the customer wants to see, for example, the best selling products first in the Product Listing?

In that case, a special drop-down box with sort options can be placed on the Product Listing page to make it easier for customers to re-arrange the Product Listing in a way that makes it easier for them to find the product they are interested in.

Special sorting options may include:

Although there are contributions like http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4312 that implement some of the sorting options mentioned above, certain sorting options may require extensive modifications in the database queries and scripts to bring up Product Listings.

The osCommerce solution supports Quick Search and Advanced Search features.

The Quick Search feature usually allows for searching by one or several keywords. The search is against product name or description database fields.

Those keywords can be entered in the Quick Search edit box in the front end, and the search results are returned in the format of a Product Listing page where each product matches the search criteria. This is very much like the Advanced Search results page (which actually is the same for both Advanced Search and Quick Search), except that when using the Advanced Search feature more conditions can be specified, like lowest and highest price, categories and manufacturers of products to be found, and dates when the products were added to the product catalog.

The Quick Search feature can be improved in several ways:

These manipulations with the keyword edit box are also applicable to the Advanced Search feature. As a matter of fact, search by the date when certain products were added to the catalog is used very rarely by the customers, so it may make sense to remove that filter from the Advanced Search page in order to make it look compact and easier to use. Also, filters that allow for searching by category and manufacturer can be improved to allow multiple selections of both manufacturers and categories.

It can be improved further by adding filters by property values if the product catalog has support for these.

Yet another improvement is related rather to the search results page; if the customer used the Advanced Search feature, it would make further navigation and searching easier for customer if the specified search criteria were displayed (and were made editable) on the search results page and it was possible to change the search criteria in order to refine the search results. This can be achieved by installing the following contribution: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4111.

It is also possible to highlight the search terms in product names and descriptions to make it easier for customers to locate the most suitable products in search results. The following osCommerce contribution could be used: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1086. Interestingly enough, there also exists a special contribution that highlights keywords on your online store page when the user comes from search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/3820.

Relevancy of the search results to the search criteria is one of the keys to customer satisfaction with the search feature of an online store. The customer is more likely to buy products if they are relevant to the specified search criteria. The customer is more likely to notice such products if they are brought up to the very top of the Product Listing on the search results page.

Therefore, the Product Listing on the search results page can be improved by ordering it according to the relevancy of products to the specified search criteria, by default.

In a very simple situation, a more relevant product will be considered as one that has more occurrences of the specified search terms in product name, and then product description. Product name here is more important than product description, similarly to how this works in popular search engines.

The search feature of an osCommerce online store has to be extensively modified in order to have Product Listing sorted by relevancy on the search results page.

If there are no matching products in the product catalog, osCommerce displays a default and quite an unfriendly message telling the customer about that and suggesting trying different search criteria.

It is still possible to improve this default functionality though, to make it more helpful to customers:

The product's name is what most customers would be looking for in their searches; it's what describes and identifies a product in most cases.

The product name should be descriptive enough to give customers an idea about the functions of the product or about its features. It may also contain category name and /or manufacturer/brand name if it's a suitable product to use the brand name as one of the selling features.

However, there are some products (like printer cartridges for example) that may be better described by their model numbers, and then these should be also included into product name.

There are products that are very well described by their features. For example computer products, like laptops may have their manufacturer, model number, CPU, RAM, and HDD characteristics included into the product name to make it easier for customers to choose the product they want.

The product catalog benefits from introducing short descriptions for products. Short descriptions can be used in the Product Listing and on the Product Information page, and would usually contain a very short description of the reason why this or that product is ideal to address customer's needs.

It would usually contain description of the most important "selling points". If the online store sells MP3 player, the short description may contain weight and dimensions information, amount of memory included, and supported formats. If the online store sells natural cosmetics, the product's short description may tell the customers what exactly the product does, what it improves, and how it can be used. An online store selling home appliances would put information about the product's dimensions, energy consumption level, noise, warranty, and some main/unique features into the short description.

The product's long description is usually displayed on the Product Information page only, and contains the so called "marketing text"—i.e. besides the fact that it should describe the product in detail, it should also contain certain parts that will be calling customers to action, to buy the product online. When the customer is looking for a product, the customer is often looking for a solution to address certain needs. Therefore, not only features of the product should be placed into long description, but also information about how these or those needs of the customer can be satisfied if the customer was to purchase the product.

If properly prepared, the product's long description can become one of the strongest salling points. HTML tags can be used in the product's long description to highlight certain parts of it. It's not only useful to draw customer's attention to the most important features or solutions provided by the product, but also for SEO, as search engines would also look for highlighted parts of the product description in the first turn.

Technical specifications are important for certain types of products as they describe the very features or ingredients of the product better than anything else. Computer parts or complete computer systems, mobile phones, audio and video equipment, machinery, even nutrition products, etc.—products where the customer may be very well educated about technical characteristics or ingredients of the desired product, can be very well described by the product's technical specification/ingredients (of course along with more marketing-oriented long description). Those specifications can be displayed on a special tab of the Product Information page, and can also be even used to compare two or more products, or to filter products in Product Listings.

Product images should be big and sharp enough to give the customer the best impression about the look and feel and features of each product. When using images of different sizes, each thumbnail or bigger image ideally should be checked to ensure the maximum possible quality of the picture.

Of course, the proportions of the original image should be kept when creating a thumbnail of a bigger image.

Additional product images can be used either to demonstrate some very specific features or details of the product, or to demonstrate different ways in which the product can be used.

Because the customer cannot just explore the product as in a regular shop, additional product pictures that let the customer see the full details of the product can help the customer make the decision to buy the product. Also, seeing different ways in which the product can be used (similar to the "serving suggestions" that one can see on boxes with food products in the supermarkets) can help the customer to decide whether the product could be used to address some of the customer's needs.

These contributions allow for multiple product images, and also for full size images and thumbnails associated with a product: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1611 and http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1289.

Image galleries with slide show, where the images either change automatically, or the main image can be easily changed by moving the mouse cursor over the thumbnails, are an efficient way to demonstrate a product's additional images, especially if the customer is not yet aware of all the features of the product or of how the product could be used.

Image galleries could be implemented using a script called "lightbox". More information about lighbox and how to use it to gain the best presentation effect can be found at http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/. There is a contribution for osCommerce available from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/5236 that also implements a lightbox feature for enlarged product images. The lightbox solution makes the most of it when it's employed to display a set of several images, so it may make sense to combine it with any of the contributions or custom-built solutions used to allow for several additional images per osCommerce product.

Sometimes the most efficient way to describe some products, especially the ones that contain plenty of features that are supposedly new to the target audience, is to include links to the related video clips into product description.

Such video clips can be provided by the product manufacturer, by independent reviewers, or created "in-house". They can be hosted on the same server where the online store is hosted, or on any other web server to spare web traffic and reduce the workload of the main web server. Video format should be the most common one, so that all customers could watch the video clips. It is recommended to include an embedded video player into the web page so that even those customers who do not have compatible video player software installed on their computer could watch the clip. The following contribution will allow for displaying embedded video clips on the product information page: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4415.

As with video clips, some manufacturers supply detailed product information, marketing description, technical specification, warranty description, and even product manuals as downloadable brochures (most often in PDF format).

Links to those brochures can be added to the Product Information page, so that customers could download brochures to their local computers and read all the information about products offline, and also show to their friends, partners, etc.

Buying guides can be created for product categories. Those buying guides can not only be made available for download from a special page, but also be added to the Product Information pages of corresponding individual products. Like brochures supplied by manufacturers, buying guides will often come in PDF format.

It is considered to be useful to place a link to a website where users can download special viewer software for PDF files on a web page that contains links to PDF files to ensure that all customers can read manufacturer brochures and buying guides.

Product ratings may not be very useful to the customers as they do not really describe other customers' experience with the product. Reviews given by other customers to the product often play an important role in affecting a customer's decision to buy or not to buy a particular product.

Product reviews can be also given by third-party experts in that type of products, or simply by the online store team itself, but in such cases, the reviews should be marked accordingly to clearly identify the reviewer.

Reviews are easier to notice if placed on the Product Information page. If there are several reviews and/or some of them are relatively large, a brief summary of such reviews can be placed on the Product Information page along with the link to the page where the customer can read those reviews in detail. Of course, it should be possible for the customer to add the product to the Shopping Cart from the dedicated reviews page.

To display reviews on the Product Information page, online merchants may want to use this osCommerce contribution: http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/3340.

If there are no reviews for products given by the customers of an online store yet, it is possible to use one of the external review databases and extract reviews given by customers who bought the same products elsewhere.

Product price is one of the most important bits of information about the product that most often affects a customer's decision to buy or not to buy the product online.

But, interestingly enough, some online stores would prefer to hide the price of certain products for various reasons. Sometimes it is done to make the customer call the sales team and let the sales team give the customer a quote according to customer's exact requirements (for example, in the case of having products that come in various configurations). Sometimes it is done because the supplier (or manufacturer of certain products) would not like the price to be available in the online stores and would simply forbid the retailers to disclose the price to customers on the website.

An osCommerce contribution could be installed to allow for this functionality. It can be found at http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2500.

Either way, it is recommended to put a free phone number that customers could dial to check the price and delivery terms with the sales team. One obvious inconvenience for customers, besides the necessity to dial the phone number, is that one of the main functions of an online store, to be open to the customers 24/7, ceases to exist in that case as only a few online stores would have a sale team available 24/7.

Product price may or may not contain tax. For selling to the public, it's recommended to display price with tax in larger font, and below price without tax with the corresponding note. But online stores that mostly sell to businesses would rather display price without tax first, and price with tax second, using smaller font size.

Often to make the price look attractive to customers, online merchants display the recommended retail price (RRP) (or it is sometimes called Manufacturer's suggested sale price i.e. SRP or MSRP) and then the actual price the customer would be paying followed by the amount of savings compared to RRP. Adding an RRP price in osCommerce is relatively easy; there are contributions available to download (for example http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/3574) that can make it possible to enter RRP and current price for each product. Savings are better displayed in percent, so that if the store price is $8 and the actual saving is only $2, it may still be a significant savings of 20% of a $10 RRP. The special price feature can made to work in the same way, displaying the savings in percent.

If the online store provides quantity-based discounts on certain products, it makes sense to highlight such products in the Product Listing, and also put information about quantity-based prices on the Product Information page. Again, the percent savings will make a difference and more clearly demonstrate how much the customer can save when buying several products at once. A special table with quantities and corresponding prices can be displayed on the Product Information page.

There are at least two osCommerce contributions that could be used to allow for this functionality. Those are http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4658 and http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2269.

In order to reward the customer for buying several different products at once, the online store can give the customer a discount based on current special offer. Special offer prices can be entered for certain products, and can replace the normal store price for those products when the order total exceeds a certain amount. Information about special offers and promotions and also about the required order total for special offers and promotions to be activated can be displayed on corresponding product pages, and also can be gathered together on a special dedicated page where all currently available offers are listed.

Product stock levels can be displayed on the Product Listing and Product Information pages. It's especially important to give customers a clear picture of the current stock levels if the business model of the online store assumes dispatching orders from its own warehouse or ordering products from suppliers first and then sending them directly to the customers, or first receiving them in its own warehouse and dispatching to the customers thereafter.

For business customers, stock levels would ideally be displayed as the exact numbers of items in stock, as business customers tend to buy multiple products at a time.

For consumers, exact stock levels do not have to be displayed. Instead, icons indicating stock status (for example, green for when there's enough quantity in stock, yellow for products with limited/critical stock levels, and red for products out of stock) can be used on Product Listing and Product Information pages.

A special contribution can be downloaded from http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/968 and installed to allow for this functionality.

The date when products are likely to be back in stock can be displayed alongside the corresponding icon/zero stock level, so customers can see it and come back to the online store on that date to purchase the desired products. Or if the customer is ready to pre-order the product, this will give the customer an idea of when it's possible to expect the product to be actually delivered. In that case, the date when products are likely to be back in stock should be included into the order confirmation email and into printed/downloadable documents, such as the invoice.

Besides improving Product Information and Product Listings, product catalog can be improved further by implementing several additional features. Those features are related to product in this or that way, and can be used to make it easier for customers to order products online.

First of all, the online store should be able to detect automatically where the customer is opening the website pages from, and either propose to the customer switching to a separate front end dedicated to the region the customer is located in, or switch the language and currency settings automatically.

It's good to know that default osCommerce installation already has this facility built in. It tries to automatically select the most appropriate language based on the browser locale settings, which sometimes leads to improper presentation of the online store, as osCommerce may determine the customer's default language and find the same language registered in the database, so when the customer opens the online store, osCommerce selects the language according to the customer's default locale even if osCommerce texts have never been properly translated into the selected language. The customer may then see categories and products without names and descriptions, pages without textual content or with strange system variables instead, etc.

Therefore, it's recommended to remove all extra languages from osCommerce database during the set up, to ensure that customers can only see the website and product catalog in one of the maintained languages.

Product descriptions should be provided in the supported languages. Descriptions in default language can be also used, but then not all international customers would be able to buy products online from the website.

Product descriptions should be professionally translated into other languages. It's not acceptable to use any auto-translation tools, because instead of the properly prepared marketing and features description, international customers will see very unprofessionally looking texts. It's not only bad for the image of the online store, but also leads to mistakes and misunderstandings about the features of certain products.

Product price is usually specified in the default currency in osCommerce, and then, should the customer switch to another currency, the osCommerce online store would take the current conversion rates and calculate the new price in the new currency accordingly.

Depending on the marketing strategy, currency exchange rate can be specified manually by the online store owner, or updated automatically from a website that publishes this information.

osCommerce has support for both manual currency exchange rate correction and for automatic download of currency exchange rates from such websites.

To avoid manual interaction, the update of currency exchange rate can be scheduled to be performed on a daily basis.

Yet another way to manage prices in different currencies would be to set up a special feature that would allow for setting prices in different currencies on the per product basis. This feature would allow for having "friendly" prices for products in all currencies, not depending on the currency exchange rate.

For example, a product that costs $9.99 might normally cost £5.01. In the case of "friendly" prices, its price in British Pounds would be set to £4.99. "Friendly" prices help selling products to international customers. The corresponding contribution is available at http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/4445.

Shipping and payment methods can be different for different countries and regions.

Therefore, the online store needs to be configured to avoid any confusion with this or that payment or shipping method not available in certain regions but still displayed during the checkout process as one of the options. For example, ground shipping methods should not be available for deliveries to Europe when the online store delivers products from its warehouse in the USA. As shipping methods in osCommerce can be linked to corresponding zones, this becomes a matter of proper configuration of zones and shipping and payment methods in the back end of the online store.

Also, depending on the product characteristics (price, weight, dimensions), certain products may not be available for delivery in certain countries or regions. Information about whether there are any restrictions on selling certain products in certain countries should be made available to the customers on the Product Information page to avoid further confusion and frustration when the product is added to the Shopping Cart and the customer finds out only on the Checkout pages that the order can not be delivered because of certain products being a part of it.