Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition will teach you how to use build and maintain a complex, powerful e-commerce Website using osCommerce. As well as everything you need to get started with osCommerce, this book goes onto cover how to: Increase your sales through cross-selling and up-selling; Offer custom discounts and support the use of gift certificates; Incorporate your own RSS feed to enhance the content of the site; Use and control banners to market popular or profitable products within your store; Customize the osCommerce code to make your site more robust, eliminate bugs, and increase flexibility and customer appeal; Understand the security technologies involved in e-commerce and develop your own security and backup strategies; Build your business by utilizing various advertising techniques, search engine optimization, affiliate and drop-shipping schemes Learn the principles and methods used by professional programmers to empower you to continue creating and building your online business. These techniques will enable you to build a unique and powerful site, giving you an ideal platform to enter the competitive world of e-commerce. Through this complete, comprehensive education in osCommerce you will develop the confidence to experiment with your own enhancements and modifications, leaving you with a truly unique online store. Practical demonstrations and well considered advice will ensure that your store will always be developed to the highest standards. As you become serious with osCommerce, this book will show you how to make the most of osCommerce's open source development process and community. You will see how to use the community as an excellent resource for developing your business strategies and practices, as well as making it easy to continuously enhance your customers' shopping experience. There is a Beginner Edition of this title available ISBN 1904811884.

Author Biography

David Mercer is a programmer and professional writer who has been writing both code and books for about seven years. He has worked on a number of titles on a wide variety of topics which has afforded him a unique oversight of the world of technology as it relates to furthering the goals of business. David finds the challenges arising from the dichotomous relationship between the science (and art) of software programming and the art (and science) of writing is what keeps his interest in producing books piqued and intends to continue to write professionally in the future. As a consultant for his own technical and editorial consultancy, David balances his time between programming, reviewing, writing and furthering his studies in Applied Mathematics.