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osCommerce here we come

osCommerce is another one of those amazing internet collaborative ventures that we have explored and made use of from time to time.

It provides a secure open source e-commerce solution that can be implemented on the most commonly available hosting platforms by using PHP and MySQL. Having decided to move in this direction yesterday we now have the basic system set up and now have to populate it and integrate it with our existing pages.

This presents quite a few tricky choices - my instinct is to retain the existing simple html site structure and create a separate shop for customers who are uncomfortable with BitPass for whatever reason. The main usability issues relate to movement between the two parts of the site and maintaining session continuity. To start with, I think we will assume that visitors will complete their visit in the shop once they have moved into it and if they return they may have to sign in again.

There are also going to be some pricing decisions - low value credit card transactions are expensive and so we will have to look at handling fees as well as volume related discounts.

In the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - No 4 First Movement by JS Bach.

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