With osCommerce installed, one might be forgiven for breathing a huge sigh of relief because at last everything has been done and that the universe is unfolding as it should. Of course, I urge you to click on the Catalog option on the final installation window in order to get a reality check. You will no doubt find that the page that is brought up spawns some horrid looking warnings before actually displaying anything, which could be mistaken for an online shop, much like this:

Take my word, there's a fair old amount to do in terms of configuring your individual osCommerce installation to suit a new business. Fortunately, the people at osCommerce have made a lot of default choices which are pretty sensible, so provided you have a good look at everything that is up for osCommerce configuration, and ensure that you understand what all the settings do and mean, quite a bit of it can go unchanged.

Having an online tool like the one shipped with osCommerce is of great value and advantage to us osCommerce users. If, for example, you had undertaken to build your own site from scratch, then no matter how well you built your site, it would probably be prohibitive in terms of time taken to develop a fully functional online administration center to go with it. This would mean effectively that you are doomed forever to modify your database manually,

In order to fully appreciate how osCommerce works, it is best to picture it in terms of how it deals with requests from a user. The correct way to think about any interaction between a user and your osCommerce application is in the form of requests and responses. In other words, whatever the user does (for example, click on a product thumbnail), the PHP application treats that action as a request, which may require some form of processing and then a response. In the case of clicking on a product thumbnail, the response might be to add the product to the user's shopping cart.