osCommerce is dead... Long live osCommerce!

As we are launching new osCommerce 4 today, we feel it is important to share our thoughts on what has happened with osCommerce in the first 20 years of its life as a leading open-source Ecommerce platform.

osCommerce - the beginnings

osCommerce started in 2000, and it was great for its time! It continued to be developed by a team of enthusiasts (to versions 2.x), and quickly a community grew around it - of merchants and developers. It was an exciting time, and, rightly so, osCommerce became perhaps THE most popular Ecommerce platform for a while. 

Unfortunately, because of the lack of the commercial strategy, old osCommerce (2.x) never took off as a successful viable commercial product, ready to support bigger businesses and help them with their challenges. And then, the team behind it simply stopped its development. An attempt was made to create version 3, but it never materialised. 

Decline of old osCommerce

osCommerce was still going, but its competition was more active, and they had business acumen that was obviously lacking at osCommerce. This resulted in osCommerce slowly slipping to the very back of the market share reports, becoming almost negligible there.

By the end of 2020, osCommerce was pretty much dead as an Ecommerce solution for business. Yes, it still had some 46,000 shops using it. Yes, it still had a massive community of loyal supporters. But it lacked life in it. It lacked any modern technologies or features. It lacked vision and direction. 

New hope for osCommerce

When Holbi took over osCommerce in the beginning of 2021, the one and only goal was to bring osCommerce back to life, and make it a mainstream Ecommerce solution for both businesses and developers. We didn't plan on using the old code, simply because it was too OLD. It is not practical to take a piece of software that is more than 10 years old, and try to make it modern. Instead we decided to restart osCommerce on our new Ecommerce platform - Powerful Commerce.

Powerful Commerce is a modern, feature-rich, modular open source Ecommerce platform with Enterprise-level features, suitable to run small, medium, large, and global businesses. It was made by Holbi, and is being continuously supported and developed further, every day. Importantly, Powerful Commerce was inspired by the old osCommerce. But made better, modern, the way it was always supposed to be.  

The work to produce new osCommerce out of Powerful Commerce took more than a year. During that time we streamlined the codebase, removed unnecessary modules, extracted a number of features into "osCommerce apps". We made it easy to install, easy to import data from old osCommerce. We added osCommerce Wiki, the App Shop, osCommerce Hosting. 

Long live new osCommerce!

Today we are proudly launching new osCommerce 4 and giving it to the world. osCommerce 4 is a modern free shopping cart and open source Ecommerce platform. It will remain free, as osCommerce has always been. osCommerce 4 is not the old osCommerce 2.x, it is a new system. But the spirit of osCommerce lives on in it! We just made osCommerce into something that it was supposed to evolve, had it been given a chance. We gave osCommerce and osCommerce users and community a chance to have a mainstream Ecommerce platform. To be able to use osCommerce to grow their businesses. To earn with osCommerce by creating Apps and Designs, offering services, and so on. We welcome everyone who would like to join us on this journey to a success of the new osCommerce!