Is osCommerce overkill for me?

[Timbeau]

Hi,
I'm setting up this site for a friend and after looking at osCommerce I'm wondering if it is overkill for me. He has one service and only one service, the price is the same each time it rarely changes. The service is only practical for a 50 mile radius or so. He would like a web page to make it easier for clients to order and pay for the service. Increasing the number of purchasers slightly would be nice but we don't think the web page will have any bearing on that.

In my mind I'd like something that provides a shopping cart but I don't think he needs the catalog portion. The admin portion that allows the merchant to login and manage purchases is necessary also.

I'm a UNIX system administrator so I don't do programming day after day but I do know php and perl and have done 50-100 php pages using mysql and other stuff.

Is it going to be easier for me to write my own stuff from the ground up or will it be easier to modify osCommerce? Or is there another package I should be looking at? I'm pretty sure I can convince him to pay $200 or so, but not much more than that.

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts about this?

Thanks.

[BerksWebGuy]

Check out www.HotScripts.com .

I think for you it would be overkill. Since you only have limited services, to a limited area, and they don't change often...it may be a lot easier to make a nice little shopping cart, instead of a robust shopping cart system that can handle thousands of products.

[stevel]

Yes, I would also say osCommerce is overkill for this application. But it does provide services such as customer accounts, tracking of purchases, management of communication with the customer, that can be nice. If you don't mind going with the default look of osCommerce, you could have a functional store in a day or so, and could tweak it to make it look more reasonable for a single product. But osC does have a somewhat steep learning curve.

[ToI2n_knIgHt]

I am still a little new to all of the portal side.. but why not use a portas (CMS) for your users and to keep track and then just do a paypal buy now button with the price that needs to be in there? :cool: