osCommerce Platform

Because osCommerce is self-hosted and highly customizable, product catalogs on it tend to grow organically over many years, which makes manually keeping marketplace and ad-channel feeds in sync a real burden. Connecting your osCommerce store to Feedance lets you turn your existing catalog into accurate, structured feeds without hand-building exports or re-entering data in a second system.

Once connected, changes you make in osCommerce, such as new products, price updates, or stock changes, can flow through to the feeds and channels you manage in Feedance, so your listings stay closer to what is actually happening in your store.

Feedance connects directly to your osCommerce store using the store's own connection details, without requiring you to rebuild your catalog or migrate data anywhere else. After a one-time setup, Feedance reads your product, inventory, and order data on an ongoing basis and keeps that information available for the feeds and integrations you configure.

You keep full ownership of your osCommerce installation and database at all times. Feedance only reads and writes the specific data needed to build and maintain your feeds; it does not alter your store's design, checkout flow, or unrelated settings.

Feedance works with three core data entities on any connected platform. On osCommerce, this covers:

• Version and customization spread. osCommerce has been actively deployed for over two decades, so live stores run everything from long-standing 2.x installations to the modern 4.x line released in 2022. Because the software is open source and self-hosted, individual stores are often customized at the code and database level, which can affect how catalog and order data is structured.
• Native API availability varies by version. A built-in REST-style server module for programmatic store access was introduced with osCommerce 4.0 in 2022. Older 2.x-based stores, which still make up a large share of live osCommerce sites, were not originally designed with this kind of native API in mind.
• Fork and derivative platforms. Because osCommerce's code was reused as the basis for other carts such as Zen Cart and CRE Loaded, it is worth confirming your store is running osCommerce itself rather than one of these related-but-distinct platforms before connecting.

1. Sign in to your Feedance account and choose to add a new store connection.
2. Select osCommerce from the list of available platforms.
3. Enter your osCommerce store's connection details as prompted by Feedance.
4. Authorize the connection and let Feedance perform its initial catalog and order read.
5. Review your imported products, inventory, and orders in Feedance, then set up the feeds or exports you need.

After the initial import, Feedance keeps your osCommerce data up to date on a recurring, automated basis, so ongoing product, inventory, and order changes are picked up without manual re-importing. Because osCommerce stores vary widely in size and hosting setup, the exact refresh cadence can depend on your store's configuration and the volume of data being processed.

1. Keep product titles and descriptions complete and consistent in osCommerce, since this is the source data your feeds will inherit.
2. Assign every product to a clear, accurate category rather than leaving items uncategorized.
3. Keep stock quantities current in osCommerce so exported feeds reflect real availability.
4. Use clean, high-quality product images, since image quality carries directly into your feeds.
5. Periodically review products imported into Feedance against your live osCommerce catalog to catch any drift from custom fields or plugins.