Written by Kerry Watson

Now anyone can run an online store that would have cost thousands of dollars only a few years ago. You don’t have to be technical or have special knowledge to do it.

When he first invented the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell is often quoted to have prophesiers, ''it is my firm belief that the day will come when there will be a telephone in every town in America.

Not long ago I realized that some day many ordinary people would have their own website. Then my customers began dreaming up ideas for their second websites, and their second websites are usually an ecommerce site that needs osCommerce.

osCommerce is for anyone who has an idea for something they want to sell on the Internet, whether it be products or services.

What kind of experience do I need?

You are not expected to have any specialized experience to manage an oscommerce store, only the ability to use a web browser like Internet Explorer and a little business sense.

A Day in the Life of a Real oscommerce Store

This can be your dream job, if you make it. It can also be your worst nightmare if you let your store take charge of you! Come and take a look at a typical day in the life of a full-time oscommerce store owner:

You wake up with the sun, no alarm clock anymore. Coffee and newspaper, you're eager to see what happened in your store overnight but understand that you must try to keep normal work hours. It's too easy to work all the time and burn yourself out You got into this to enjoy yourself, remember?

Opening Time

Its 9 am and time to ''open your store '' You click your browser and immediately see that your store is fine-you have set your browser ''start'' page to your store so you can easily keep tabs on it. You put on a fresh pot of coffee while you download your emails with copies of orders that came in overnight as well as enquiries from people around the world and night owls in your country.

Checking new messages

You have a mailbox full of new messages; since your store is open around the clock the citizens of Asia and Europe browsed your store and bought your goods as you slept. The U.S. is just waking up with you so you have few sales from them yet.

You receive a copy of each sales receipt as it is sent to your customers. and the matching credit card Sales receipt You also receive pre-sales inquiries. Most critical are the entails sent to your ''Customer Service'' email address, because those are support issues by frustrated customers, luckily your entails are filtered into folders so you can quickly prioritize and identify the emergencies.

Taking care of customers

You have learned to think of your store like a restaurant: people who enter are hungry for your goods, and easily upset until they are full. You quickly scan the pleas for help and politely set the ones who need support onto the right path to get it.

Hmmm, you note that two people have recently had trouble with the same page, so you make a note to yourself Self, it's time to re-write that page. If one person complains that they didn't understand it, maybe they just had a bad day if two report it, it's time to pay attention.

Surf to your Bank

Now, with coffee in hand, the fun part: check your bank balance online since yesterday. Wow! It was a good day it could have just as easily been an off-day too, though, the orders seem to ebb and flow. Customers all seem to order at the same time on the same gloomy days, and few orders come in on those first gorgeous spring days. Each store and even each product can have a different ''busiest'' day of the week.

See who's in your store, right now

Now you can't resist taking a look at how many customers are in your store right now. So you click who’s online: 6 customers are meandering around in your store, right now! One has put something in their Shopping cart. good. One is looking at your information pages. One is looking at your most popular product, and the other 3 just got there, with their referral ID from a sister site still showing. Another just registered for a new account! This makes your store feel alive, and you're refreshed.

Pick up your new sales orders!

Time to fulfill orders before the postman arrives, so you click Orders and view the list of most recent orders. You've priced all your goods so you can tell by the total sale price exactly what goods the customer ordered without clicking each sale. For example, odd prices are download goods, even prices are items you need to ship on the fleet business day. There's no reason to open up all the download orders since you already matched them up to sales receipts and you know they went through just fine.

You quickly copy and paste the shipping address for each order into a Word document that's set up for labels, also noting on each shipping label the Order Number, Date, and Product Model Number.

You also open a text document you call ''Snippets'' which contains the text of the various things you say to customers over and over, said in the best and most polite way.

After you copy in each shipping label, you paste in the ''comments'' box the appropriate comments thanking them for the order and telling them that their order is being processed will go out next business day. You change their order status to ''PROCESSING'' print a packing slip, click ''UPDATE'' and move on to the next order you repeat this several times. Going back to check a day or two in the past to be sure you didn't miss any recent orders.

Now that you have all your orders copied onto shipping labels, you make a duplicate copy of each label. This second shipping label will be pasted to the green Delivery Confirmation receipts for US shipments or to the Customs Declaration form for international shipments. You hit ''Print '' pull the finished labels off your printer and take them over to your shipping center.

Package up your orders

In your shipping center which is really just a big closet you have set up for shipping, you have envelopes in two different sizes for single and multiple purchases you count up the single orders and double orders and pull the appropriate envelopes and merchandise to fit You are a shipping machine as you affix the label, drop in the merchandise, insert the appropriate packing slip and seal the flap.

You still need to affix the delivery confirmation or customs receipt, slap the second shipping label on that, and stamp the package with ''Priority Mail'' ''Air Mail'' or other appropriate shipping rate

Last, you tape the flap and the shipping label with clear tape - you have learned that they open too easily or smear without it - and at last you have packaged up the first order. You move onto the next order and the next Finally you have a neat stack which the postman picks up. Perfect timing!

Lunchtime

Its lunchtime and you've learned to stand back from the computer and not touch the keyboard for at least one hour or you will quickly burnout. OK, so your secret is that you have to set a timer to stay away from the keyboard. Go for a walk or run with the dog, exercise or read a book. Beeep!! You can come back to work now. It was never this fun working for someone else.

Proactive Maintenance

Now it's time to fix those problem's that at least two people have had with your store . Perhaps the language you used is not clear. the word uncommon , perhaps it's if) a part of the page that the visitor's eye just naturally skips over. You take a look and make some adjustments, then repeat it on another page for extra luck. That should eliminate any customer complaints, on that issue anyway. You should be working on a newsletter to send out to those customers who subscribed, but you'll Save that for tomorrow and work on it in your head until then.

Run some reports

Since you’re a already in osCommerce , you need to check some reports . You look at Products Viewed Report to see what products are being looked at the most, then Products Purchased to compare the two. You need to file a sales tax report tomorrow with the state, but you have the Monthly Sales/Tax contribution installed, so you simply click that link and then click the ''Save as CSV'' button to save it as a spread sheet to your computer. You open it in Excel, sort and play with it a bit, then print it out and save. Fun!

Add a new product

You have new product coming out next Tuesday, so you need to start working on the product description about it. You open Products/Categories and add the new product. It takes longer than you expect, dreaming about what to say, and suddenly an hour has gone by.

Get a little bit ahead

If you're like many osCommerce store owners, you may also be the craftsman who makes the merchandise you sell. So now that it's late afternoon it's time to get to your ''real'' work! You spend the rest of the day on your craft and answering the occasional support emails that come in from your US customers your international customers are now sleeping). Every now and then you see an order come in - ka CHING ! - But you know enough to leave them alone until you do them all in a batch the next morning I or you'll find yourself working around the clock. This is your dream job! And you are in control.