Sales guide
This is a guide to Oscar, Tangent's open-source e-commerce framework. It is intended for a non-technical audience.
It is an e-commerce framework, written in Python using the Django web framework.
An e-commerce framework is software used to build e-commerce websites. It generally requires some additional programming work to capture the specifics of the shop being built.
It is not the same as an "off-the-shelf" software product that can be downloaded and run immediately. It is also not the same as "software-as-a-service" e-commerce products like Shopify.
While frameworks require more work to be set-up, they are much more flexible than the other options. Frameworks are the best solution for shops which require heavy customisation.
With Oscar, the framework can be easily customised to accurately model your business. With Oscar's competitors, your business has to be customised to work with your e-commerce software!
Python is a modern programming language, used by many organisations including Google and NASA. Many of Oscar's competitors are written in PHP, a language widely held to be inferior to Python due to its history of security problems and amateurish culture.
Django is a web framework, written in Python. It is one of the leading frameworks available today, and is used by Mozilla, Pinterest, Instagram, The Washington Post, The New York Times and many others.
Django sites can be scaled up to serve millions of requests a day. The framework is not a bottleneck.
Oscar is designed to be extremely flexible, much more so than other e-commerce frameworks. There is no part of Oscar that can't be customised, replaced or dropped. Oscar's case-studies demonstrate this.
This has been driven by Tangent solving complicated e-commerce problems for our clients. The experience of many years of e-commerce experience is baked into Oscar's design. We've learnt the hard way that you have to have flexibility build into your core data structures.
Oscar is already used by multinational companies like Carlsberg, Tata group and PepsiCo to solve problems like:
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Managing a catalogue of over 20 million physical and digital products fulfilled by over 200 suppliers. Each supplier manages their own inventory and orders using a customised dashboard.
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Providing a global, multi-language platform for businesses to purchase customised goods and get recommendations based on previous sales. Further are building a global network of per-country portals on top of Oscar.
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Allowing orders to be paid for with a combination of several payment methods: bankcards, giftcards, managed accounts, cheques, cash-on-delivery.
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Selling goods in multiple territories in the same site. This requires multi-currency support as well as handling the different ways sales taxes are handled between the US and the UK/Europe.
There isn't an e-commerce requirement that can't be elegantly solved using Oscar. Using Oscar's competitors to meet complicated requirements generally requires ugly hacks and work-arounds. Ultimately such solutions aren't maintainable.
The core Oscar framework is deliberately kept lean so that it is easily moulded to solve a particular client's problems. Extensions are used to house functionality that only certain merchants require. The core features include:
- Advanced catalogue management: products, product classes, categories, attributes, per-product options
- Baskets, saved baskets, wish lists
- Multi-currency support
- Multi-language support. Oscar has translations available for over 20 languages.
- Responsive design
- Reviews, product ratings, recommended products
- Customisable checkout flow
- Pluggable pricing and availability engines
- Pluggable shipping costs
- Comprehensive and extensible dashboard
- Sophisticated offers and vouchers / automatic up-sell messaging
- Pluggable reporting engine
- Analytics gathering
There is also a growing collection of Oscar extensions that provide things like:
- integration with payment gateways like PayPal, Datacash, Stripe, GoCardless.
- store locator functionality
- managed accounts for running giftcard or loyalty schemes
- order workflow management
Fundamentally, Oscar is a e-commerce framework for solving complicated problems elegantly.
Oscar is built in a modern language (Python) rather than the outdated language used by Magento, PrestaShop, osCommerce and OpenCart (PHP). Oscar is the most popular e-commerce framework written in Python.
Oscar is built on leading web framework, Django. Magento uses the inferior Zend Framework. One of the advantages of using Django is that there is a large ecosystem of Django extensions that can be used with Oscar. This includes blogging engines, webservice APIs, range of market-leading CMSs.
Oscar works seamlessly with Postgres while Magento (and other PHP frameworks) only support MySQL. Postgres is widely considered to be superior to MySQL as it better protects your data integrity.
Leveraging this network of plugins and extensions, it's possible to use Oscar to rapidly build fully featured e-commerce sites.
Oscar can easily handle catalogue sizes of many millions. Magento is known to struggle with catalogues of more than a few thousand products.
Oscar's default design is clean and responsive. Oscar is optimised for mobiles by default.
Oscar has a flexible design that allows complicated business requirements to be met. It is well suited to B2B and enterprise merchants who need fine-grained access control and multiple external integrations.