OS Commerce integrated with Ebusiness Suite

OS Commerce is one of the many Open Source Ecommerce UI that’s available in the market. There are plenty of Open Source ERPs available as well. However, integrating an Open Source UI with Oracle Ebusiness Suite does have its own challenges and its a very exciting project that we have undertaken.

Our developers are adept in PHP programming which has been used in developing OS Commerce. At the same time it is very important to understand how Oracle Ebusiness Suite works both in terms of UI and in terms of what can be leverage from the myriad of backend APIs. OS Commerce has the merchant UI and the end user UI, just as Oracle’s iStore module that is integrated to Oracle Ebusiness Suite. From our preliminary observation we notice that it would be a big challenge to modify the merchant UI and integrate it with Oracle Inventory. The bigger challenge is in displaying the price for the end user, since a merchant could have various rules that may drive the price, which uses the complex pricing engine. However, given the right amount of man hours with the right skills who understand both sides of the coin, it can surely be achieved.

To display the item information on the end user catalog, we need to use mtl_system_items_b and for simple price display, that does not involve modifiers and/or qualifier, we just have to make use of qp_list_headers_v and qp_list_lines_v. Easier said than done. To modify the code written in PHP for OS Commerce, did involve considerable amount of man hours. We also need to set up OS Commerce and PHP engine on the same Oracle Applicaton server. More about this later.