What is Oscar?
If you’ve worked with Django before, you’ve probably heard of Oscar. Oscar is an ecommerce plugin. It allows your development team to create a whole shopping interface and functionality. Oscar is an extremely awesome tool, but is it the tool for you?
The Tradeoff: Out of the Box vs. Customization
If having something that works quickly with little to no setup and even no need for a programmer to get involved, then there are many services like SquareSpace, WordPress, and Wix that have shopping carts and checkouts. On the other end of the spectrum is paying a development team to completely code it from scratch. There are several other options on that spectrum. The greater the customization, the greater the cost. As a business, you always have to ask, “How important to you is it to have the custom functionality you’re asking for? Is it worth days, weeks, months of development time?”
Oscar’s Customization
As far as the spectrum goes, Oscar is definitely on the customizable end. It’s not as extreme as completely building it from scratch, but there’s significantly more set up time than Squarespace or WordPress. In addition to that, there’s a pretty big learning curve. Your team will need to spend a some time researching and learning the platform. On the plus side, Oscar has extremely well architected code and thorough documentation, both of which make it easy for an experienced developer to work with.
And it frankly has everything else you could possibly want in a shopping tool from managing stock, to a dashboard, to structuring your data, to checking out complete with payment portal, coupons, product history, a notification system for your customers and beyond. What perhaps is most excellent about this swiss army knife of an ecommerce solution is that it’s very easy to integrate or modify any of their tools with your site or even third party sites.
Taken together, Oscar is a tool worth getting excited about. Whether it’s the right choice for your business needs is something we can help you determine. Connect with us to tell us about your project today!