Does ayone have any experience with oscommerce and MYSQL?

I want to have multiple sites that are all identical. I think sharing the database is probably the easiest way but the only thing I want them to share is the product list so that when I change a product on one site it changes the products on all of the other sites. Each site needs to have it's own customr database etc (so the only thing shared are the products).

How (if at all) is this possible?

I would suggest you to ask that question at OScommerce.com's forum. You have a chance to get an answer directly from OSC developers.

It is possible, and I have done it, but on using a different commerce engine. You want to consider whether the orders need to be tracked separately, and whether the users will log into more than one of your sites. I call the technique "syndicated stores" and I have one customer that has a central product catalog database that feeds 100 stores. Its pretty neat.

Thanks for your reply JLove. Each site will be owned by a different customer so orders and customer history needs to unique for each site so customers will only need to login to their own site.

Basically the way it works is that the customer buys a site from me with products that are available for dropshipping already uploaded to each site. So therefore the products will be exactly the same on each site but all other databases will be completely different.

May I ask which commerce system you use and how to get this implemented. I don't see a problem manually updating 3 or 4 sites but when it gets to having to update 10, 20, 30 etc sites (as I gain more customers) then it will become very time consuming. Therefore in the long run I don't mind investing money and time to get a system like this up and running.

It is possible, and I have done it, but on using a different commerce engine. You want to consider whether the orders need to be tracked separately,

THat should be easy, just have a foreign key for customer id in each order :)

How you are explaining it is exactly what we ran into. For example, we have a customer that is a large manufacturer/distributor. They have hundreds of retail outlets that sell their products. What we suggested was that they give a free store to each of their customers, while maintaining the master catalog themselves.

Each store may choose which categories they want to syndicate from the master catalog/site. They can then add their own graphic layouts to the syndicated store, or they can strip the site and embed it into their existing site.

The last hurdle you will have with this is allowing a choice of payment processing options. For example, what if some retailers want to take orders only by phone (I know, dumb) and others will want to use paypal, others will use payment gateways, and yet others will want to use a virtual cart scheme to pass the cart to their own checkout system. All of this is possible, but at the moment we are working on the automation of the syndicated stores. This goes against the grain of most commercial commerce systems where licensing becomes a hurdle. If you can pull this off with OSCommerce, then you could go after larger clients that want to offer drop-shipping or virtual stores to their retailers. Good Luck.

You also asked what commerce engine I use. I built my own from scratch because we needed the flexibility to do things like syndicated stores without having to pay licensing fees to an eccomerce company. We got burned once with poor support from a major vendor.

Thanks again for your reply JLove. Although your post is very educational, it doesn't really offer advice on what I can do next. It seems that you have designed a perfect system for a previous customer but how do I get something like this? Surely it can't be that hard to point to a specific part of a database on each site (well, at least for someone who knows what their doing).

You are talking about changing the SQL queries, which are easy. That is true. But it will take more than that. You need tables that are linked together with linking tables. Adding a column, as someone else pointed out, is not all that you need.

If the master catalog/company is the only one processing payments, and all you need is to track affiliate IDs on the other sites, then that is really easy. That may be all that you need to do. But don't forget that the affiliates will want reporting and their own administration panel for managing their customers and their site.

When you build a web applicaiton, the administration area is always where the most work is.