Zen Cart Review
Zen Cart is an open source e-commerce solution based on the PHP programming language and a MySQL database. The Zen Cart home page provides a great overview of the project. Not only does Zen Cart offer a very long list of features, the system is designed with both store owners and web developers in mind. There's no sacrifice of usability or power.
What Features Do I Get With Zen Cart?
You get everything you need to maintain a professional, robust shopping cart web site for an unlimited number of products. Products, pricing, shipping, newsletters, sales and more are managed by the store owner through the administration area. The shopping cart is already set up to receive payments from any major credit card and several popular payment gateway services are included. For a more thorough breakdown of Zen Cart features, visit the web site.
Will I be Able to Install and Maintain My Own eCommerce Web Site with Zen Cart?
Yes! The great thing about Zen Cart is that anyone with basic computer skills can manage their own shopping cart. Zen cart is ready to go right out of the box. Installation is automated and the administration area is very user-friendly. All you need is a merchant account. One caveat: unless you want your store to look exactly like hundreds of others that use Zen Cart, invest in some professional web design services to customize the look and feel of your web site.
What Kind of Customer Support May I Expect When I Use Zen Cart?
There is some basic self-help available in the Zen Cart support forum as well as satisfactory documentation on the web site. You may that customizing your shopping cart will require professional assistance.
Why Wouldn't I Want to Use Zen Cart?
Other than personal preference, purchased solutions will have better customer support and more targeted solutions may be available for certain industries.
Zen Cart Resources
E-commerce Guide Review - Interesting article about osCommerce off-shoots, Zen Cart and CRE Loaded.
Zen Templates - Basic web design templates for Zen Cart.
Zen Cart Templates - More expensive templates for Zen Cart.
this is very interesting stuff
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The zencart is such a great feature to use on your website. I use it on my website and it works so good.
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Many people find it really very convenient to use.
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Zen Cart is one the most popular, free, open source shopping cart options available. Generally Zen Cart is considered to be a superior extension of osCommerce with improvements in coding practices such as better separation of code and display that make it more intuitive and easier to extend and customize.
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It is powerful cart software. On the Zen-Cart website there are hundreds of documents for everyone from developers to regular non-programmers. There are documents on adding products and options, setting up shipping, changing the home page and custom pages, customizing newsletters and tons more. Much of the entire setup is self-explanatory enough using an internet browser, but it's always good to have a reference.
Cubic Zirconia Lady
It is a very user friendly shopping cart software. Installation was fairly straight forward. As with most shopping carts, it comes with an out of the box skin and configuration. This seemed to be serviceable, although the skin wasn't terribly attractive and it seemed like a lot of options were turned on, making the interface a bit cluttered for my liking.
bedden
When searching for a merchant account provider remember to do some research on the company and try to get some positive opinions about the merchant account provider you are planning on doing business with. Not every merchant account provider can provide you with the perfect solution to fit your needs. Due to the competitive market these days when you do find a reliable merchant account provider make sure that the rates you are offered are appealing.
John,
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You will definitely be needing an account merchant. It's the safest way to have a purchase online.
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Zen Cart is a PHP/MySQL open source shopping cart. It is completely free, and comes with source code which you can freely modify. The software is developed by a community effort. The code is based on the popular osCommerce shopping cart.
Autozubehör
Interesting take on Zen Cart. Not sure I agree with all your comments but insightful nonetheless.
Here's another interesting review: http://www.shopping-cart-reviews.com/articles/Zen-Cart-Review.aspx
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Zen Cart is certainly a powerful piece of software. Zen Cart is worth considering if your requirements are very basic and you aren't very fussy about the look & setup of it, or if you enjoy hacking PHP and are moderately good.
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Zen cart is qute reliable software and it's been on the market for quite a while. Many users wouldn't change it to anything else. For those who know that zen cart is the best choice for them - here's a little tip. You may switch to zen cart with web service cart2cart. It automates migration process.
You can visit http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com for details.
To all fellow readers,
I recently wrote an honest review on my blog about Zen Cart - 1.38a. I talk about the pros and cons of this software from my experience of using it over the last 4 years.
You can view it at: Zen Cart Review
I would appreciate your feedback as well.
Thank you.
Tyrone Shum
I recently used Zen cart & found it quite appealing than some other professional shopping carts which i had been using till now. And the best part about Zen Cart is that it is open source, so free for all.. I particularly like exploring the additional ecommerce modules of various PHP Shopping Cart that are available in the open source category.
hello everybody!
I'm searching for a solution for the following problem:
We're setting up Zen Cart and we have some partner companies for whom we want to display other prices, maybe other content then for the simple customers.
I want to create some new user groups for the members of the certain companies. I didn't find built-in support for this. Discount coupons and discount groups are not good because these only affect the prices during checkout and cannot display different content on the pages.
I think I have to modify the database tables and the php code somehow, and now I'm searching for a ready-made script for this (link to a blog, forum, etc...) and of course any good ideas are very welcome..
Thx a lot,
David Dul
We are experienced Zen Cart developers. Call today for more information and a detailed quote on a Zen Cart powered website.
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Jolene Pirrone
Advanced Web Design
(518)392-0585
We are currently using Zen Cart and having a problem with posting images. Our
developers tell us that we have to have to create three different sizes of pictures
in order to post them on Zen Cart. The Zen Cart book isn't too clear on this, but
we believe we should be able to use one large picture and post it and use the
admin to tell it to be sized for the small and medium size pics. Can you help
us?
This is the manual way. There is an image handler module, which I have used with success. There is also a plugin for HTMLArea.
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Jolene Pirrone
Advanced Web Design
(518)392-0585
We are currently using mal's e-commerce and are having problems.
What would be involved in converting over to zen?
Thanks,
Bill
Zen Cart may be overkill for your website. For a smaller number of products and services to be integrated into an informational website, Drupal would be a better solution. A website with many products and product lines without much content would be better handled by Zen Cart. For inquiries, please use the Quote Request form.
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Jolene Pirrone
Advanced Web Design
(518)392-0585
HI Jolene,
could you expand on that. i understand why you say this, it is the accepted wisdom, and does differentiate Drupal, which is foremost a community-based cms system. However zen cart performs well, is probably simpler to administrate and set up, plus i would think, an di am thinking of doing exactly this, that content may be added as static content, yet styled the same overall with links to it. This way content can be very easily produced and uploaded en mass. I know DRupal has a mass html importer , but that depends on server features like Tidy HTML or configuring it. I found it very difficult in a non-linux server. Pus, in any case it is still l far more longwinded than simply uploading hypertext produced, in my case, Tinderbox (OS X). Radical changes would be easier to effect for content too, as well as migrating in the future.
In a shop, once on a product page, content needs to be apt and straightforward for checkout. Of, course some context-relative links may not be automatically produced in Zen, but if needed they could be hard-coded in to the product description page.
But these are just my present thoughts. I need to make decisions, and have produced the Drupal alternative already. I have ran Zen before, but not in this way and might attempt it. A further reason is simply that drupal ecommerce, which is under rapid development, described as 'immature' (though powerful), presents its own headaches so far as UK postage by weight goes, though I have solved that to an extent with the wight mini-module. However this will later need to be integrated properly in some way, and it doesn't work with zones (e.g. europe-wide). If you are busy with the commerce, constant radical updating (4.8 will not be compatible with 4.7) would present a little mountain of work, lots of hitches too, I think, even with few products; I have about seven with the site.
To summarize, It appears that ecommerce in drupal is useful for a community -based site only, with few products. I don't see why zen is overkill for few products. It works. It's fast.
Zen cart is NOT easier to setup and manage. Not that it's dreadfully difficult. But it's definately not easier - especially if you don't have a lot of products. There would just be a lot of overhead that will not apply to you and I'm not sure how that's any easier.
The advantage/disadvahtage of Drupal e-commerce is in no way related to community/non-community websites. It is just a simpler solution with less overhead for site with fewer prouducts that may want to focus more on content development such as article and review writing. Zen Cart has no good solution for adding content other than products themselves.
Your concerns about software versioning and development are likely to be universal no matter what OS solution you choose. You'll even find headaches with paid software. For example: every year, business owners have to shell out $200 some-odd for Quickbooks payroll updates in addition to the ususal updating nightmares.
You pose some unique chanllenges such as currency and postage for the UK, which ARE likely to be better handled by Zen Cart. I would suggest that website owners are better served by finding a domestic developer to handle their e-commerce needs since they are more familiar with these issues.
In conclusion, Zen is not ALWAYS too much, it just MAY be. It does sound like it may the better solution given some more information about your particulars.
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Jolene Pirrone
Advanced Web Design
(518)392-0585