Zencart Development
Zen Cart is an open source product developed by a group of shop owners who know what they need in product implementing this into Zen Cart. Zen cart is a more user-friendly shopping cart version of OSCommerce. Designers, programmers and ecommerce consultants help them on the way. This is probably one of the most user-friendly free shopping cart scripts, though the functionality is still to be extended quite a bit. If you are already using Zencart software, and for some reasons must continue using it, we can help at an hourly rate. However, if we were to build store from you from the beginning, we would use a very different solution.
Why Zen Cart?
Zen Cart is a great online software and best of all it is free. Since its inception few years ago many developers have created numerous add-ons which can be downloaded and installed onto the Zen Cart system at any time. They are publicly available on the Zen Cart website and gives your e-commerce software extra functionality. You can download add-ons ranging from administrative tools anywhere to adding extra languages.
The key to running any successful e-commerce business is how well you can manage your products. With Zen Cart, you are provided with a wide range of product options such as:
- Allows you to sort your products in categories and sub-categories
- Manage and control your stock levels
- Create attributes for your products, such as colours, sizes, and much more
- The ability to create products in bulk using the Easy Populate add-on
- Create specials and featured products
- Write reviews for each product
Each option can be activated when you need it or turned off. Zen Cart’s product management system is by far the most comprehensive system I have used to date and everything is at your finger tips as it is all linked to your orders and customers.
Why NOT Zen Cart?
Almost inpossible to have a 100% custom design. Zen Cart comes with a few skins, there are more available for free and commercially. If you have specific design requirements, this shopping cart could easily become a nightmare. If we want to make superficial changes - maybe change the color, the font, the logo, the module headings, etc, then it would be a fairly painless experience. If we want to get deeper into the skinning, we would expect a significant battle. Skinning is such a fundamental concept we don't think it should be this hard. By default, Zen Cart requires all modules in a column look identical. To work around this is very time consuming. If we pass the cost on to you it could easily get more pricey than using a paid shopping cart.
Repoting features are too basic. Also, most of the basic reports are available which include products viewed, products purchased and customers orders. However, Zencart lacks more sophisticated reports such as sales by products, profit on each product, profit margins made and so forth.
Zen Cart has not been designed to upgrade without overwriting all your addons and customisations. So if we did any modifications, we would be very cautious to stick to the existing version. Unlike WordPress for example, if there are major upgrades or upgrades for add-ons it is a simple click of a mouse and the rest of the system will do the upgrade for you.
Unfortunately, Zen Cart also does not have any add-ons that are sufficient enough to automatically register a new customer to an email autoresponder and add it to the database. This is a major marketing tool that is missing in Zen Cart that can help Internet businesses grow their online customer database.
Bottomline
Zen Cart is not ideal if you want a plug and play solution, which is what most e-commerce businesses need. Over time Zen Cart has improved this issue, but has not completely created a plug and play solution like many other paid shopping cart solution. We expect the new version of Zen Cart will have this ability, as most open source projects begin to migrate to automatic updates rather than manually installing the plugins ourselves.
Overall, Zen Cart is a powerful shopping cart 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. However, if you want a complex store up and running quickly and efficiently, we would not use Zencart. We would suggest that please build your business and focus on how you can increase sales rather than spend hours debating with us on which cart we to build your store with.
