MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks

ZenCart – open source professional ecommerce software solution review

Sep 1, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko Herne Name: Veiko Herne
Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com
Site: http://veikoh.wordpress.com
About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10) E-commerce

Zen Cart (or ZenCart) www.zencart.com has been developed by group of professionals from Newcastle, England, Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada. It’s not a simple shopping cart module, but truly professional ecommerce store management platform (named also a shopping cart system) with newsletters, coupons, gift certificates, etc more capable to run Amazon type of stores than small websites with thousands of products allowing unlimited category depth and site search.

Even if Zen Cart comes with one standard outlook, there is several free sites and commercial stores (algozone.com, zen-cart-templates.ichoze.net, zencarttemplates.info, www.templatemonster.com/zencart-templates.php, themestock.com) available to give your store a custom outlook.

Installation and store setup
ZenCart shopping cart installation went smoothly, however the system complaint again several PHP setting parameters like register_globals=on (had to create separate php.ini for those), and even I didn’t had secure server protocol purchased to my hosting account, I was able to complete the installation with some simple steps.

There were eight editable pages from the administration module to customize the site layout using pure HTML language or JavaScript based Rich text editor, the side box content can be set on and off and their sort order can be modified. The software which I installed was with “Contemporary Classic Green” and English language but additional templates and languages can be purchased and downloaded.

The administration module is extremely broad and from first look, I was little bit confused where to start.Defining the products should be most reasonable step to start and as those are belonging to categories, those should be defined first. For SEO purposes, you are able to define your own Meta tags (title, keywords and description) for the category and build category tree structure.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: e-commerce software, online store, open-source, php, review, zencart