Watch Free Zen Cart Tutorial Videos
opensourcecms.com is now offering free streaming video tutorials showing you step-by-step how to manage Zen Cart. These free streaming videos will show you how to add products, configure options, install Zen Cart via Fantastico, manage customers, change Zen Cart passwords and much more.
Zen Cart Description
Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. Some solutions seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users' needs, Zen Cart puts the merchant's and shopper's requirements first. Similarly, other programs are nearly impossible to install and use without an IT degree, Zen Cart can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic computer skills. Others are so expensive ... not Zen Cart it's FREE!
Zen Cart will deliver the ultimate online shopping experience to your customers. Navigating through your merchandise offerings is a breeze with Zen Cart, the program provides several "Spotlight" lists in addition to the traditional category to product links. Once a product is added to the shopping cart, secure checkout is a simple 3-step process. After providing the billing information, your customer chooses the shipping method. (multiple shipping methods including real-time internet shipping quotes are built-in) Next, a payment type is chosen from one of the popular payment modules. (PayPal and AuthorizeNet are just 2 of the included modules) Last, the customer reviews the order, shipping and payment choices, and confirms the order. You are immediately notified of the order and your customer automatically receives an e-mail confirmation.
Zen Cart gives web designers a robust and customizable electronic storefront that's easy to keep up-to-date with new features. It provides usable, intuitive and unobtrusive purchase flows right out of the box based on proven industry best-practices - there are no major revisions required to get things right for your clients!
One of the secrets behind its power lies in our robust template system that "abstracts" the look-and-feel from the code and logic behind Zen Cart. This enables you to give clients a truly custom solution that integrates quickly and perfectly with their existing marketing websites.
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Posted By: Rob PinewoodBlue on May 20 2010 09:00 am
I would recommend Zen over any others I have tried to implement!
Once you are used to the way it works with the stylesheets and templates etc then customising becomes a doddle!
I have set up Barclays and Worldpay payment modules with no hassle and customised the system with various additions such as wishlists and stock print pages etc.
I will put a couple of my examples on here as requested further down but sure they may be removed?
Posted By: Peter Leigh on May 7 2010 03:48 pm
Zen Cart is one powerful cart! bit of a learning curve but no more than others. Yes, very ugly defalt template but so, you can make it look how you like with an average understanding of CSS.
This site is out of date though, Zen Cart is on version 1.3.9b now
Posted By: Rosemary on May 3 2010 09:56 pm
HOW! I have sophisticated Dreamweaver CSS pages and lots of graphics. I'm an accomplished designer but have not got a clue about how to work with Zen Cart. Can I download the "stuff" and play with it? It's not clear if or how I get those pages into zen cart and how I can design around Zen Cart. Who can teach me? How can I learn?
Posted By: Asdesign on March 30 2010 11:39 am
Zen-Cart is great imo, it's true though. The default template is really ugly and outdated. It should have a new, web 2.0 based design, much like presta shop which I think, is a serious competitor to Zen-Cart and others. Anyway, for one, totally redesigned Zen-Cart and now it looks awesome. It did took a lot of time to do though...
Posted By: Johndh on March 25 2010 03:34 pm
Out of the box, zen cart is ugly. BUT, with some skilled knowledge of colour schemes, just by css alone, this is one easy sucker to style. There is some brilliant support and I would say that this is the best solution for small businesses and people with some knowledge of css and preferably a bit of php knowledge. You can use the free templates or buy premium ones if you wish, but, the default is really easy to customise and get a professional looking site going fast (you have to know what colour schemes work, rather than coding, simple).
If you still don't like zen cart go for oscommerce. If you dont like that, and your sick in the head, you could spend ££$$K on Magento.
I give Zen a well deserved 5 out of 5.
Posted By: Ken on March 4 2010 11:04 pm
Folks, please post websites where you have implemented tbe product about which you are speaking. This is extremely helpful for others who are at the research/product selection phase.
Posted By: Agree on March 2 2010 08:22 am
Good but it looks horrible.
Posted By: Donny on February 24 2010 09:25 pm
I have been using ZenCart for the past 4 years for myself and my 200+ clients, and I can say the stability is way beyond the other popular scripts.
I myself has become a ecommerce service provider, I always use Zencart for my client, some of my client are multi-million dollar stores, some has more than hundred thousand products, some using highly complex customizations, and ZenCart take care all of them, and I just couldn't trust other scripts to handle these flawlessly, I have some clients using Magento, Osc or other scripts, but to some extent, in stability, coding and performance they lack behind Zencart.
The support forum is amazing and response time is very fast, no other script's support/forum come close to this except osCommerce, if you use Magneto for example, you will likely ended solving the problem by your own because support forum is almost helpless.
The only downside are, the number of add-ons modules are not as many as osCommerce and stock design are not so well made like Magento, but for most store owner they usually want to build their own design, and most current add-ons already fill the needs, so there is not much to worry about this. But lately the new release is way behind schedule, however the patches and improvement available in Zencart forum, just need to digg it.
Posted By: Miquel on February 1 2010 03:34 am
Horrendously coded, rubbish admin interface, outdated (no releases in 2 years).
Zen Cart may appear to have more features out-of-the-box than some of the newer carts, but beware -- it will not scale well, it is a nightmare to develop for (and if you do, upgrades will become an additional headache), and the hacked and unorganised nature of the code is a recipe for bugs and security holes. If you are running a business, you will not want to get locked-in to something this fragile and potentially insecure.
Posted By: mcshane78 on January 26 2010 04:35 pm
rock solid!
love it! Been using ZC for years. I have tried/played with magento and prestashop but no where near the features, stability and community of ZC!
Posted By: moby on November 16 2009 02:02 pm
its material you provided is too good.keep it up!
Posted By: Tarek on November 1 2009 03:36 am
Zencart is the best, its so robust, strong, stable, it doesnt needs much knowledge of php and sql, i have tried 20 other shopping carts but zen cart is the best.
Posted By: Tonello on October 26 2009 04:57 am
Dudes, I was looking for a free (as in freedom) solution for e-commerce when i ran into Magento... It really surprised me! It has a nice and coerent interface for the backend and a lot of options, especially about the management of the discounts, which can be higly customized (and that were my main source of unsatisfaction toying around with Virtuemart)! I suggest everyone to give it a try!
Anyway, I think ZenCart is a quite good product, but it lacks the features which I need to manage promotions... I need a per-user, per-product-category, management of them and no one except Magento seems to do that!
Posted By: Martin McShane on October 16 2009 01:34 pm
I spent a good 6 months researching which cart to use for my site and without a doubt Zen Cart is the best!!!
Yes the standard template is pig ugly but designing for ZC is a piss of p*ss once you have read how too!!!!
It is the hard working code that runs in the background that makes ZC so powerful and robust. You'd be a fool not to give it a try!
Posted By: Zenuser on August 19 2009 10:19 am
I am using Zencart and Its ok but with the learned knowlegde it would go for osCommerce. Its the same, but with more crap in the code.
But the big plus is, more add-ons and more backup of businesses like TNT or other big company's.
Yes the community is great, but designing is a pain in the ass and hardcore. It took me as a noob 50 or more hours to learn how to program the code to dutch, and redesigning all the buttons. With a free template that is.
Designing a own templated is even worse. This is ofcourse for all free cms software.
