The Web Hosting Blog of Host Color

It is easy to install it and to use it because it has multiple customer modes. This is Zen Cart. This very popular shopping cart gives an opportunity to manage an advance e-commerce website by making multiple sales and discounts. Zen cart has XHTML template system anyone can create unlimited extra pages to manage in-site advertising with ad banner controller. the software also offers multiple shipping options and multiple payment options.

Zen Cart has convenient newsletter manager and a tool that allow site owners to offer discount coupons, gift certificates, featured products, and quantity discounts.

What People Say?

“The Zen Shopping Cart solution is an out-of-the-box style e-commerce system that aims to offer everything you could need to get a store up and running on the Internet” says E-commerce Shopping Cart Review in Devshed’s Web Hosting News section. The review explains that Zen Cart comes with an integrated phpBB forum “built in that can be configured or left out at install time”. The author Dan Wellman explains that it is quick and easy to set up, provided you have everything installed on the Web server.

“I have found that it works best using IIS 5.1, PHP 4.3.10 and MySQL 4.1.1, although it is possible to configure higher versions of both IIS and PHP. Theoretically, this should all be taken care of by your Web host, and in many cases, hosting companies are configured specifically for the Zen Cart, but if you’re hosting a site on your own Web server, setting up a development server, or want to create a store on your desktop PC, this is something you’ll need to think about” says the author.

He writes that “When everything is in place, you are taken through a browser based installation that helps you to quickly set up a store and database. Once set up, you’re given some basic security advice to protect your online store, which is helpful. In addition to using MySQL as the default database, you can also choose to use the postgreSQL open source database”, says the Zen Cart review.

The author draws web entrepreneurs atention to the point that the “Zen cart is optimized for U.S. market”. He adds hat any U.K. based online stores will need to do quite a bit of customization just to use the UK currency and address formats.

In an artles titled “How to Pick an Online ECommerce Shopping Cart: 6 Carts Reviewed” the author Tim Slavin names Zen Cart “The first install it yourself shopping cart”.

“In my experience, Zen Cart (and osCommerce) benefit from the same strengths, for example, a strong online community and lots of modules to extend the shopping cart functionality. However, they also share the same weaknesses, mostly too much code to wade through to make changes to templates”, explainds Mr. Slavin. He adds taht installing Zen Cart is fairly easy. The users needs to upload their files using FTP software, set up a database and the database username and password, and then call up their installation page in a web browser. Zen Cart also requires permissions on several folders and files to be set.

“Once Zen Cart is installed, the administration area makes it fairly easy to create products and categories. The installation process also lets you load the database with sample data so that you can become comfortable with the cart as you load in your own products”, says also the author.

He also writes that creating templates with Zen Cart is “somewhat more complicated”, but at the same time there are a templates that “can be changed to reflect anyone’s web page design”. Tim Slavin also says that editing a template requires carefully maintaining PHP conditionals and other code.

“Like most carts, there are dozens of templates that control the center content area of the cart. These templates are named in a fairly easy to understand way. Finding a specific template to tweak a design should not be hard” adds the author.

At the end of the review we would like to target your attention to Host Color’s Shopping Cart Hosting plan and to Web Mall, our fully featured e-commerce shared web hosting solution. Both of them have Zen Cart as a preinstalled shopping cart software application.