I am investigating various e-commerce platforms for a clients website.  Has anyone used Zen-cart?  Do you have other suggestions and a link to those sites to investigate?

If you have used zen cart, does it stay as a sub of your existing website or does it take you off-site?

@deereinhardt I don’t have vast experience with online shopping carts but I am getting ready to startup a new venture for online shopping, checkout, and digital delivery of some special content. I may have to write the whole thing myself because I can’t find anything that allows me the branding experience and flexibility that I need.

Let me know what you decide. 

@deereinhardt I am a web developer who has used Zen Cart. Frustrating. I think it is way powerful, but unless you use it regularly and become a habituated expert it is very hard to just pick up and run with. In theory it is simple but in my experience it just is not.

In answer to your question… Zen Cart includes functionality for ‘Pages’ and you can (theoretically) copy in HTML or use the (should be) WYSYWIG editor to set up pages for things like About, Policies, Our Story… I worked on sites that did it this way and other sites that created an HTML ‘over site’ that fed in to the Zen Cart for the store. All of them were on the same server. Even integrated one with Wordpress.

In its defense, it is super powerful – it copes with tax codes and shipping rates and international currencies and… but all of this makes it seem pretty cumbersome to ‘just’ do anything.

Personally I suggest Magento to people. There are good plug-ins available and I’ve found it to be quite flexible. Never used ZenCart, how does it compare?

My understanding of Magento (through my fiance, who uses it where he works) is that even the free version is a bit cleaner than ZenCart, presumably because all of the Magento products (including pay-to-use versions) were developed by the same professionals.

The shipping module is more refined than ZenCart in that you can specify not only how much the item weighs (which you can do with ZC), but Magento also provides the means to indicate how many like items can fit in the same box, so as to allow for a more intelligent process of calculating combined shipping. (For me, that element is pretty much a non-issue, as 95% of what I sell has a max quantity of 1.)

If I recall correctly, I think he also mentioned that the concept of ZenCart’s templates is a bit easier to understand than Magento’s.  And they recently encountered one quirk to Magento’s system in how it manages (doesn’t manage?) canceled orders.  (They recently had a customer place an order, pay, and then cancel the order as the customer realized it needed the product in a different.  The gal in bookkeeping issued a refund, but now they can’t void the order in the Magento system, so the Magento year-end reporting will be overstating sales.)