ZenCart is one of our free one-click installs that often gets overlooked, but it’s a surprisingly powerful ecommerce solution perfect for small budgets. Whilst you could use a variety of CMSs to set up an online store, ZenCart has an integrated ordering system and shopping cart so you can just change your settings, tweak your template, add your product information and you’re ready to go. You can accept payments via Paypal, and you can also securely accept card payments with the addition of an SSL certificate.
You can sell physical products, downloads such as PDFs, or a combination of the two. If you’re a designer, this makes Zen Cart a great option for selling things such as patterns and themes which customers can buy and download instantly with no work required on your part. If you sell on websites such as eBay, Amazon or Etsy but are ready to take it to the next level then selling via your own website is a great way to cut out listing fees and third party design/content restrictions.
An example of a Zen Cart store (click the image to view the demo or download the template):
How to install Zen Cart: We offer a one-click install of Zen Cart so you can get up and running straight away. You will need a Home Pro web hosting package or higher. Just log in to your customer control panel, go into eXtend and scroll down to the ‘E-commerce’ section. Click ‘Zen Cart Shopping Cart’ and install to a directory of your choice as prompted.
What else do I need? If you want to customise/design it yourself, you’ll need some HTML and CSS knowledge and ideally the ability to make minor PHP edits. An SSL certificate is needed for secure card payments.
Getting Started
Just like any ecommerce platform, Zen Cart takes a bit of getting used to at first…largely because of the number of features on offer and the customisation you’ll probably want to do. Once you’ve installed Zen Cart, sign up at the free support forum, which has plenty of knowledgeable members who are happy to help out with any specific problems you may have.
1st Web Designer also has an excellent beginner’s guide to Zen Cart. Tutorials are widely available via a quick search, and the official Zen Cart website contains plenty of useful articles which can be found here.
Tip: Unsure which file you need to edit? To speed up code and text edits in Zen Cart, search for all instances of a word or phrase using the Developer’s Toolkit in the admin panel. Just go to Tools > Developers Toolkit in your admin panel, and you can quickly find out which files your chosen phrase appears in and which line(s) you need to change.
Free Zen Cart Templates
There are plenty of free and premium templates available for Zen Cart if you don’t like the look of the standard ones. Some free template sites to get started are:
ZenCartTemplates.info
Zen-Cart-Power.net – Free Templates
Hidden Pixels – Zen Cart Templates
Add-Ons
Whilst the Zen Cart add-on community is small, there are still plenty of decent extensions available. In many cases, you’ll be able to tweak your code to do what you want without an add-on. The Zen Cart add-on directory is located here, and well worth bookmarking.
Warning: Some add ons will require you to overwrite core files. If you’re installing several add ons that require this, there’s a risk that you will overwrite a previous change and thus break another add on you’re using. To prevent this from happening, make regular back ups and keep a running list of all the files you’ve edited previously. You can usually just copy and paste the different code referenced in the add on file rather than overwriting your file completely.
Quick Answers
How to change the page title: Essential for SEO, see this article.
How to remove a product’s weight, model number, ‘date added to catalog’ and more: Follow this guide.
How to remove product categories from the template header: A useful change, see this thread.
How to set free postage for orders over a certain amount: A great way to encourage customers to spend more is to offer free delivery when they spend a certain amount. You can implement this using this tutorial.
How to edit your Zen Cart footer: There are plenty of options here, including turning banners off, hiding your footer when your store is closed and more. Check out the anatomy of the Zen Cart footer.
How to automatically print orders: If you use Outlook for your email, you can have your customers’ orders automatically printed out as soon as they arrive in your inbox. This is ideal for companies such as bakeries and takeaways where orders need to be created and ready to go within minutes. As Zen Cart is set up to email orders to your inbox as and when they are placed, you just need to set it up from your email client, and then test the process to make sure you’ve got it working. Click here to read the tutorial. Automatic email printing is also possible from a range of other clients, so if you don’t use Outlook it’s worth checking Google for tutorials and applicable software.
Keeping up to date
As with any software, it’s important to keep up to date with upgrades and security fixes, particularly with the personal details accrued from running an ecommerce website. Once you’ve signed up to the Zen Cart support form, you can subscribe to this thread to receive email notifications of upgrade announcements.
Zen-Cart seemed very daunting to me at first, due to it’s vast array of configuration options. However once you got going it was really easy. Unfortunately for me the Magento bandwagon had just started and nobody seemed to want good old zen-cart anymore
Hope to see it end up on the one-click install list soon !
I tried Zen Cart once about a year ago. Found it was very configurable and easy to install a nice template.
I’d be lost without Goh Koon Hoek’s Zen Cart book.
Think the biggest turn off for me was the ZC back end which was dreadful and needs some serious redesign to make it more usable. I couldn’t imagine having a store with more than about 20 products once you start to customise items into Small, Reg, L, XL products. Just my 2Cent.
I have never been a fan of the osCommerce ‘spin offs’ to be honest. While they do a very good job, they also get people into the online store business with little cost and effort. I also think osCommerce is a bit long in the tooth.
My preferred shopping cart software is from Ecommerce Templates. I have been using their software since 2004 and it’s just so easy to setup, customise and use. The admin is by far the best, they update many times a year and there are many mods and add-ons to add extra features from many third paty developers. The best, and most important of all, is their support and their support forum. Faultless, quick and extensive, it’s an utter gem of software.
We’ve been using zencart and heart Internet for a few years. Checkout our zencart site at http://www.refreshments op.co.uk
Zen Cart was good long long ago. These days one of the best free solutions is the OpenCart!
It’s powerful e-commerce solution with easy installation, easy multilanguage support, easy admin management, easy teplatable with hundreds of professional templates, Automatic image resize and many many more easy tools.
I left behind all the other old solutions and i found my health!
Try OpenCart and you’ll see the future in your hands!
Chris,
Just had a shufty at OpenCart and liking the look of that one. I will be trying this one out over the next few days.
I’ve used open cart a few times and think its as good and zencart with a few enhancements, I’ve stuck with zencart over the years but will probably move to open cart shortly – I’ve just got to rewrite some bespoke code that links zencart to our IBM iseries backend bespoke stock system.