Zen Cart
Review this cart!
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| Company name |
The Zen Cart Team |
| Product name |
Zen Cart |
| Version |
1.3.7 |
| Sample customer sites |
http://www.acrocomia.com/
http://www.nejewelry.com/
http://www.sbcphonestore.com/
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| Price |
Free |
| Average review score |
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| User reviews |
Reviewed by: John
"Zen Cart has everything you could need in a shopping cart site, but the bit that most impressed me as a developer is the fact that the presentation layer is totally separate from the application, which means you can make it look the way you want. All it takes is a bit of CSS and you're away.
Zen cart has all the great stuff from OsCommerce without the pain of trying to customise it.
Wonderful piece of work."
Reviewed by: John
"This cart is basd on osCommerce. If your PHP, HTML and MySQL savy, this free cart may be for you. This cart has many nice features and adds many user interfaces However, this cart lacks interface consistency and design. It's evident that many progranners contributed to this effort independently without a good game plan for design. In addition, creating custom templates in order to change your sites color scheme and layout are a joke. The biggest draw back I found for this product is the lack of documentation and support. A administrators guide does not exist and support (via user forums) is fair. Bottom line is that I did not feel comfortable basing my online business on this software."
Reviewed by: Frank Ray
"This shopping cart is the best open source shopping cart I've seen. It is very complete. If you have a designer that knows a little of PHP and MySQL and some basics of CSS, you can for sure build a great shopping cart. Remember, it is FREE! "
Reviewed by: Al
"I tried it and I liked it, but I couldn't use it. As mentioned before, three CSS files are packed...so it take hours of digging through them all just for basic customization. I just found it messy and hard to use due to complicated product attributes. However, the people in the forum are very informative and polite!
It was just too over my head to put to practical use in a constricted time frame."
Reviewed by: DJDevon3
"I used OSC and someone told me about Zen and gave it a shot on a seperate install. Needless to say my OSC site was down that same day and Zen went up as my primary. I know php, sql, css, html as any good admin should. Took me about an hour to get a good template going. The template system is very easy to navigate. As mentioned previously some of the propietary variables are hard to customize and the language files are cumbersome to work with. Kind of the same admin interface as OSC but with much better gui and added options. It still has the localization lang files that you have to edit from the administration. The template system is very good but still just not quite there as far as being for a designer. Making the template easy to work with is the key. Everyone wants their own face on the web and customization is part of that. Zen is almost there, really close to being a complete open source solution. Just needs a bit more polishing with the templates and administration options. The layout is good but hard to actually remove blocks/features. Super easy to get your store up and running in minutes. As a designer for DragonflyCMS I had no problem getting my Zen the way I wanted and in the timeframe I wanted. I can recommend this and would like to see it developed a bit more to get it where the rest of the world could go wild for it."
Reviewed by: Nicole
"The fact that this cart system has so many pieces and it's hard to find where everything is laid out is the reason I'm here on this site--to find something else!
I think the open source idea is wonderful. I just think that Zen Cart is a mess..."
Reviewed by: cploonker
"Zencart is one of the most feature rich shopping cart amongst all those which are either free or under $200. What i like about it more than the other free shopping carts is that programming quality is very good. It has excellent support on it's fourms. I compared extensively with squirrelcart, cubecart and CRELoaded before coming to this conclusion. I have contributed more detailed comparison at http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2006/12/28/cube-cart-vs-zen-cart/"
Reviewed by: Musaaf
"Hello
I have tested it thoroughly since its inception when the developers left oscommerce.
The admin panel is still a mess and the templating structure is spread all over.
"
Reviewed by: Jessica
"Zencart is infinitely better than oscommerce. But the admin could be improved upon greatly. You still have to hunt to change options and functionality, just turning off category counts took some searching.
I spent quite a few months customizing Zencart for my own webstore, installing various contributor modules (paaid and free) to add functionality I needed. I really wanted to be able to use a separate image for my product thumbnails (squashed ones look so terrible) and there is a (slightly confusing) module for that. I kept waiting for the Quickbooks integration module to be completed, but it took longer than I could wiat and moved on. It looks like it is available now.
The forums are fairly active but sometimes support questions go unanswered. It can be frustrating when you are running a business that there is no 'real' customer support person to call for help.
I think PHP can be written beautifully. Wordpress CMS is an example of this, but I'm still hunting for a shopping cart with PHP that isn't more complicated than it needs to be."
Reviewed by: Musaaf
"Hi
The cart is fine but the admin section is very poorly designed though they will change it in future versions, whenever that is going to be.
Also, they do not support that many Payment Methods especially 2Checkout. The Developers do not support 2Checkout and there is only one module developed by some member on the forum which works for old versions and its not that much of a use for the latest version.
The developers just dont care about making Zencart compatible with 2Checkout whereas all other Shopping Carts online are all compatible with 2Checkout, the reason they give is that the 2Checkout Team does not give them any help.
What a lame excuse, and why is that all the other carts have 2Checkout built in them, even the loosy OsCommerce has it by default.
"
Reviewed by: Peter
"This is one powerful system, with a very flexible templating system and a very helpful and responsive support forum.
It does require some investment in time to learn how it work, but once over the initial learning curve, there really isn't much that can't be done with this package."
Reviewed by: Paul
"Zencart is better than oscommerce but the alleged Zencart Dev team are rude and have control freak tendencies. Zencart is based on Oscommerce but rather than concentrate on improving important issues (admin interface for one), they seem to have simply hacked a lot of the code to make it work slightly different and not always for the better. Oscommerce has a lot less database queries on the first load compared with the mammoth amounts called by Zencart.
The Zencart forums are quite useful but finding answers is like pulling teeth. The same questions are asked countless times and answered quickly but these are all obvious numpty questions. Ask a technical question and you get stony silence. I suspect the Dev team don't understand the OSC code as well as the original developers, which would explain why zencart is more a collection of OSC hacks than a standalone cart.
Templating for zencart is easier than OSC but still stuck in the age of the dinosaurs. I swear T-Rex was using this cart when he was selling mammoth memorabilia. You have a cart with a mysql database crammed with tables, then a flat text file language system in directories which are plastered all over the file structure. Any true developer with half a degree of sanity would have moved the language files into the mysql database and provided an admin interface for making the changes, but as I said, Zencart is a collection of OSC hacks and its developers seem to be more focused on squeezing donations and cash from the user community than actually creating anything remotely useful. (Example: If you want a template created you can post in their commercial help forum, but developers need to PAY to read your request. Isn't that nice and cosy for the select Zencart Developer few - keeps most dev-type people out of the forum so they can clean up).
Add on modules for zencart are not in short supply and if you are able to do a spot of php coding, anything you cannot find can easily be located on the OSC"
Reviewed by: Vicky
"Very difficult to learn where everything is laid out. I started out with osCommerce but found that some of the features I wanted weren't included. However, ZenCart did include them. Support isn't too bad. Very good forum community willing to help out. I started by finding a layout template under their free download section and just went from there. I customized it and made it more of my own branding. You can see it here (http://zen-cart-templates.ichoze.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=181) and this is what I turned it into http://www.texasjackrussells.com/shop
The biggest hurdle is learning where everything is. And even though its CSS designed, it can be confusing at first what does what. It took me awhile to find out what did what. But overall, I'm pleased with it. It fits my needs."
Reviewed by: aeon
"Zen Cart comes out of the box with a lot of fire power and a lot of customization capacity. People on the forum are very courteous and will give really quick responses. The Zen team do a pretty good job of maintaining open source code that can be adapted to meet the needs of most shop owners."
Add your own review |
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| Supported operating systems |
Windows, Linux, Unix |
| Language |
PHP |
| Database |
MySQL |
| Source code |
Yes |
| Reseller discounts |
No |
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| Product limit |
No |
| Category limit |
No |
| Multi-language |
Yes |
| Gift certificates |
Yes |
| Loyalty program |
Yes |
| Email merchant on order |
Yes |
| Affiliates program |
3rd party |
| Site search |
Yes |
| Search optimization tools |
Yes |
| Product reviews |
Yes |
| Newsletters |
Yes |
| Discount coupons |
Yes |
| Customer registrations |
Yes |
| Wish list |
3rd party |
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| Shipping price range |
Yes |
| Shipping weight range |
Yes |
| UPS lookup |
Yes |
| USPS lookup |
Yes |
| Fedex lookup |
Yes |
| Canada Post lookup |
Yes |
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| Tax by state |
Yes |
| Tax by country |
Yes |
| PayPal |
Yes |
| Authorize.Net |
Yes |
| Verisign |
3rd party |
| Worldpay |
3rd party |
| Secure Trading |
No |
| Others |
Yes |
| Non credit card options |
Yes |
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| Customer forums |
Yes |
| Free support |
Yes |
| Paid support |
Yes |
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| Sales reports |
Yes |
| Search reports |
No |
| Low stock reports |
Yes |
| Inventory reports |
Yes |
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This is a totally free, open source product. It has a good and active support forum. Most of the features are not in-built but you have to install them seperately. Zen Cart is a refined variant of the popular osCommerce cart.
It now supports XHTML/CSS layouts. Some of the features are only supported through add ons (which are usually free).
Read a detailed hands on Zen Cart review |
Last updated:
6/20/2007 11:50:46 PM
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