Zen Cart Review – The Pros And Cons Of ZenCart

Over the last four years of running my Internet business I have been very fortunate to use a very robust and reliable system called Zen Cart. All of my transactions are processed electronically through this platform and my business has been streamlined because of this. This is a biased review, and the only system I continue to use today. Though I will be upfront and say that Zen Cart is not perfect and I am always on the look out to find better systems such as Magento Commerce. I will be reviewing that shortly as well, so stay tuned. Also if you would like to see a couple of the websites I have developed using Zencart visit DBV.com.au and AsianGroceryShop.com.

An Overview Of Zen Cart

Zen Cart is an online software designed solely for e-commerce businesses. It uses PHP, MySQL and is an open source project that was developed by a community of shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants who just wanted a simple e-commerce solution. Being open source like Wordpress, the software is free for anyone to use and it allows anyone to modify, develop and distribute. If you would like more information and details about Zen Cart, visit their tutorial section and read their about FAQ.

As of the date I write this review I am basing my experience on version 1.38a of Zen Cart. There was an announcement made in December 2008 for the release of version 2.0 and if you would like to know more about what is happening in the upcoming version, please read the Coming Soon: Zencart 2.0. For now, you can continue below to read my review on the Zen Cart system.

Installation Of Zen Cart
Most hosting companies offer Simple Scripts or Fantastico, which are application installers to help install Zen Cart. I would recommend using them as it saves time and also the hassle of setting up databases yourself. Zen Cart is one of the standard shopping carts available for installation so it should be a breeze to install. If you decide to go through and install Zen Cart yourself then you will need to read the instructions provided and it will take some time to get through. I would only recommend this route if you have a strong knowledge in PHP and MySQL as it will require you to edit some files and utilise FTP tools. You can download Zen Cart here

The Pros Of Zen Cart

Zen Cart Is A Free Bundled With Addons Available
Zen Cart is a great online software and best of all it is free. Since it’s inception over 5 years ago many developers have created numerous add-ons which can be downloaded and installed onto the Zen Cart system at any time. They are publicly available on the Zen Cart website and gives your e-commerce software extra functionality. You can download add-ons ranging from administrative tools anywhere to adding extra languages.

A Great Product Management System
The key to running any successful e-commerce business is how well you can manage your products. With Zen Cart, you are provided with a wide range of product options such as:

• Allows you to sort your products in categories and sub-categories
• Manage and control your stock levels
• Create attributes for your products, such as colours, sizes, and much more
• The ability to create products in bulk using the Easy Populate add-on
• Create specials and featured products
• Write reviews for each product

Each option can be activated when you need it or turned off. Zen Cart’s product management system is by far the most comprehensive system I have used to date and everything is at your finger tips as it is all linked to your orders and customers.

A Wide Range Of Free And Paid Templates Available
Most Internet businesses usually want a customised website and want different features to show their customers, which is why Zen Cart has a wide range of free and paid templates. You will find free basic templates available on the Zen Cart website that can be easily installed changing the colours and layout of your website. If you want more customisation, try some paid templates which start from about $50 and upwards. Here are two sites I recommend: Algozone and Template Monster.

Forum And Community Support Is Good
Unfortunately there is no formal support from Zen Cart or a team hired to handle customer service being a free product. Though there is a strong forum and community that does support and try their best to help. I have posted on their forum many times and got a response quite fast. Most of the answers are found by running a quick search and most of the time they will have a step by step process to fix the problem. I have to admit though it does get a bit technical and if you lack PHP knowledge then I would agree it can be quite frustrating to find a solution.

There is also some documentation available laid out in a Wiki section and FAQ on the Zen Cart website. If you are looking for a detailed manual there is one solely for administrators and it can be downloaded from a PDF file.

If all else fails, then try to find a Zen Cart experienced programmer and pay them to help fix your problem. They won’t cost too much and are very reasonable at what they do. I used a programmer to do some modifications to my website previously and I found them in the forum as well. Simply place a post asking for a programmer and specify what you want done. I am sure you will get people to reply if you pay them.

Export To Major Accounting Softwares Are Available
Currently Zen Cart supports both QuickBooks and MYOB accounting. Though, one module is free and the other does cost. So if you are looking to implement Zen Cart into your Internet business you will want to consider which accounting package to use. Currently there is a free QuickBooks export module that you can download and install available in the Zen Cart Downloads section. Alternatively if you are using MYOB, check out the company that has this export available at Zencart2MYOB.

The Cons Of Zen Cart

Originally when I first started using Zen Cart I was not very impressed by the not so appealing website after the installation. You will you see why:

Not Cosmetically Appealing
As with most of the open source “out of the box solutions”, I knew there were going to be somewhat a lot of customising to be done. What I found at first was the default skin that Zen Cart provided had a lot of “stuff” that were not needed and it made the whole store look a bit cluttered for my liking. Furthermore it was extra work to turn off all the banner advertisements and also to rearrange the boxes to have a simplistic look. I believe there has to be some element of visual appeal for any new user wanting to use Zen Cart as their e-commerce system.

Very Basic Reporting
Most of the basic reports are available which include products viewed, products purchased and customers orders. It lacks more sophisticated reports such as sales by products, profit on each product, profit margins made and so forth. There are additional addons which can be installed but are still not up to scratch. Basically I would not expect in depth analysis of sales, customers and products going through the door. You will need to generate these reports from your accounting software.

Upgrades And Add-On Integrations Are Difficult
This is the big downside of Zen Cart. Once you have installed Zen Cart and made modifications to the software, don’t expect to upgrade for a very long time. In my past experience if you decide to upgrade to the next version, you will basically have to start from the beginning again. The system has not been designed to upgrade without overwriting all your addons and customisations. So if you did any modifications like I have on my websites, I would be very cautious to stick to the existing version. Unlike Wordpress for example, if there are major upgrades or upgrades for add-ons it is a simple click of a mouse and the rest of the system will do the upgrade for you.

I am not saying it is not possible to upgrade, it is just extremely time consuming and a very tedious process. I have upgraded my Zen Cart websites twice from the previous versions of 1.1 to 1.2 and to 1.38a. Each time I have had to do a clean install and migrate all the data to the new version over a very long tedious process. Hopefully when the new version comes out it will eliminate a lot of these issues.

Newsletter And Email Autoresponder Is Not Reliable
I have noticed once your database begins to hit the 1000 customer mark, the email newsletter system and autoresponder facilities begin to show a slower response time. As most hosting companies do not allow for more than 50 emails to be sent out per hour via their mail servers, a majority of the emails do not get sent or are blocked by other mail providers. This begs the question to use other email service providers that will send your emails and guarantee at least a 99% delivery rate. One provider I use and talk about a lot is Aweber and I currently use this to manage my customer email database to send my updates and newsletter through. Unfortunately Zen Cart does not have any addons that are sufficient enough to automatically register a new customer to an email autoresponder and add it to the database. This is a major marketing tool that is missing in Zen Cart that can help Internet businesses grow their online customer database.

Overall Rating On Zen Cart
After using Zen Cart for a few years now I have seen the development and growth of this project. When I first started using Zen Cart it was very basic and I had to do a lot tweaking and personally add code to make it function the way I wanted. This is not ideal if you want a plug and play solution, which is what most e-commerce businesses need. Over time Zen Cart has improved this issue, but has not completely created a plug and play solution just like Wordpress has. I expect the new version of Zen Cart 2.0 will have this ability, as most open source projects begin to migrate to automatic updates rather than manually installing the plugins ourselves.

My rating for Zen Cart is a 7 out of 10 and I would recommend it as a solution to start off with for any small to medium business owners.

Tyrone Shum
Zen Cart User