Zen-Cart Consulting
About Zen-Cart
Zen-Cart is a free shopping cart program that offers a lot of functionality, including the basics like catalogs, shopping cart, checkout and shipping options, as well as the real eCommerce stuff like support for SSL and the most popular payment gateways.
It's what's called "open source" meaning that a web developer can easily change "the code" to make the shopping cart fit into your site exactly the way you want. This means that your web developer does not have to build you a shopping cart 'from scratch'. The underlying code is written in the PHP web programming language.
Zen-Cart & Me
For an example of how I've implemented Zen-Cart into a site, check out www.collabiril.com/shop.
I modified the Zen-Cart files so that the shopping experience matched the overall look-and-feel of the site. I also set up the catalog, implemented the shipping modules and payment gateway, and made formatting/layout changes for the catalog.
Zen-Cart & You
Regardless of which shopping cart software you decide to use, there will be a learning curve for you. After the software is integrated into your site, there will be an "Administrator Panel" that will let you see your customers, orders, etc and will let you manage the orders and, most importantly, the payment for those orders. You will need to learn how to do this.
I can help you with this.
Zen-Cart's Features
Zen-Cart offers a lot of features and options. It's important to hire a web developer who is already familiar with these, and knows the correct way to use them, so that future upgrades of Zen-Cart will not "break" your site. Some of these options include:
- Customize the look-and-feel
- Catalog layout with categories and subcategories
- Checkout with or without an account
- Different shipping options: per item, flat rate, etc
- Different payment gateways: PayPal, Authorize.net, etc
- Multiple images per item