All posts tagged ecommerce software

Zen Cart (or ZenCart) originally developed by group of developers from Newcastle, England, Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada has become one of the most widely used cart software programs for e commerce businesses. Now with a great support community and new addon modules being created on a regular basis. It’s not just a simple shopping cart module, but a truly professional ecommerce store management platform (named also a shopping cart system) with newsletters, coupons, gift certificates, etc more capable to run Amazon type of stores than small websites with thousands of products allowing unlimited category depth and site search.

Store setup

ZenCart shopping cart configuration is straight forward, and your store settings can be made easily within the zen Cart Administration pages.

As standard Zencart is almost ready to go straight from the box, however some personalisation is required eg configuring the Store Owner details and site preferences. There are eight default editable pages and each can be configured within the Administration area to customize and add supplementary content to the site, more pages can be added easily if required and created using either pure HTML language or the JavaScript based Rich text editor, along with which sideboxes are displayed and the content can be set on and off and their sort order can be modified.

The Administration area is extremely broad and comprehensive making it easy to add and define your products, you can in a fairly straight forward way, easily set up categories and sub-categories and place your product information where desired. Then for SEO purposes, you are able to define your own Meta tags (title, keywords and description) for the categories and products throughout your category tree structure.

Each product can be set up as in stock/out of stock or defined by the availability date, the price model can be free, call for price or priced by any attributes that you assign, it can be “virtual” without a need for the shipping address or can have free shipping.

It can have units which can be defined as minimum and maximum for order. Images can be uploaded, defined as existing files or there can be separate web page for the product (for example manufactures page).
Manufactures with their images and URL’s can be also defined.

Product Options allows defining options like colour, size and assigning them to products or product groups. It had very powerful feature to assign, copy and delete those characteristics over the
product database.

Products can be featured or have special price for the limited period of time.
From the localization option within the ZenCart Administrator area, you can define Countries which can be divided to Zones, Tax Classes, Tax Rates , Currencies and their rates and Order Statuses (ordered, processed, delivered, etc).

The Sale Maker option is a module to create limited period sales campaigns which can be new price, discount amount or percentage for the products in price range for the product category.

The Payment module allows to configure payment gateways and preinstalled options where Authorize.net, PayPal, Linkpoint, NoChex, cash on delivery, offline credit card processing and check-money order.
The Shipping module allows configuration of basic shipping costs and Order Total module discounts and taxes used by the system.

The customers’ module shows customer orders, account balance, number of logons with last login reviews written, and discount group. Customers can be disabled but not deleted. There is possibility to create discount groups assigned to customer.

Setting the Zen Cart system options, site look and feel, banner campaigns, etc can be done either using Configuration or Tools module. There where lot of options to switch on and off, however for your custom
store lookout I would recommend to purchase or develop separate template package.

Coupons can be defined giving fixed fee discount for the minimum order value and offering free shipping. Those can be valid limited time, zone and limited per amount and per uses by customer.

Gift certificates will be emailed to customers or customer groups by some discount value, and those can be redeemed in customer next purchase.
Coupons and Gift Certificates codes are automatically generated containing 10 characters and numbers.

Media manager allows defining of Artists, Labels, Genre and Media types. Those can be assigned to products.

Administration module produces reports by products viewed, products purchased, and customer order total, products low on stock and customer referrals.

Usability

Customers can locate products by category, new products, bestsellers or search by keyword. Products can be listed by Product Name, Manufacturer, Price, Model or Date Added. Music can be listed by Labels or genre. All those options can be set on and off from the Tools / Layout Boxes
section in administration module.

Language and currency can be changed Ad-Hoc, which option also can be set on / off.
Who is online option will show only how many registered customers and guests are using the site at the moment.

Tell a friend option allows send the page link by email.
Registered customers are able to write reviews which must be approved by administrator before they appear online, email a product page to friend and purchase the product.

Returning customers can sign in by email address and password, otherwise the registration will ask postal address, telephone number and age verification. Those options can be setup using Configuration/Customer details in administration module and several other options (fax number, US state list, and referral) can be added.

After the products have been selected to shopping cart, users are able to estimate shipping or proceed to checkout.
During the shopping process addition shortcuts to visit shopping cart and direct link to checkout will be shown on upper menu bar.

After selecting the shipping method and altering the shipping address if necessary, customer is able to use coupons and redemptions, alter the billing address, select payment method, enter special instructions
and by doing the final confirmation on next page the deal has been done.