Product Review: Zen Cart
kosmo - See all 471 of my articles
3 Comments
I recently got consumed with the idea of getting a storefront online. The store will have my fiction eBooks and and, in the future, some audio versions of those books. There will be a lot more about the store tomorrow, so I won’t dwell on the details.
I asked for some advice on how best to go about this. I received good suggestions about working with web sites that routinely sell eBooks for people. Unfortunately, the setup fees were more than I wanted to deal with – I wanted to keep more of the money in house, so that I could afford to charge a lower rate to customers.
This led me to a product called Zen Cart, which was advertised as a “one step install” on my web host, Dreamhost. Let’s look at the good and bad of Zen Cart,
What Zen Cart did right
First of all, Zen Cart is free. How does the company manage to stay in business? They sell a manual, of course. I’m a big fan of this business model. It’s possible to use the product completely for free if you can Google to find the answers to your questions (as I did). If you like it well enough, you can always leave a donation later.
The installation itself actually was pretty easy. A big chunk of the praise goes to Dreamhost for this, though. All the necessary databases are set up by invisible hands, and Dreamhost sends you an email cheat sheet to guide you through the installation screens. I stumbled through the screens a bit because I wasn’t paying attention. Once I actually read what was written, I did much better.
The product is actually pretty feature rich. More features than I needed, really. It has support for multiple tax structures (for each state, for example), allows various payment methods (including pretty cool PayPal integration), digital products (the files are stored within the Zen Cart installation), coupons, and much, much more. I’ve barely scratched the surface, since I had fairly minimal needs.
What Zen Cart did wrong
Setting up downloadable products was not very intuitive. I finally figured out how to do this by Google’ing for the answer. It involves setting up and “option name” and “option value” and configuring this option to point to a file. I was expecting to perhaps just check a box for “this product contains a download” and be prompted for the file location. There are a lot of people interested in selling their intellectual property on the internet. A quick-to-setup solution would gain a lot of fans.
On the subject of downloads, when you configure the product, you type in the file name, rather than using a dropdown box to select it from the available files. The greatly increases the chance of making an error. (Oh, hey, make sure you actually TEST the process). Setting up a multi-part file was even a bit different. In the end, I was able to set this all up, and the downloads enable after the cutomers finished the checkout process successfully.
By default, the customer registration screen asks for the person’s physical address. This is completely unnecessary for me, since all I’m selling are downloads. I really don’t care what street you live one. This fields were also set up as required. My fear was that some potential customers would say “aw, screw it” when asked for that much information. I just wanted them to enter their email address and password.
It took a bit of searching to find the answer to this. Finally I stumbled across the perfect solution from a helpful forum member (this guy) who outlined a five step process that involved editing 3 PHP files. It was very effective – but, seriously, I need to edit a PHP file so that people buying my PDF books don’t have to type their address and phone number?
Along the same lines, I had to edit PHP in order to change the default text on other screens, notable the main page for the screen.
I suspect that a manual would have come in handy – or even a step through the tutorials. Of course, I didn’t have the time for that ☺
The verdict
I do like the product. It’s not the simplest thing to configure, but once you have it set up, it does work very well. If you need a virtual storefront, give Zen Cart a shot. If you’re selling products that sell for less than $12, you will also want to sign up for PayPal’s micropayments option. This is a different fee schedule that charges for 5% plus 5 cents for each transaction instead of 2.9% plus 30 cents. At the very low end of the price range, this can make a lot of sense.
- How to Win Writers and Influence People Something that longtime readers of The Soap Boxers have noticed is the gradual morphing of the writing staff from one...
- Is Verizon Trying to Kill 4Info? 4Info is a wonderful, and largely free, service that allows people to get all kinds of updates on their cell...
- DirecTV Review Recently, we switched from cable to a combination of DSL and DirecTV. Â The DSL is working out OK so far...
- Synthetic Long Johns? Even though my CFC and WCI option strategies backfired, my JRCC puts did quite well. Enboldened by that success, I...
- Money Hack: When You Save Money, Actually Put It in Savings As part of the publicity push for Your Money: The Missing Manual, I’ve been a guest on a couple dozen...
- Acai Berry Select Review Acai Berry Select â Is It Effective In this article, you will learn how Acai Berry Select will help you...
Comments
3 Responses to “Product Review: Zen Cart”
Leave a Reply
Set up a customized icon to appear next to your comments! Is your comment not appearing? Don't worry - I'm not censoring you. Your comment just got caught in my spam filter. It will be viewable shortly (almost always within 24 hours, and much more quickly 90% of the time).Copyright for all content belongs to the writer identified in the byline. Copyright for any content not associated with a particular writer belongs to Kosmo. Copyright for comments belongs to the writer of the comment.
Content from The Soap Boxers cannot be reused in any manner other than what is allowed under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law or the applicable copyright laws of your country.
© 2008-2010. All rights reserved.
Please email Kosmo at Kosmo@ObservingCasually.com with any questions you may have.
The Soap Boxers is a division of Hyrax Publications
Soap Boxer Search
Just For Laughs
Category
Recent Posts
Search by Writer
Lazy Man and Money
Blogs Written By Us
Financial Blogs
Fun Blogs
March 25th, 2010 @ 7:26 am
[...] fees, in order to keep costs low, allowing me to keep prices low. I ended up going with Zen Cart (see review here), a product that installed on my web [...]
July 28th, 2010 @ 11:25 pm
This is a good summary of zen cart’s strengths and weaknesses. It is a brilliant piece of software for the price
But there are some things that should definitely be admin settings rather than having to edit the PHP code.
Total Comment by Zen Cart Zoo: 1
August 26th, 2010 @ 3:49 am
I love Zen Cart and all the options and flexibility it provides. I do agree though it could be more user friendly. I think Zen Cart 2.0 will include much, and more, of what we have been waiting for – like a more streamlined registration and checkout process.
Kerrin´s last blog ..Do your online store pages load in 2 seconds or less
Total Comment by Kerrin: 1