ZenCart is a full-featured shopping cart that can be integrated into your website. It provides the website owner with an administrative login where you can log into ZenCart's administrative control panel. This administrative control panel is hosted on your webhost in the same manner as your website. In fact it is a password-protected portion of your website.
Once you logged into the your website's Zencart administrative control panel, you will be able to adjust the product descriptions, prices, and even photos without touching code. "Without touching code" means that you don't need to hire a web designer/developer to make minor updates.
Via the control panel, you can also add new products to your store. This is a bit more complicated than updating prices, because you will have to prepare and resize your product photos and upload them. Nevertheless, with some training it is certainly possible for the website owner to do this themselves without the need for a web designer.
Once a customer makes a purchase on your ZenCart eCommerce store, ZenCart will send you an email notification of the order so that you can package and ship your product. The order as well as the customer information will be tracked within the Zencart admin control panel.
The control panel also gives you ability to turn on and off your store. For example, if were to go on vacation and do not want people to able to purchase from your store because you don't have time to ship the package, then you can "turn off" your store.
ZenCart is an open-source eCommerce solution based on PHP and MySQL database. Open-source means that you do not have to pay for or buy the ZenCart software. In addition, the full source-code of ZenCart freely available to you. This means that a web developer can modify and customize the functionality of the shopping cart to suit whatever need.
A website that uses ZenCart can be customized so the look-and-feel of your website can be of any design you desire. This is accomplished by modifying ZenCart's template files and CSS files.
Another benefit of ZenCart is that it is matured. Because it has been around for many years, it has development much developer support as well as developer contributions in terms of the availability of the many function-enhancing plugins that is available to Zencart. It also means that many bugs have been ironed out and security is keep tight by constant code updates.
After downloading the ZenCart software from ZenCart.com, you will find the installation instructions within the zipped packaged. Review the basic server requirements and FAQ. If you run into any problems, you can ask on the ZenCart forum.
ZenCart is only a shopping cart. You need to hook ZenCart up to a payment processor in order for your shop to be able to process payments. PayPal and Authorize.net are two popular payment processors that can be used. And then test with a real purchase to make sure everything is setup correctly.
After installing ZenCart and getting the shop up and running, start becoming familiar with ZenCart from an user point of view. For example, learn how to turn on/off the store, upload products and email customers. These are all done through the admin user interface.
As part of running a ZenCart store, you have to learn regular maintenance tasks such as backing up the store and cleaning logs on a regular basis.
There are many ways that ZenCart can be customized in look and functionality. For example, the sidebars can customized as to whether you want them or not. Similarly, for the reviews and tell-a-friend features. You can also configure what you want shown on the front page and the checkout success page. You can configure whether you want free shipping feature and the behavior when stocks are low.
The default look-and-feel of ZenCart may not be what you want. You often want the look and style of the ZenCart shopping cart to be like your website. Hence you have to "skin" the ZenCart "theme" or template to make the ZenCart shopping cart look the way you want -- and not just for the home page, but all all the customer-facing pages (such as the ones listed here). This requires some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP.
Many developers have created modules (or mods) that extends the functionality of ZenCart. Some of the ones that might be useful are listed here.
If you maintaining a ZenCart shop, you should sign up for ZenCart update notifications so that you can be informed of new versions and of security holes found.
