Trying to decide which shopping cart to use, Open lite zen cube

hello

any help would be appreciated.

trying to decide which shopping cart i should use.

have a few questions, if anybody can answer them, it would be much help.

thanks

here are a few questions.

can shipping charges be shown before checkout?

do you have listing feed to ebay, amazon, google?

is there a payment module for paypal?

do you have a fedex and ups shipping module for the USA?

is the shopping cart design responsive?

does the shopping cart support seo friendly urls?

thanks

tim

Welcome to the forum and, hopefully, welcome to Zen Cart!

Here are a few answers to you questions. You can see the available plugins at https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php and a demo of the cart at https://jeandret.com/index.php?t=ADA_Boot3_3 with everything turned on.

can shipping charges be shown before checkout? Zen Cart has a built-in Shipping Estimator. When used with the various Shipping plugins, it lets the customer know what to expect. Shipping and tax (if any) is displayed at checkout as well.

do you have listing feed to ebay, amazon, google? There are mods to do such things but I am not familiar with their operation.

is there a payment module for paypal? PayPal is built in. Just add credentials. There's also Authorize.net and a mod for Square and several others.

do you have a fedex and ups shipping module for the USA? Yes

is the shopping cart design responsive? Zen Cart ships with one responsive template and there is a module for a bootstrap template. The bootstrap template is pretty impressive out-of-the-box

does the shopping cart support seo friendly urls? There is a mod for that but I personally do not recommend its use unless you are relatively static in your categories and products. Changes to the categories and products can be a management nightmare using them. Google kayak parts. They don't use any of the SEO "tricks". Good product descriptions/images will get you more exposure than friendly URLs.

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Originally Posted by timr

hello

any help would be appreciated.

trying to decide which shopping cart i should use.

have a few questions, if anybody can answer them, it would be much help.

thanks

here are a few questions.

can shipping charges be shown before checkout?

do you have listing feed to ebay, amazon, google?
There's an (albeit not yet released) plugin for a Google Product Search Feed. See https://github.com/lat9/gpsf

is there a payment module for paypal?

do you have a fedex and ups shipping module for the USA?

is the shopping cart design responsive?

does the shopping cart support seo friendly urls?
Again, with a plugin. The most up-to-date and easier to use is Ultimate SEO URLs (https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=132)

thanks

tim

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Building on @dbltoe's comments, see inline above

I have been using ZC for almost 20 years and have watched it grow and develop. Between 2005 and 2012 I ran a company building ecommerce shops for small businesses - all on ZC and during these 7 years built over 200 online shops. Around 2011-2012, large ecommerce "portals" like Wix and Shopify made an appearance and basically pulled the rug from under our feet, as we could not compete with them - either in technology or price, so I examined the commercial marketplace and decided to open a few online shops of my own. Today - around 11 years later, my company operates around 10 online shops - all doing well and making profits.
I have NEVER sold on Amazon, eBay, Etsy... etc and never will. Basically because these portals own the customer - you don't. Sellers on these platforms are just conduits for income from the platform. Fundamentally, they are a "race to the bottom" and a real business will never use them. Recent reports of "holding revenue" from sellers on Amazon and Etsy made news headlines, and highlight the danger sellers face when using these sites for business activity.
SEE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66486803
There are challenges to operating your own independent online shop - and these include how to gain exposure and visits (translating to sales and profits) as well as the responsibility of maintaining the website. I had basic HTML knowledge back in 2002, but over the years learned a lot more about dynamic database-driven websites (particularly PHP, MySQL, CSS, JS and other essential tools).
It therefore helps to develop such knowledge - or to at least have access to someone who knows this stuff.
That said - the ZC community is vast, and knowledgeable, and a lot of free advice is available. Some ZC specialists offer commercial help and in general charge fair prices.
Ultimately, having full control over the technology is (to me) the most important aspect of running an online shop - but (depending what you are selling and how large and complex your business is), portals like shopify and wix may work - although these are often limited in functionality, being more a "one size fits all" system.
But you should seriously consider avoiding Amazon, eBay, Etsy etc... VERY FEW people make profit on these platforms and more importantly, you do not own your customers... they do... and if you fail, they don't care... You are unimportant - all you are is a conduit between the people who spend (the consumer) and the place that takes their money (Amazon/Etsy/eBay).