Never Used Shopping Carts Before

[GEP]

I am here as I have never used a shopping cart system before. Thought I would see what gives with Zen cart as it is available on my cpanel.

Heck, I am new to this whole web master thing. Just got my site up using Joomla. It is a photography site and I already have people who are local wanting to buy some of my photographs of this local area. That is the good news.

The difficult part is that I have no idea how the carts work. Things such as; how does one list photos for sale and keep an inventory so that one knows what someone just ordered?

Too many ignorant questions to bore you with here. I am just really wondering how you folks find this cart system to work with. How goes an installation. Troubleshooting, difficult or relatively easy. You know, all the questions born of ignorance and trepidation of something new. A lot of my decision will depend on the support here at this forum. I know of another forum that one is afraid to post a question as the moderators are very miffed at newbie type questions, such as these. And, no, I haven't personally had a problem there. Thanks for listening. Hope I can get some good answers.

[Ryk]

Welcome to the community, which you will find extremely helpful, especially to those who help themselves rather than just expect to have an instant answer supplied to a question that has been asked several 100 times before!

The thing to remember is that there are literally thousands and thousands of ZenCart driven stores out there, so there aren't many questions that haven't already been asked, and the dev team have done a great job in creating a superb tutorials/FAQ section to this site...so start here https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php (and bookmark it! )

Download a copy of the latest release of ZC and install it as per the instructions; include the demo store to begin with and have a good play around.

And if you do have questions that are not covered by the tutorials/FAQ use the search facility, and if you still can't find the answer, then please ask here. Just remember that the person who knows the answer may have just gone to bed (or worse, on a 2 week vacation!) somewhere on the other side of the planet, so it's not always instant response.

Again, welcome to ZenCart.

[Ryk]

NB I say Download the latest release because your cPanel version may not be current. You'll also learn more if you start right from the beginning.

[GEP]

Thanks for the answers. I have used support forums for years and am well aware that the search facility should always be used first, before asking a much answered previously question. Will do. I am sure that the cpanel version is NOT the latest so will download and install the newest version. (After asking my host to upgrade the available cpanel version)

I hav eread, while doing my research before coming here, that many folks have complained of the difficulty of customizing Zen. Now, I know that many screw themselves up and then blame the messenger. But am wondering if there is something that I can better orient myself to here so that I can get a head start. The last thing I want to do is try to spend a lot of time trying to "interpret" hundreds of posts and answers to questions that I do not understand the nomenclature of.

Having asked the last I will start geading the tutorials today.

[Ryk]

The best thing for you to do is to play with the demo store first - once you decide that this is for you, then you can think about the customising. There are some templates available in the downloads section which you can use as a basis for your site; customising is easy or difficult depending on a) how much you know about css, html and php b ) whether or not you keep copies of ANY file you are about to change and c) if the answer to a) is "very little" then to stop it getting too difficult, you must take small steps

The most important word you will read on these forums is BACKUP...before making ANY changes.