Is Zen Cart Overkill for us?

[Jolaedana]

Hi there.

I'm talking to a client who's looking to have an ecommerce kind of setup- only thing is, she's only got six to twelve items she's looking to sell, and she wants an EXTREMELY simplistic setup- clean, entirely text based, and nothing but an image, sizes and "add to cart" button for each one.

I feel like Zen Cart would be one of the best choices for us, but I also kind of feel that it might be overkill and would require a lot of stripping down.

I have no experience with Zen Cart, and very little with PHP- what would you say is a realistic time frame to get things set up and running?

Thanks in advance. :)

[Kim]

Well- it depends on what you mean by stripping down - most of the features you wouldn't want to use are easily turned off via the Admin so that the look can be very simplistic. No graphics are required for a template over - it could be completely controlled by the CSS.

The admin has quite a lot of features and in your case I would recommend the Admin Profile add-on to remove the control access the client wouldn't need.

Zen Cart is wonderfully flexible and should meet your needs with out ever having to touch the code.

With a simple design and complete information from the client you can have her set up and ready to go in a very short time.

[afo]

I'm going to second what Kim has said and add a thought. ZC will allow your client's site to grow as her business demands. It might have extra features she doesn't need at the moment, but you never know where life will take you and ZC can be the only cart she'll ever need whether she's selling 6-12 items or 6,000-12,000 items.

[crazy_chris]

i also agree to what kim said.

i'm dealing with zencart for a few weeks now to make a cusomized printer-shop and my overall impression is that it's really easy to customize zencart for any basic needs. especially if you only use the build-in features (which are plenty).

adding / programming new features may take quite a bit of time. zencart has a lot of files, but once you got into the file/directory-structure, it's easy to find the files you need to modify. about the code i'd say, for the size of the project it's still possible to have an overview whats going on; althought some parts are better coded than others...

the shop you described sounds like you won't need to touch the code. i'd say, take 10 to 20 hours for setting up your shop. the first 5 hours just to play around and get a taste of whats going on

sometimes, you don't get around adding new features. for the most requested exist addons or howto's which are really good.

alltogether i really appreciate what the zencart team has done and absolutely enjoy working with it. the support in this forum is great. with zencart it's just easy to setup a small webshop or develop a big one out of it. once familiar with zencart, you won't switch to oscom or something else

thx a lot, zencart team!

greetings from austria,
crazy_chris