Questions On ZenCart Capabilities

[JPBear]

Hi All,

Recently my Web Hosting announced that they are no longer supporting the shopping cart I am currently using and were switching to Zen Cart. I had started my own website (We sell Antiques and Collectibles and 99.9% of the time our items are one of a kind, no running stock) with the old cart but I really never pushed it and only get a couple sales here and there (basically enough sales to cover the cost, and most my income come from my other venues) from it because of Family problems. Now that the family problems seem to have leveled off and I have more time, and I want to get my website up and functional and decided it was time to evaluate my plan of action. So I decided to check out ZenCart to see what it is all about and like the idea that it has a lot of things my present cart(M) doesn't have unless I pay an additional $250.00 in add ons. But I have a few questions to some of the capabilities of ZenCart if you don't mind.

Does ZenCart have unlimited Categories and subcategories?
Can you list the item in more then one category. Example Put it in the sub category of McKee and then in the other sub EAPG.

Not sure how ZenCart handles pictures, with my present cart I am only allowed one picture and have to hand code in the others (usually there are 4-10 pictures with any given item). Does ZenCart have a program to put in more then on picture at a time or will I have to hand code the extras.

Right now for a CC we use Propay and it handles the sales we have right now with no problem and can use it with the other two websites that are webmall based and are our main sales at the moment. With our present Shopping Cart the have a module of Credit Card Payment With Simple Validation and we just go in and manually retrieve and process the credit card. So is there a similar module for ZenCart since we don't have a direct payment gateway.

We only ship USPS and have encountered problems with their new Dimensional Shipping and our Shopping Cart. If we want that capability we will have to pay extra for this module. Does ZenCarts USPS shipping module have the Dimensional Shipping where we put the size of the box as we list each item and then at check out it calculates if it will be extra because of its size.

I think that is about it for now, We realize that we will have to start over but that isn't the problem because we would have to anyway since we will be changing Web Host and would have recode all our product listings anyway. We also only expect about 100 sales per month on average when our website is fully functional. I appreciate any input to the Above.

Thank You
Bear :-)

P.S. Here is our Website to get a feel for what we are doing.
www.jpthings.com

[Merlinpa1969]

welcome to ZC

Yes you can have unlimited cats and sub cats,
you can also have the product in more than one cat ( done in the admin as a simple switch )

Adding extraq pix is no problem, ZC will auto add any like images ( example if the main image for your product id FRED.jpg then to add other images you would name them like FRED_1.jpg FRED_2.jpg etc and they will auto load )

Yes you can set up the CC to be manually entered in a terminal,
you would use the stock CC module, this will actually split the number
you will get 1/2 of the number and the exp in an email and the other 1/2 and cvv are with the invoice

this is for security

Im not sure if there is a USPS mod that supports dimensions at this time,

Hope this helps

[afo]

Ummm...the answer to most of your questions is "yes".

Merlin beat me to the rest.

There's a rather extensive selection of free addons in the download section of this website, so many things that ZC doesn't do out of the box can be added at no cost.

[TShooters]

Welcome to Zendom!

You might also check out the ZenCart certifed hosting providers here:

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...es&pages_id=10

and the free contributed templates here:

http://(sorry, site offline)/

[afo]

I forgot to add this earlier... You can link products to multiple categories from the product itself. It just takes a couple of mouse clicks.

[JPBear]

Hi All,

Thank you for the very quick responses, sounds like right now the only thing missing is the Dimensional Shipping, which can be a down fall, but since the USPS I have been weaning off of extra large things to ship. I have looked into the ZenCart certifed hosting providers and narrowed it down to a couple. I did visit the template link its all interesting and one came close to the colors I like. Since I own several Domain names, I Just might give Zen Cart a try to see if I can handle it.

Thanks Again
Bear :-)

[afo]

There's plenty of helpful info in the tutorials/FAQ section. If any of that's no clear, the forum's a great place to ask questions.

Good Luck and Happy Zenning!