Re: Why I'm Quitting Zen Cart
Originally Posted by
pricediscrimination
- Zen Cart does not keep up with modern demands. It's an old school OG platform that seems stubbornly stuck in the early days of eCommerce.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'modern demands'. I know I looked at quite a few options two years ago when deciding whether to upgrade Zen cart, or switch to a new platform. I stuck with Zen cart, but put money into making changes. I looked at using WordPress with an ecommerce plugin, but none look like they could cope with a store the size of mine. Plus none had good back-office flow. It's not always about the front-end.
Originally Posted by
pricediscrimination
- No modern site asks more than 3 or 4 questions to create an account. Email is more important than anything and account creation is basically another way of subscribing to an email list. Zencart asks 12+ questions just to create an account! Nobody wants to give their address and phone info just to join a site. I tried and tried and tried to get around this, but alas there's no resolution for this old school way of thinking.
Zen Cart assumes it needs the extra billing and shipping information because eventually you'll need to ship something, so may as well get it at account setup than as at any other time. If you're not shipping then you can customise to reduce the stuff asked. You can also stop some fields via config settings. I recently turned of asking for the salutation and age.
Originally Posted by
pricediscrimination
- Themes are stuck in the early 2000s and the modern looking themes available (ie: themeforest, etc) have wretched code that is impossible to modify nicely.
I agree that the default themes are very dated. Plus most of the new responsive themes I've looked at so far are pretty clunky and some really slow sites up. However, I've recently seen some Zen Cart sites that look 'modern' and are responsive. But money was spent to buy them and customise them.
Originally Posted by
pricediscrimination
- The admin area hasn't changed in a decade. It no longer makes sense in 2015. One example, why do you have to go to an entirely separate page to input metadata for a product? It should all be done on one page, so less energy is spent on listing products. Look at the wordpress admin and compare logic and overall usability.
So fix it, or pay someone to do so, and contribute it back to the Zen Cart community. I'm currently paying a developer to make lots of changes to our Zen Cart site, and a lot of the changes are making their way back into the Zen Cart platform.
About three years ago I used WordPress to build a site with an ecommerce plugin (WooCommerce) to handle a small gift shop with about 20 items related to the business. I couldn't imagine using that solution to handle the 3000 items and back-office processing of my Zen Cart based online shop. And quite frankly, I often found having almost everything on the same page in WordPress frustrating. Sometimes you just want to do what you need to do and you don't need all of that extra clutter.
Originally Posted by
pricediscrimination
- Out of the box SEO is horrible
Actually, it works quite well if you focus on the content and not on killer latest tricks. Sure it takes some work to find the extra plugins to get the right structured metadata into Zen cart, but it's easily done. And it would be nice if when inputting metadata in Zen Cart one had the sort of guidance the Yoast plugin provides for WordPress. But see, that's not standard WordPress. That functionality is achieved by a plugin. One day someone might do the same for Zen Cart.
Originally Posted by
pricediscrimination
- Everything feels like a bunch of hacking together to get things to feel like a 2015 shopping site. Stuff that comes out of the box in newer platforms is impossible to achieve in ZC.
I wish you luck in finding that one platform, because I haven't seen anything that comes close yet. Nothing is impossible to achieve in Zen Cart. Because it's open source, you can do anything. And often the extras are available, they just cost you money. But that happens with other platforms as well. But with closed platforms, you don't have the choice of breaking out and doing your own thing the way you can with Zen Cart.
Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.
Zen Cart 1.5.5e, PHP 5.3.29 MySQL 5.5.42
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