New Guy here with a few general quick questions

Hello all.

My name is Micha Petty. I currently own a remodeling company in Shreveport, Louisiana. I also own several information web sites. In case anyone is interested, they are: http://americanrevival.org http://louisianacarry.org http://jesusisonthe.net (I own a few others, but those are the ones I spend the most time on). I only mention it by way of saying hello.

Anyway, first off- thank you to the Zen Cart team and all the people who put so much hard work into these forums. I will try not to bog you down with questions I can find the answers to myself. I am the type that would rather put the extra time and effort into learning to do for myself, rather than pay others for something generic, so Zen Cart seems like the solution for me.

Here is where I am at right now:

• I have a web site (http://uglyguns.com [not selling guns, just accessories like scopes and triggers])
• I have a dedicated IP and SSL certificate installed
• I have Zen Cart successfully installed and the basic styling options configured (including a downloaded custom template)
• I am a fair hand at straight HTML, and have been able to accomplish a very few things with pre-written PHP in the past when I needed to, but have not yet really learned PHP or even much about CSS
• I use MS Expression Web 2 usually, and my server runs Apache (Inmotion hosting)
• I have not yet set up my merchant gateway, as it will be a couple/few months before I open, and no need to pay the monthly fees until then, I figure
• I have read through many of the FAQs, and purchased/downloaded the Zen Cart Newbie Guide, but have not had a chance to read it (just got it last night)
• I have an account with Pitney Bowes for shipping/printing labels for parcels

Ok, here is where I want to be:

• I want to create my own custom template to get the look/feel of my site just the way I want it
• I intend to use Authorize.net as my processor (I currently have an account with Elavon for my existing business, but I don't see a module for them in the downloads)
• I am hoping that there is a way to use Zen Cart in a relatively seamless fashion with Quickbooks, to avoid manual data entry
• I am hoping there is a way to merge my Pitney Bowes software (using their ShipStream manager- software based meter) to avoid manual data entry on that front
• I plan to use USPS for almost everything, but may get set up with UPS/FedEx for special purposes, and hope that I can merge data there semi-automatically, also

I tried looking through the info on this site already, and I am not asking for the entire run down from you kind folks (I know you have better things to do than hold my hand) right now (though if you have some links handy that I may have missed, I sure wouldn't be adverse to you posting them). I know I will have to become more familiar with PHP and CSS- that is fine, I have been putting it off for too long as it is. My main purpose in starting this thread is to make sure of the details regarding the basic points I listed above. I have a little bit of time/money invested in this now, but not so much that if I find out that my best case scenario using Zen Cart will still leave me doing alot of manual data entry to complete my book keeping/stock tracking/shipping that I could not still back out and find a more automated solution. I assume those who have tread this path before me have wanted/needed the same things I do, so I am hopeful that everything will be fine. I just wanted to ask to be clear.

1. Exactly how much of the accounting process is automatically updated between ZC/QB?
2. Does anyone know if it is possible to have Pitney Bowes and ZC "communicate" with each other- I would like to see my cart tell my shipping program where my parcels need to go. I have not yet familiarized myself with QB yet, either (will do that soon). If ZC cannot sync with PB software directly, does anyone know if QB can sync up with it and then pass the info (like confirmation/tracking) back to ZC? Again, I am trying to find out how automated I can make this process? (This same question could also be asked of FedEx/UPS shipments)
3. I would like to confirm that if I use ZC/Authorize.net that the sales/inventory info will update with QB on its own- if not automatically- how much hands on is required?

I know I am probably being too verbose, sorry.

Let me try to ask this in a more succinct fashion.

From the time I enter inventory info into Quickbooks/Zen Cart to the time a package arrives at my customer's house, how much of the process am I going to have to do manually?

Obviously, I know I will have to package the item and give it to the postman. What I do not know is how many of the computer-based details (like re-typing the customer's info for printing labels or adjusting inventory counts or calculating and remitting tax for intra-state sales or emailing the tracking info to my customer) I will have to be doing myself, and I need to have a fair idea of this before I really put my nose to the grindstone and finish building my site.

Also, one other dumb newbie question while I have your attention- how do I (can I) sell from backorder from my site? I would like to offer many items that I can only receive intermittently. I do not want to list them as being in stock, but I do not want to simply zero the total and have ZenCart disallow orders. Is there a link that you know of (sorry if it is right in front of my face and I missed it) where I can learn how to handle this?

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR READING MY LONG AND NEEDY POST! I KNOW THIS INFO IS PROBABLY ALREADY AVAILABLE, BUT TRACKING ALL THIS DOWN IS NO SMALL TASK, AND I FIGURED SOMEONE HERE PROBABLY KNEW THE ANSWERS TO ALL THIS AND COULD POST IT WITH EASE. I do appreciate you, and will do my utmost to try not to be "that guy" that wants all his information spoon-fed in the future. I just need to get over my apprehension about the questions above before I really settle in to learning all this stuff, as it will be a lot of work for a newbie like myself, I am sure.

By the way, I have a very positive outlook for my store. I do not even have any stock yet, but I have a good enough reputation with my customer base that when I told them I was going to open my store they have already sent me $20,000 up front for back ordered items in the past few weeks alone, and I am only accepting back orders on approximately 1% of the items I intend to sell. I only mention that to say, for the record, that if I can get Zen Cart up and running and do start making money at this I WILL do what I can to monetarily contribute back to the Zen Cart team for all their hard work!

If a time does come that I need a little help getting something configured, is there anyone on the zen team or a seasoned ZenCart veteran that works on a for-hire basis who I can turn to to help me get over any humps?

If you want to hire someone to help you, there's a Commercial Help Wanted section of this forum.

There are free templates available at http://(sorry, site offline)/ which may get you started.

Authorize.net is one of the options built into Zen Cart. You can activate/configure it from the admin.

I believe there's a quickbooks mod in the Free Software Downloads section.

Thank you very much for your reply.

Actually, other than mentioning the help wanted section that I had not noticed, the information provided was information I already knew.

My post was probably too long, I know, but that is not what I was asking.

Sampling or searching in the Quickbooks mod support thread in the Contributed Modules forum may tell you more about the capabilities of the interface (I am not advising you to read the whole dozens of pages of that thread:).

There is a mod in Free Addons to interface with a label printer - I forget which one.

Some people don't have many items to sell and don't need to track each customer in QuickBooks. If that is the case, I have a manual solution that may work.

I had a customer looking to do all of her accounting in Quickbooks. However, she had just 10 or 20 items for sale, only a few of the sales were through Zen Cart and most were point of sale.

After looking at the QB interface it looked very good, but not complete at the time. Here is what I suggested to her rather than do the QB / Zen-Cart link.

1. Buy a cash register at COSTCO that has a "push the button, get a list of item sales". I believe these reports are just group totals of all items sold.

2. I would install the SALES REPORT module in Zen-cart which allows her to (at any time) generate a report of items sold and group them by item. Thus the report would show (5 widgets at $5 ea).

3. Since she was not using either of these systems for a realtime inventory and did not need to record each sale to a customer, each week she would run each report (the one in Zen-Cart and the one in the cash register).

4. She would go to QuickBooks and make 2 entries, the first for a user named "CASH REGISTER". She would go through the list and enter that that "person" bought 5 widgets at $5 ea, a double widget at $7, etc. She would do the same from the "Zen-Cart" sales report.

These entries are a total of each item sold. If the report averages the cost of the items, that should not matter as you are probably only interested in sales vrs cost anyway.

The actual number of items sold doesn't increase the time to manually enter data; it is the number if items. I calculated that actual time to enter data manually for her was about 10 minutes. While nice to be able to automate this rather than do it manually, this was an easy cost-effective solution which did not take much of her time.

In my case, I enter local walk-up sales into Quickbooks for each sale but take a yearly sales report from Zen-cart and enter that into Quickbooks with a date of Dec 31, 200x. My quickbooks entry from Zen-Cart take all 10 minutes for the year! I only have 2 places to look for customer information and have very little manual entry.

Anyway, this solution may help someone.