Using the Admin part of Zen Cart with own custom shop - Possible?

Hi guys and girls,

We are currently running a site (playhorizon.co.uk) which is running Zen Cart.
We took this store over from Horizon Simulation so I've had to learn the system quickly.
We also own and run Flightstore via our custom built online store.

Although I haven't fully got the hang of things, we like the Zen Cart system and we are liking it more with the more we learn about it.

Anyway, here's our question:

We are planning another online store... PlaySims which will sell simulation software and hardware. Zen Cart seems suitable for this as it has proved with PlayHorizon.

Could we use Zen Carts administration system to manage the back end of our custom built store?
So after our store has managed the user, built the basket, made the sale and taken the payment, Zen Cart takes over for the rest.

We are looking into the option of using Zen Cart for the whole process also. Would it be an issue (Copyright, patents etc) if we took an installation of Zen Cart, stripped it down to bare minimum and built our own system on the Zen Cart base?

Thanks,
Phil

You can do anything you want to with Zencart within the terms of the license (license.txt in the zip file).

So you want Zencart to handle just inventory manangement ?

I would guess that would be a lot more work than just rebuilding the site in Zencart completely, depending on your coding skills.

stevesh:

You can do anything you want to with Zencart within the terms of the license (license.txt in the zip file).

So you want Zencart to handle just inventory manangement ?

I would guess that would be a lot more work than just rebuilding the site in Zencart completely, depending on your coding skills.

Thank you for the reply :thumbsup:

The licence.txt seems to suggest you can do pretty much anything you want programming/editing wise. So as far as I have understood from it so far, we could strip this down and use any component/s we wish within our own software as long we do not charge for the use of the new software.

Zen Cart would be used for the user management, order record/packing slip printing etc
Our own software would simply pass the order lines and price onto Zen Cart after the user has paid for the order so we could handle the processing of the order from Zen Cart.

My personal skills don't go past basic php in regards to web development. But our programmer has a good brain for code.

The issue with using Zen Cart for the whole site is for promotions such as "buy 3 for the price of 2", "buy these related products together for a discount" and such.
I know there are modules for some of these functions, which I'm looking into. But for other functions, we would have to look into custom modules which could be costly or time consuming.

Check out what's available at http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/index.html. The functions you need may already exist. I've used some of Scott's add-ons. They are excellent and reasonably priced.

I think you'll find that working within Zen Cart's framework will be more cost and time effective.

I agree with Mary-Ellen

Slicing up zencart's code will be way too complicated... so much so that it would actually be easier to write a completely separate admin section for your site.

There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code in zencart - the majority of which interact with others in very complex ways, and also with the database.

It will be far, far easier to just use zencart as your eCommerce platform and either find add-on modules that deliver the functionality you want, or get a zencart guru to help you code them.