installing Zen-cart

Hi there,

I am unsure what software i should use to aid me in designing a shopping cart site.
I have looked into oscommerce and actinic, but have found oscommerse to be difficult to costomise and actinic works slightly diferent and is only pc compatible, unfortunately for me i work mainly on MACs.

I have just come arross Zen-cart but am unsure how to install and how easy it will be to use and work with. Obviously if anyone replies to this post i will expect some biased feedback towards Zen-cart, But which is the eassyest ecommerse help out there, for redesigning and setting up for begginers.

Does Zen work in a similar way to Oscommerse in that you have to upload everything to your database server. i believe actinic works differently. Are there any benifits to working this way???

Also can i use an excisting css web page created in dreamweaver (0sx) template to use as the template for the oscommerse site.

Also can anyone recommed any books to related to building ecommerce cart sites. What knowledge am i likely to need? I gues it stuff like PHP and MySQL web development.

Any enlightentment will much apprieciated.

Many thanks

:P

00lewis --

Hi back at ya.'

I really can't speak to Zen Cart vs. others, because I really only know ZC. All I can say is, it works for me. This, of course, means it's dead easy to use by definition. If I can get it up & running, anybody can.

After that, it's hard to give detailed advice without knowing a bit more about 1) your requirements (number of products, sales volume, rate of changes to your products, etc.), 2) your expectations (level of automation, level of customization) & 3) your current skill level.

By far the easiest way to get a bang-up shopping cart that meets 100% of your needs from day one is to hire someone with loads of skill & experience to create it for you. The next easiest would probably be to buy an e-commerce software package that comes with detailed documentation, a full-time development staff, on-call tech support, etc.

Going 'open source' cuts down on your initial capital outlay, at the expense of doing a lot more of the work yourself; a classic tradeoff.

The good news is, it's really not necessary to learn either SQL or PHP to use Zen Cart, or (AFAIK) any of the other similar carts out there; all of the heavy lifting has been done for you. You only need to get into the code if you're trying to do something out of the mainstream.

As stated, I don't know very much about osCommerce, but any PHP-based software is not going to get along well with DreamWeaver (or GoLive, HomePage, iWeb, FrontPage, or any of the others). They're all intended for designing 'static' pages -- and shopping carts, by their nature, dynamically generate the pages 'on the fly' based on the contents of the database & the user's actions.

You don't actually need to upload to a server, but running your own HTTP server is a major pain & expensive for a decent connection speed; it's a lot easier to set up the store locally & then upload it to a remote machine that's maintained 24 hours a day. The cost is trivial compaired to the other expenses of running a store.

-- Larry

If your Mac uses the OSX system then it probably already has an Apache server installed and MySQL, but not PHP. Personally I find that XAMPP For Mac OSX Beta works for me on my Mac (http://www.apachefriends.org/en%29. It's an all-in-one package, that is literally a 1-click install.

Vger

Hello, I have been selling online for a number of years and yes, I am All Mac. I have some of these concerns as well. I have used the Mozilla composer for most of my pages because I donate to them once a year and keep it simple with tables for layout. I would like ot have a better look for it and feel, I use PayPal for everything.

I did try out a couple of shopping carts in my previous business, and found they were really clunky and there were hidden costs.

Before I donate, I would love to be able to try it and see what it can do. It is a project I would need to do full swing by summer, and can't risk my pages that are already up, because the website functions...and is how I make a living.

Any thoughts. I work in the school part time and can spend time on this on weekends, I would like to know if there is a way to set up a test page and run it local on my Mac with OSX?:unsure:

Yes, I guess this is a pre donation question, v. pre sales

Hi lostcoast,

(I'm guessing that'd be the west coast. :laugh: )

The easiest way to try out Zen cart is to set up a local server on your Mac. That's easy to do if you've got lots of hard drive space and a resonable amount of RAM. Download a copy of MAMP to make it even easier. (You could use the built-in Apache, etc. but installing MAMP makes the whole process a no-brainer.)

Note that this gives you a fully configured Apache/MySQL/PHP setup, but not one you'd use for actually serving your site to the world. This is just for local practice and testing.

Once you've got that installed (should take about an hour if you've never done it before) download the full Zen Cart package. Follow the install instructions except that you'll be putting it into the htdocs folder in the MAMP folder on your hard drive.

Once installed come back to the forum and see how to do all the customizing you can do with Zen. If it looks like something you'd be comfortable with, buy the book -- link at the top right of all forum pages.

Don't worry about donating until you're absolutely sure Zen Cart is what you want. There are no hidden costs, assuming you're comfortable doing your own customization.

Don't worry or hurry. You'll go through periods of great frustration, but it will all come clear in the end. My first site took 4 months of part time work before I felt it was ready for prime time. The second took less than a month -- in part because I got the book. The third would probably take a week. It gets easier!

HTH

Rob