What is the essence difference with osCommerce? I want a mall.

I DO reviewed almost all the questions answered here.
But for me, zen-cart seems indeed no essential difference with osCommerce.
I mean, when I turned to zen-cart, somebody told me it can support multishops within one site, but seems this unique feature are not officially integrated? If yes, then I could just use osCommerce contribute, that is good enough ...
Can any one give me more insight of zen-cart? Thanks a lot.

You can do what you like...In my biased opinion Zen Cart is more like CRELoaded only better...

Multi-Shops - - If you mean like a Mall then no Zen Cart does not include this feature. If this is not what you meant then clarify in detail

The new Multi-Shops mod could work for you IF what you want is setting up resellers of your products. They all work from one database. You still might have a problem separating sales by shop...
As far as I know osC does not have the ability to have separate unrelated stores running in one program either.

kobra:

You can do what you like...In my biased opinion Zen Cart is more like CRELoaded only better...

Multi-Shops - - If you mean like a Mall then no Zen Cart does not include this feature. If this is not what you meant then clarify in detail

Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I mean like a mall ...
Originally I investigated this link:
www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1730/category,all/search,multi+shop

This "Multi-Stores multiple shop system" is a contribution for osC, and it seems good, while it can not share the shopping cart, and from the osC forum, I saw one thread told that zen-cart can support this! So I come here for help ...

But I found that zen-cart seems also need additional module, which makes me confused if I should use osC or zen-cart ...

Hope any one could help me. What I would like to have is a mall style website, and once the shop-owner registered at my site and requested open a shop there, The website can function well ...
Thanks a lot again.

gjh42:

The new Multi-Shops mod could work for you IF what you want is setting up resellers of your products. They all work from one database. You still might have a problem separating sales by shop...
As far as I know osC does not have the ability to have separate unrelated stores running in one program either.

Please check this link:
www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,1730/category,all/search,multi+shop

I looked a little further into it, and found it can have the ability to have separate unrelated stores running in one program ...
While it also did not have something I must need ...

Thanks for your help ...

As I thought, the osC mod does not allow for unrelated stores either. It lets you "decide which products in that category you want displayed on which store-front," i.e. they all work off one database of products. Like the ZC mod, I'm sure you can have totally different layouts/looks for each storefront.

Do you want resellers of your products, or people selling their own products through your mall site? If other people's products, they will all have to be entered into your central database.

Are you expecting that the shop-owners would have individual-looking stores? Or all the same look? They can't have their own looks without some real template work, so that can't be instant.

The answer to what you are trying to do is much simpler than you are trying to make it. What you need to do is simply make a website (html programming) for your "mall" which would include links to the individual stores. You can go as basic or advanced as you want to. Each store would be a seperate instance of zen-cart or oscommerce or any other shopping cart program, although I do prefer zencart.

You can have anything from one page with all the links to all the stores or a seperate individually themed page for each store, to an entire catagory listing with individual products listed and the link takes them to the correct page in the correct store (A LOT of html programming for this one)