Why not to use ZenCart or OSCart
17Hundreds of webmasters and web designers choose to use ZenCart of OSCart to set up their or their clients’ stores on the web. I myself have setup quite a few shopping stores, and I’m here to tell you that using OS Cart or Zencart just because they are free is not always the best decision.
My personal item of choice is eCommerce Templates. It’s not free, but it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg, and it will get you everything you need for a shopping store, in probably half the time as OSCart & ZenCart will.
I’ve recently spent some time trying to play with and configure both ZenCart and OSCart, and they’re both quite a mess. The support is sketchy for both of them, as is the pattern in which support is provided. They don’t necessarily come ‘built-in’ with any payment providers, and you have to use add-ons to get them to work with different payment providers and different shipping providers, and finding and installing the right add on can be quite a hassle because, well, they’re written by the creators of zencart or oscart, but by other independent developers.
Please note that my goal here is not to undermine the pros of open-source, as I am a big fan of open source, despite being a microsoft partner. But read on, and I shall tell you why I think you shouldn’t waste too much time troubling yourself with either ZenCart or OS Cart, when you can be up and running with eCommerce Templates in a few hours.
The Pricing & Income Factor
Okay, so OS Cart and ZenCart (I’ll be calling them OSC and ZC from now on) are free. eCommerce templates may run you round about $ 150.00. My experience? On average I can have a shopping store up and running on eCommerce Templates to MY design in less one, inefficient working day. With OSC and ZC, it was a painful operation, and it took me a few days to wrap my arms around the template. In addition, I think the coding model for both OSC & AC is rather sketchy, especially when compared with eCommerce Templates.
Now, let’s do the math. A client hires you to put together a shopping store. You choose one of the free solutions to make an extra $150.00. It takes you three days to make the store, and you’ve fixed a price of, say, $ 1,850 with your client. Three working days means 24 hours, which would be mean that you made an average of $77 per hour, which really isn’t that bad. Now, let’s say you used eCommerce Templates, you can have the same store ready in 8 hours, and if it is your very first store, it really shouldn’t take you more than 12 hours, or you shouldn’t do this for a living. Now, let’s do the math here. You pay $ 150 for an eCommerce Template, and spend 12 hours designing the store. That means you made a whopping $ 142 per hour, which is practically DOUBLE of what you would make if you used OSCart or ZenCart. If that isn’t incentive to sway away from these two packages, I don’t know what else is.
Avoid Tedious Coding, anyone?
There are many of us out there who don’t mind spending time digging into the code, because for some of us it’s actually productive. But i really don’t like to do that when I could be using my time more efficiently, i.e., completing the work that I’m actually getting paid for. With eCommerce Templates, you have one big plus that you don’t with the others. You do not have to be familiar with PHP or ASP templating in any way, shape or form, because their templates come built in for the piece of software that you want to use to do your design, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, Frontpage, and if you’re not faint of heart, purely CSS & XHTML compliant templates too. That makes it much easier for those who like to stick to familiar territory to “edit” the design.
In addition, if you like to use photoshop to do your design work, you can continue to do that with eCommerce Templates, and simply integrate the “ecommerce” portion of their template/design into yours. You can choose their simple template design for this, and when you’re done slicing up your own design in photoshop, open the files up in your editor of choice, and paste the no more than 3-5 lines of code to get the shopping cart functionality on your pages. It really is that easy. The store at Asif Nawaz Consulting, on http://www.asifnawaz.net/consulting/shopping_store/ is a prime example of something like this, and although it’s not the most flashy of designs, it is a perfect example fo the functionality you can get with eCommerce Templates.
Adding a payment provider
Well, let’s say you’ve been using authorize.net for a long time, and now you want to add google checkout functionality. Well, with OSC or ZC, you’ll have to look for the add on, download it, upload it via FTP (and this isn’t that simple, because you have to replace like 5 files over 15 folders), and then, maybe, if all goes as planned, you’ll have the google checkout functionality. With eCommerce Templates, it is much simpler. You sign up with google, log on to the administrator panel at your online store created with ecommerce templates, and simply enter your google API and Account #, and you’re done. It is actually just that simple.
Shipping Options
This is my biggest difficulty with OSC and ZC. With eCommerce Templates (eCT), you can use UPS, FEdEx or USPS. I haven’t seen Royal mail here yet for UK, but I hope to see that addition soon enough. You can also use weight based or flat rate shipping, depending on what you sell. I’m not sure if you’ve ever made the effort to integrate FedEx or UPS into a web site yourself, but I’m doing it now with DesignerPottery.com, and I can tell you, it’s note a whole lot of fun. Using eCT, you can sign up from inside your admin panel and have UPS shipping up and running in a few minutes. BEWARE, though, if you are hosting through GoDaddy or a Wild West affiliate. You will need to add a couple of variables to your includes file for it to work.
Documentation
The benefit here is that the manual and documentation is detailed and orderly. With OSC and ZC, that was one of my biggest problems. Help online is very sketchy, and nobody wants to spend time weeding through a massive PDF manual to see how something works. The HTML manual and help is easy to use, and you have access to a forum, which discusses almost all of the issues with the product.
Forum Support & Updates
This may be the only downside. eCT periodically releases updates to fix bugs and add functionality, and the updaters cost about $ 25, and they include a 6 month membership on the support forum, where you can directly communicate with their team and other members/users to get your questions resolved. Even if you don’t pay the support fee, you can view everything on the forum. You just can’t ask for help directly. If you don’t want the updaters, you can buy a support subscription, which costs slightly less than the updater, but it’s worth it, because when you’re adding functionality to your client’s store, you will be charging him/her too.
International Compatiblity
Okay, eCT stores are compatible in the US & UK, and I believe elsewhere too, but you do need to check this before you purchase it. In my experience, it works okay for UK based stores too, and it is the only solution that has worked for a UK based store for me without causing me too much heartburn. I’d recommend it to others.
In Conclusion
One thing you must keep in mind is that I have now been using eCT for 5 years, so i am very comfortable with it. Of course, as a new user, there will be a bit of a learning curve, but what I can tell you is that that learning curve will be, at worst, half of what it may be with OSC or ZC. There are solutions out there like CubeCart and XCart, which are free to a point and then they charge you per your requirements, but I don’t have much experience with them.
I’ll be very honest with you: I haven’t tried another solution since I switched to eCT, and that’s because it’s simplicity and scalability attracted me. I highly recommend the product to anyone else.
If you have any questions about the solution, please feel free to ask and clarify them before you buy it, and if you do and it is not too much of a hassel, kindly use the window below to order:
Also, please share with everyone what software you use.
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