Zen cart is okay in my opinion I prefer to use Magento Commerce which is much better and easier for SEO. Zen cart has the ability that you need to tweak it with some specific code.

The BIG shortcoming is in shipping. Having set up a store for a customer with items ranging from jewelry to furniture, I can tell you that the ability to configure shipping options is dismal. There is no way to assign different shipping options to different categories of products, let alone individual products. There is no way to set up different packaging options. Any way you slice it, it’s one-size-fits-all, which doesn’t work unless your customer just ships one size and weight of products.

Based on this alone I’d have chosen a different cart if I’d known of this shortcoming.

Yes you are right, Magento is a lot easier to use and upgrade for the future. Zencart has it’s pros and I’ve found it to be a great system. The only downside is when I upgrade I have to reconfigure every customisation, which is a real pain and very time consuming for my programmers.

I would recommend starting off with Magento Commerce first.

The one good thing is the Zen cart is so widely been used that every question i’ve had, I’ve been able to answer.

I’d say its a great solution for a small / new business owner, although once my store is at its peak, I may pay for a new server hosting and then get magneto. I’ve read and heard magneto is a lot more friendly and up to date.

If you want to integrate it fully, just play with the templates and source code a bit (php) it’s not very difficult if you know your basic HTML.

Shorter description: Over the last four years of running my Internet business I have been very fortunate to use a very robust and reliable system called Zen Cart….

Thanks for your comment. Hopefully you will be able to use the system for your Internet business as well.

I have tried OsCommerce and they are very similar overall. Zencart was spun off from OsCommerce and I actually went by a friend’s advice on using that system over OsCommerce back then. I probably would say to go with Interspire if people had the money, but if they were on a budget, stick with the Open source systems.

If you want to go in a more professional way with your ecommerce features, you have to opt for the Interspire Shopping Cart which is the best I have come across so far.

Now, although this one is going to set you back almost U$2,000 for the Ultimate version, it’s well worth it and that investment will soon be recovered through the numerous ways this system can increase your sales volume conversion.