Zen Cart – an ideal shopping platform for small to medium size businesses

For a small to medium sized business looking to make a move into ecommerce the choice of platform can be a confusing task. There is a range of ecommerce solutions both open source (free) and paid for. If we discount the commercial solutions which strictly limit the store owners' ability to scale up and add more features, and concentrate upon choosing a robust, scalable and easy to operate open source ecommerce platform then Zen Cart stands out as the clear winner by far. Just why is this though? Why should the small to medium sized business choose Zen Cart as its shopping cart solution?

Development

First and foremost is the fact that Zen Cart is an established ecommerce solution with a proven track record and a history of excellence. The shopping cart application is updated frequently and the developers are constantly extending the feature set. This means that choosing Zen Cart provides the business with an ecommerce platform that will be supported long into the future.

Flexibility

Zen Cart is also one of the most flexible ecommerce platforms around. A well set up installation allows the company to accept multiple payment methods, using multiple currencies. Zen Cart is also capable of supporting multiple languages and allows for completely location driven shipping calculations. Zen Cart provides every possible tool for selling a complete range of items both tangible and intangible, including downloadable products.
But above all else is that Zencart is open source which mean store owners like us have full access to its source code and can change it to work any way we want.(If you haven't noticed already, RubikIntegration.com website is built upon Zencart and has been fully customized)

Marketing

Zen Cart also provides a set of tools designed to help the ecommerce site owner to market their products or services. The incorporated newsletter module can be used to keep the customer base informed of offers and new products. Combining the newsletter function, with the ability to create discount codes or offer discounted products, the website owner has a feature rich set of product promotion tools at their disposal. Marketing features include discount coupons, bulk order discounts, gift certificates and featured products.
And to make the cart even more Search Engine Friendly and User Friendly, ZenCart gives the store owners the ability to edit meta tags for each page/products, and to customize each the links (urls) created by ZenCart.
Zen Cart can be fully customized to MAX OUT CONVERSION RATE and turn leads into sales. The checkout process, for example, is very straightforward and allows the purchaser to select from a variety of payment methods (chosen by the store owner). Based on this current checkout process, Rubik team has built a Single Page Checkout for Zencart utilizing AJAX technology.

Management

When it comes to maintaining the product portfolio Zen Cart once again provides a very flexible solution. Products may be placed into multiple categories and the category depth is completely unlimited, meaning that sub categories can nest down to many levels. Zen Cart is suitable for selling services, physical products or even digital products which are downloaded after purchase.

Training

One of the most time consuming tasks faced by new ecommerce site owners is getting up to speed with the back end of the system, and learning how to add products, build a product catalog and set up site options. Zen Cart features a very easy to understand administration system which can be learned very quickly by anybody with a general amount of internet knowledge.

Support

Given the large number of store owners and developers using and working on Zencart, business owners can rest assured that they have someone to turn to in case they need emergency help for their businesses. That alone is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing a shopping cart platform to build your business upon.