Zencart is an open source ecommerce/shopping cart software that has been around for years. The system is a fork version of the well known and perhaps one of the first ever open source shopping cart: osCommerce.

Zencart is a huge step from osCommerce in creating a users/developers friendly shopping cart that allows people to quickly setup a cart system to start selling.

Pros:

1. Performance: Zencart runs really well on shared hosting environment and such. If you are a startup and want to save cost at first by running your site on budget hosts, Zencart is a great choice for you. We also have seen Zencart stores with millions of products, the system work well for businesses ranging from tiny startups to big size companies.
2. Customization: Zencart is quite easy to customized given that you have some knowledge with HTML and PHP (and perhaps mySQL as well). It’s not something like WordPress where you can drag and drop things around and voila you have a new site; but it’s relatively easy to learn your way if you have the basic knowledge. More importantly, it’s possible to do customize Zencart to do ANY THING you ever want.
3. Plugins: Zencart has been around for a while, and is being used widely by people all around the world. For that reason, you can easily find many plugins that allow you to do things you want, to connect with shippers and payment gateways of your choice etc…

Obviously, just like any other software, Zencart has its own cons:

1. Outdated code: Zencart has been around for a while, and it’s coding scheme has been a bit outdated
2. Learning curve: Zencart can be difficult to tweak for people with no coding background

Why we picked Zencart for many of our clients? Because it’s a stable and proven piece of software, and because we are so good at it we are confident to maximize its strong points and minimize its weaknesses. At the this moment, we are working hard on implementing a new plugin framework that should make life much easier for developers as well end users of Zencart, and we have been closely in the watch of the development of ZenMagick, a new generation of Zencart that aims to cure all its current weaknesses.

When it comes to Zencart, not so many out there can beat us in term of the added value we can provide!