Nowadays eCommerce belongs to some of the fastest growing industries. Due to the fact that it is very accessible and generally you don’t even need to have any special skills to create an online store, the quantity of such stores is growing rapidly, making an eCommerce market very competitive. In order to succeed on it and withstand the competition, you have to first of all choose the right tools to work with, since they are the basis of your store’s functioning. The most important of such tools is an eCommerce platform. There are many platforms to choose from, but before deciding which one to use, you should carefully examine the particularities of the considered shopping carts.
This article will compare two popular shopping carts — Zen Cart and VirtueMart and outline their major benefits and drawbacks.
Zen Cart is a free open source shopping cart, based on PHP and MySQL. It has been around for over a decade and gathered a community consisting of an impressive 100,000 users. It is perfectly compatible with many commercial shopping carts, moreover it provides a lot of the same services at absolutely no cost. One of its biggest advantages is almost unlimited customization options, but you have to be aware that in order to apply many of them you have to have at least mid-level programming skills. So basically, this is not really an option for starters, is you want some custom features and design, you will need a custom coding.
VirtueMart is something completely different. First of all, unlike stand alone Zen Cart, it is an eCommerce plugin for Joomla! CMS. It is also free and open source so it allows as much customization as Zen Cart. Moreover, since Joomla! is one of the most popular Content Management Systems in the world, many of its developments and benefits are available for VirtueMart as well. For example, you can easily add and control almost any type of content. With this shopping cart you can also incorporate other Joomla plugins and extensions. As for design, there are tons of templates and pretty advanced design options available. Finally, it has a convenient product management system and a handful of checkout options, which altogether makes VirtueMart comfortable to use for both store administrators and clients.
So, to summarize, the main benefits of Zen Cart are:
- It’s highly customizable and all the customization options are free.
- Its stability is proved by a big community of users.
- It has many international options, which helps to create a global community.
The drawbacks of Zen Cart are:
- It is difficult to really get familiar with it and it requires a certain level of programming skills.
- Not extensive enough marketing department.
- Issues with Upgrades.
The main advantages of VirtueMart are:
- Compatibility with tons of Joomla! extensions.
- It is easy to install and manage.
- Real time shipping rates calculation available.
- Great marketing features (coupons, discounts, SEO friendly links)
If you have decided to migrate from Zen Cart to VirtueMart, you are probably looking for the easiest way to do it. Generally speaking there are three ways to perform a store migration:
- Manual transfer. This option is obviously free, but not very reliable. Not only it requires a lot of time and effort, but the result may turn out not the way you wanted it to be.
- Hiring a professional. A developer can perform the data transfer for you, but you have to be ready that he may charge you quite some money.
Automated migration. This is an option that requires no technical skills or software install. Moreover it will save you a lot of time and ensure safe data transfer with no data loss or duplication. Cart2Cart is the easiest and the fastest way to transfer your store from Zen Cart to VirtueMart.
To really wrap it up, here is an infographic for you. It will also help you to get familiar with the details of Zen Cart to VirtueMart migration process, as well as find out some pre- and post-migration tips.
Note, that when choosing the entities for migration, you can also choose some additional options, they include:
- Clear current data on target (VirtueMart) store before migration.
- Preserve order IDs on Target (VirtueMart) store.
- Strip HTML from category and product names, descriptions.
- Transfer images in product description to your target store.
Finally, for your best convenience you can also watch this video tutorial dedicated to Zen Cart to VirtueMart migration.
How to Migrate from Zen Cart to VirtueMart with Cart2Cart
- Cart2Cart — Automated Shopping Cart Migration Service
Unique online shopping cart migration service that allows you to transfer all your customers, products and orders from one shopping cart to another.
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