What is e-Commerce?

e-Commerce is a sphere of business that enables a company or individual person to conduct business via Internet. In the environment of growing competition where billions of websites are trying to increase sales, e-Commerce shopping cart has become really important. Not only e-merchants can benefit from a platform, but also customers who choose to shop from these stores.

Benefits for customers. Shopping cart is like a mediator between payment processors and store. Your customers will not pay for every item separately, but the shopping cart software will easily calculate a price for all selected products. A platform that is easy to navigate improves sites usability and it will be easier for buyers to find what exactly he or she is looking for.

Benefits for merchants. Shopping cart software makes the process of store administration more straightforward and organizes information for successful transactions. Moreover, reports will help to monitor and analyze store sales and other statistics.

Now you understand how important it is to choose a proper fully functional shopping cart, which will satisfy needs of store owner as well as customers.

Is Zen Cart a Proper Cart for Your Online Business?

Zen Cart is an open source PHP/MySQL based shopping cart. It is free and source code is open to the public. It was split from osCommerce in 2003. Since then it has been growing and developing by a huge amount of designers, programmers, developers and business owners. Zen Cart is a powerful e-Commerce solution, but it probably will not be suitable for every online store. Will Zen Cart satisfy all your business requirements?

• Zen Cart was developed with users in mind. Nonetheless, some store owners claim they spend a lot of time and efforts into learning the interface and customizing a store. So, before choosing Zen Cart evaluate the level of your programming skills.
• SEO is one of the crucial aspects of any online store. Compared to other platforms Zen Cart has a lack of SEO capabilities, but there are available SEO plugins.
• Time goes by and it really important to keep your cart up to date and regularly update it. Often Zen Cart upgrades go with numerous issues like loss of custom coding or other bugs.
• If you would like to build an online store compatible with mobile devices, take into a consideration, Zen Cart doesn’t have many robust add-ones yet.

What about PrestaShop?

PrestaShop is as well open source e-Commerce platform. It was launched in 2007, France. Since then it was downloaded more that 3 million times and now it is one of the most widespread shopping carts. What are main features you should get acquainted with?

1. Price. Since PrestaShop is an open source shopping cart, it is free to download and use, without monthly or transaction fees. You will be able to expand stores functionality with the help of numerous extension, most of them are provided foradditional cost.
2. Features. PrestaShop is one of the most feature rich platforms and offers over 300 features. One of the strongest sides is a multi-store function, which provides a possibility to set up several different stores and manage them from one admin panel.Comparing with Zen Cart PrestaShop is mobile compatible and advanced marketing features.
3. Security. PrestaShop has everything to make the payment process secure. It is PCI DSS compliant. In order to avoid data interception shopping cart uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
4. Design. Platform offers a wide range of templates to choose from and create an attractive design. Moreover, you will be able to view more theme examples in the add-on store

Now you can decide which platform will be able to fulfill your business demands. In a case, you already own a Zen Cart platform, but wish to change it to PrestaShop, don’t hesitate. It can be really effortless process. Everything depends on which way of migration you are going to choose. If you still have questions regarding Zen Cart to PrestaShop migration? Watch a video guide, which illustrates step by step instruction on how to transfer product, customers, orders and other data automatically and will help you to perform fast and accurate migration process.

Video Guide

What do you think?