Export Zen Cart to Magento- why not?
“Don’t be afraid to change. You may lose something good but you may gain something even better”
Are you running a good business and getting great benefit each day? But you still have to manage to gain more and more when other competitors grow up day by day? So it is time online website owners should think for big change, with your own store firstly!
In the dynamic e-commerce market in recent years, it is essential to choose a right platform for your online stores, which impacts directly sales. Lots of merchants have had wrong choices beforehand and always find ways to change it, including transfer from Zen Cart to Magento. So, is it a judicious change for your business? This article will help to make clear reasons why should move current Zen Cart to Magento and how do that.
WHY SHOULD CHOOSE MAGENTO INSTEAD OF ZEN CART?
According to Google Trends, although occurring early and own a big number of fans, Zen Cart now has trend to go down considerably. In contrast, users seem to share interest in Magento more and more, which makes it become the most popular shopping cart recent years.
Overview
Zen Cart is a PHP/MySQL based service and free open source platform that branched off from osCommerce- one of the first open source carts. It is believed to be easy to set up and use with more than 100,000 users, which makes it suitable to newbies or a wide range of owners, but some developers complain that its less malleable PHP coding framework shows signs of aging.
Meanwhile, Magento with a steep learning curve is designed to provide maximum customization, flexibility, scalability and control. It is just its complexity which attracts more than 150,000 users most of who own medium to large sized organizations.
Price
Both of them are self-hosted shopping carts, so merchants need to pay nothing for download and installation.
Despite free to download, it still costs amount of budget for hosting, credit card processing, design template (optional), security for PCI compliance ensuring, etc.
Features
In general, Zen Cart offers special features such as:
- Provides simple customization to developers via style sheet.
- Pretty secure
- Allow to change configurations within intuitive admin interface
- Offer gift certificates and a WYSIWYG tool
Win in this term, Magento offers a more robust and variety of functions which help to build and develop a modern and professional online store:
- Analytics and Reporting integrated with Google Analytics
- Multi-store for products, options for extensive reviews, wishlists and much more.
- Compatible with mobile devices
- User- friendly design with order status and history, wishlist,etc.
- 100% Search Engine Friendly, various marketing promotions and tools
- Serious security
- Not free but high quality support from experts
- Multilingual supports
- etc.
Integrations and Add-Ons
Zen Cart offers several out of the box features with 1500 integrations including admin tools ranging from bulk order plugins to advanced login features, language packages, social media and marketing extras, and pricing tools. However, it is said that Zen Cart plugins may not compatible with new versions.
With higher judgement from experts, Magento also allows a wide range of useful features for users with both free and fee-based integrations. Magento lets its app store users provide feedback about plug-ins and each integration can get a ‘popularity score’. This may it a better choice for some as it provides a frame of reference when making a decision about an add-on.
Payment Processing
Once again is Magento the winner. Magento integrates with a wide range of gateways and third-party processors including PayPal. It supports one-page checkout and guest checkout while Zen Cart does not.
So, do you make your own decision after above comparison? If you are running a unsatisfactory online store, do not be afraid of changing as right change will bring prosperity for your business.
It means that if your current store is Zen Cart and you really would like to move it, please find good ways, and the best one is use Zen Cart to Magento migration tool by Litextension. Easy to use and nice to feel, it is sure!
