Comments on: Zen Cart vs Magento Comparison

By: HaIzI72G3T

HaIzI72G3T — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:45:37 +0000

iv tryed magneto zen cart and presta . to be honest zen cart was the easiest for me to start with.. and am not new into php coding but magneto was just too complicated for me and presta had lack of support on forums.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:34:27 +0000

There are significant flaws with zen cart and magento. We opted to migrate from zen cart to magento enterprise cart due to the following reasons:
-customers were mixing sessions almost every week, we could not stop the problem due to the nature of php handling. Read the forums, there is no true answer once your store is large enough. At 70k unique visitors per day, zen cart is TAPPED.
- product attributes were randomly being dropped from the site. We felt our database was entirel insecure after this started to happen. Also not zen cart is not very robust in keeping track of hut inventory. Our biggest daily chore was cleaning up out of stock issues because zen cart would randomly drop or oversell products
-zen cart was not designed to grow beyond a single dedicated server, and even then, it’s damn hard to get t to work on a quad process Octo core server. We were unsuccessful at attempting this feat.

Mind you, if you have that much traffic, it’s time to move on to bigger and better things, such as magento. The problems with magento that we are facing are
-it’s damn hard to get working
-it’s even harder to find people who can work on it
-caching is a must, but is very difficult to understand and causes a ton of problems
-magento is not flexible, server intensive, and requires a ton of php programmers to upkeep.
- overall magento is more for larger sites, we loved zen cart for it’s simplicity, but loathed it for it’s lack of robustness. Magento has been by far superior in robustness, and is very, very, very scalable, but sucks up a lot of $$$$.
Good luck out there.

By: Magento vs. Zen Cart | Magento Development & Magento Developers - Orange Collar Media

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 04:39:17 +0000

[...] are many, many more ways to compare Magento and Zen Cart. This site does a great job of going through them all. Overall, Magento has more features and looks a great deal more [...]

By: Edith

Edith — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:44:45 +0000

@Stephany – tracking stock per attribute is possible in principle for Zen Cart, there is an add-on for osCom (on which Zen Cart is based). It’s not pretty code, but it does work, I used to install it myself in my old freelance days for shops selling apparel.
As for the time it takes to set up attributes – feedback I had on Magento from shop owners was that they found it complicated and lengthy. So for entering data, I don’t think you’ll win either way; but as Magento is built on the assumption that the attribute is the product (attribute = SKU) it will work much better for clothing.

By: Stephany

Stephany — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:38:20 +0000

I own an online store, well… still in process since march 2011 due the bad decision the first programmer I hired made selecting zencart. As an online shopaholic, I knew the features I wanted see on my site and the guy says everything is possible… after a while, he couldn’t figure out the codes to make changes that add consistency to the site. I mean once he made changes to one page, always there was another page that was a mess. I hired a second developer, same story. I will sell apparel and need to track the inventory per attribute (color, sizes), this is a free add-on. A 3rd developer installed it, now I can determine the quantities in stock per attribute when creating the product but the site allows me to buy more than what I have available per attribute, actually it allows me to buy the total amount of items I have without considering the attributes, it’s a mess!! Also if you go to the new arrivals page it has a different layout display than when you navigate through the categories, they couldn’t figure out how to make all the pages with product listing look exactly the same. To create a product instead of doing it in one page you have to add the item, then go and assign the attributes and finally select the stock by attribute to fix the amounts, then the additional pictures, to many steps for someone that needs to enter many products quicklyI have wasted money and time It’s very hard to find people that REALLY knows how to deal with zencart. I started getting quotes to start over again using a different shopping cart. I called companies this time, not freelancers anymore and all of them use Magento. The freelancers prefer to go with wordpress, joomla, zencart…

By: Willows Consulting

Willows Consulting — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:06:41 +0000

Our experience with the opensource version of Magento is, it looks pretty on the front and backend from a UI point of view. Extending Magento is a complex task. The fact that Magento is slow in moderate hosting environments is down to a flawed database structure and setup. Moving Magento from one hosting to another is also a complex task. if you won magento you will end off moving to bigger hosting becuase the database will simly get too big over the course of a year with light traffic.

All systems have their downsides, what all systems should learn from magento is : the UI is king even if the database structure and setup is flawed. Once the client likes the UI they are won over. It is only us engineers who are interested in the underlying structure. But its the underlying structure that is flawed that makes it run slow.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:20:29 +0000

@ Sonia.

I agree that WordPress is very modular. And you’re right…maybe its just a matter of time before one will be able to use their WordPress install as a full-blown shopping cart. At the same time, you may as well obtain an actual shopping cart suite if you’re going to convert your WordPress blog into a “full blown” one…as I can imagine the API would get a complete makeover anyway. At its current state, WordPress simply isn’t built for hardcore, ecommerce endeavors. Lastly, I do not think it will ever be able to compete with the likes of ZenCart and Magento, which are purposely built for ecommerce. Unless, of course, WordPress were to develop their very own shopping cart suite, aside from the community of plugins they have.

But your post raises a VERY good point that will possibly help others who are viewing this page. If your ecommerce needs are very small, WordPress does offer some plugins like Cart66 and Tribulant that are quite robust…giving you ecommerce capabilities with extensive shipping options. But when you start getting into hundreds and thousands of products for sale, you will need a more powerful solution. Cart66 does not convert your blog into a shopping cart, but rather allows you to place “add to cart” features anywhere on your site. Again…this is good for small endeavors, but can turn into a migraine when managing thousands of products.

Great point, Sonia!!!

By: Sonia

Sonia — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:57:36 +0000

Hi, Edith & friends

Some of you are saying that Zencart doesn’t have some features that it has, through free add-ons, for example: wishlist, product comparison, multi-site, single page checkout…

I’m no expert, but I’ve tried Zencart, Magento, Prestashop, Tomatocart…

From my point of view, Zencart is, by far, the best of them all, in configurability, easiness of use, number of features, fast page loading and fast store populating (of course, with free add-ons like Easy Populate and Image Handler).

I only see one big competitor to Zencart, but not very focused in e-commerce (so, lacking some features), yet. I believe it may be a question of time… Its powerful modularity saves us so much time… – have you already guessed?

Yep, it’s WordPress. “It’s not just for blogging anymore”.

So, I’m very satisfied with this formula: Zencart plus WordPress.

By: Edith

Edith — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:27:07 +0000

Some shopping carts have “catalogue” mode where products are shown but can’t be bought. Zen Cart has this feature, PrestaShop added it recently, as for Magento I’m not sure. Using a cart with catalogue mode should save development cost/time and is well worth looking into.

By: jonatech

jonatech — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:11:57 +0000

I’ve been researching shopping carts for some time and now have a client that doesn’t necessarily want to sell products online but able to display, group, and manage them. The feel would be more like an informational site but I think using a shopping cart back end to manage would be the best approach than to customize a database and PHP, etc….

Any suggestions? Is a shopping cart the best way to go?