You can check out the demo and give it a test run yourself. You will notice that the backend has a really nice simple design and is very very easy to use. I did some research in their forums and looked through some of the site examples that were running OpenCart. I found 3 really good websites that give good examples of the abilities this cart system has.

1. Gorgeous George

2. Beautyspot

3. Lytmed.dk

After looking at these sites it made me even more interested in OpenCart and actually using it on my next shopping cart project. It’s something worth considering for sure! Check out OpenCart and let me know whaty YOU think!

Affiliates for All is highly configurable. You can set:

• a fixed commission rate or a percentage,
• the affiliate cookie lifetime,
• the currency, and
• whether commission is paid for the life of a customer or just for the first order.

Some other really cool features to take note of are:

1. Affiliates for All will (optionally) email affiliates with details of new orders and approved commissions.
2. Affiliates for All provides your affiliates with many reporting features. They can see graphs of orders and revenue over time. They can view and download lists of orders. If you want to, you can pass customer names and email addresses to the referring affiliates, allowing for further marketing efforts.
3. Affiliates for All has a user interface similar to Google Mail. Just like Google Mail, this is achieved with AJAX, but you can use Affiliates for All without understanding the details.

This is a really cool open source application, similar to which you will not find anywhere! There just is not really any good open source affiliate applications out there. And this one appears that it could eventually stand head and shoulders above the rest. Check it out.

Free Ecommerce Theme from CSS Creme

CSS creme has put together a free CSS ecommerce template that looks pretty nice. It’s simple and coded together well so that you can customize it and use your imagination on top of what is already put together. If you are using an open source application like me, you will need to apply this template to your theme and make your customizations. But I know with me that this will save me some serious time on a few projects of mine.

Instead of recreating the wheel everytime I make a shopping cart website, I can build off an already CSS/XHTML built template and make my customizations after that. The free template comes with 3 pages:

• Product Listing Template
• Product Detail Template
• Form Template (contact us)

That way you have enough to build off of with your Zen Cart theme or OScommerce theme or even Ubercart theme. This also could be a benefit if you are just putting together a quick shopping cart for a friend or relative for free, and you don’t have much time to put something elaborate together. Just throw this CSS template together with your theme and you are good to go.

I now accept customers’ credit card details by fax. I am wondering how to receive credit card info online and process them offline? how to store customers’ card info securely online? I do not use payment gateway, just collect and store creidt card details in a secure way online.
Can anybody give any suggestion.

The following is a response given back to a member of the community. THIS IS IMPORTANT INFO TO KNOW!

read up on PCI compliance – http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcicomplianceguide.html]PCI Compliance Guide. In a nutshell, this is a data security standard considered acceptable by credit card companies. It involves a rigorous auditing process that reviews your network security systems and methods of collection and storage of credit card information. This means your servers must be under your control, not on a shared or leased hosting, which is out of the reach for most merchants.

The second consideration is that you review your offline merchant account, you will likely be in violation of your contract if you use it for this purpose. This is why an online merchant account is structured differently and generally more expensive than an offline account.

The best option, really, is to relinquish yourself of this responsibility and set up an online merchant account, which places the responsibility of PCI compliance on them or the gateway that interfaces with the merchant account. You then only need to install an SSL cert on your web site and securely pass the info to them, without actually storing this data on your server.

Basically, don’t collect credit card data yourself. Make sure that it is being submitted securely to your Merchant Account Provider like Authorize.net. This puts the liability of holding credit card numbers in their hands.

But what if you don’t want the merchant account to bill the credit card right away? That’s what my client is asking for and that was a major question that I have. Here is another comment in the thread:

I do online processing and store ZERO credit card details, just the authorization information. What it sounds like you want to do since you post the sale later is to use AUTHONLY as a sales type online. With AUTHONLY it pre-authorizes the credit card which will “reserve” the amount specified, it will not actually bill the consumer’s credit card. This process is used for Book and Ship sales transactions, where a merchant gets an order and at a later date, completes the transfer of funds.

Basically you go into the remote control panel for the credit card processor and complete and book the transaction later. 100% secure, NO sensitive credit card, NO details stored on your server or premises, nothing an employee or hacker can steal. Do anything less and you’re at risk and you don’t want to be at risk because fines from Visa can be nasty, like $50K or some other ugly amount to cover their costs of damage control, and you can lose your merchant account.

Summary
Do not store credit card numbers on your own server! If you need to collect credit card data from your customers, only to charge the card later use the AUTHONLY. That way you pass all credit card and personal information of your customer right on to your Merchant Account keeping your customers information safe and secure. You can then bill the credit card at a later date through your web based control panel for your merchant account.

Are you looking to have your Zen Cart shopping cart give your customers the ability to purchase products without having to register for an account? Believe it or not, this is not currently an option with any default Zen Cart installation. It’s a beef that i’ve had with Zen Cart for quite some time! Why would you force people to create an account before making a purchase? What if the product you sell does not require such a thing?

There is a module I guess you can call it called COWOA which stands for “Checkout Without Account”. It gives the shopper another option to skip the account creation section and purchase anyway. The module requires the overwriting of some of the include files as well as an SQL injection. So you want to make sure someone with some technical expertise can help you out with it. Here’s what it looks like to the shopper:

I have actually used the COWOA for a Zen Cart shopping cart for a client of mine and it is working great. So if you are using Zen Cart, and need this type of functionality then use this. It will work great for you! Just make sure to follow the instructions carefully!

“I need a simple shopping cart” is a simple yet complicated demand that I hear often from many of my clients. “Simple, just need to be able to sell a couple of products on my website.” If only they knew how difficult such a “simple” thing can be. What to do? Setup Zencart? OS Commerce? Magento? Just build my own from scratch? Having just a simple shopping cart can be quite the task for a developer when a business has such a demand, yet such a small budget. I have been battling this dilemma for over 5 years now.

A good place to start is with a content management system, then find a way for a small shopping cart plugin to integrate into it. That way it’s not a big cart system like Zencart, and it’s still content manageable unlike the custom one you might be considering building. But two of the most popular CMS systems don’t have great shopping cart plugins that fully integrate with the CMS system itself. Joomla and WordPress! Sure there are many plugins available, but not any that truly integrate with the CMS itself.

That’s where the Drupal CMS has the advantage. With the Ubercart module for Drupal, you get a simple shopping cart setup that integrates perfectly with your drupal CMS system. I have found this to work perfectly for me. Using the drupal “node” system, you can create a specific node for each individual product. This allows you to setup a smaller number of products, and get the huge SEO benefits that come from the Drupal system. Things like URL Aliases and so forth. Now, because of Drupal you can have a CMS, blog, newsletter, shopping cart, and much much more all integrated seamlessly into the same site. I can tell you from personal experience that Joomla and WordPress do not come close to providing this integrated combination as well as Drupal does.

And for you developers out there, the Drupal template system is way better than Zen Cart, Magento and OS Commerce combined. The admin interface is easier to learn. And you can create individual product pages, create a product catalog, or do both. You are not tied to one, unlike Zen Cart and the other major e-commerce systems. And if you wanted to make things even easier, you could find a Premium Drupal Theme that best fits your project and have a sleek design up in minutes.

So the next time you are in need of a simple shopping cart solution, try giving Drupal a try along with the drupal Ubercart plugin. It won’t let you down. Also as an additional resource to help you get started with Drupal, here is a step-by-step guide for installing Drupal on Dreamhost.

Adam Liberman is the man! That’s all I have to say! He really is. I came across today the Quickbooks plugin for Zen Cart that he is the author of and I must say that I am impressed. And as an open source advocate I am also so proud. It’s great to see great things built in the open source world and this is one of them. A little while back I wrote a post titled Zen Cart + Sugar CRM + Quickbooks = Heaven! where I wrote about how great it would be to have plugins that had all 3 applications speak to each other. So many companies would benefit from this. I received a comment shortly after writing the article from a guy named Adam who claimed to already be using a Quickbooks plugin for Zen Cart. So it inspired me to go out and find this plugin.

I wonder if the Adam who left a comment on my post is the same Adam who created this great plugin. But if you are, and even if your not, thank you! The plugin can be found by clicking here. I’ve tested it and it works great. Now if only we can find a way to get an open source plugin together for Sugar CRM to talk to Zen Cart and QuickBooks then we should be on our way. The plugin is called Quickbooks Import QBI for Zen Cart. Check it out and download it today for your Zen Cart shopping cart system.

Improved site performance (faster loading, faster display)
* Professional looking images (no stair-effects, smooth edges)
* Uploading one image automatically creates small, medium and large images on page request.
* Choose preferred image-types for each image size.
* Source image filetype doesn’t matter. Have jpg base files with gif and png additional files if you want to.
* Drops in and out seamlessly. No need to redo your images. All images are kept.
* Easy install. One-click-database-upgrade.
* Works with mass-update/-upload tools like EzPopulate.
* Watermark images to prevent Mr. Competitor from stealing them.
* Fancy image hover functionality lets a larger image pop up whenever you move your mouse above a small image (switchable).
* Watermarking and Fancy Hovers work with different source-images for small, medium and large, too!
* Choose an image background color matching to match you site’s color or select a transparent background for your images.
* Manage your multiple images for products easily from one page just like you do with attributes in the Products Attribute Manager.

This is a terrific plugin for Zen Cart and again, I recommend it to all Zen Cart users. It helps enhance the Zen Cart core and prove why Zen Cart is just as good and effective of a shopping cart as anything else out there. Check it out.

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