I really enjoy putting together Zen Cart shopping cart systems for my clients. It’s great to see them feel accomplished in selling products online at an affordable price. Zen Cart has so many options built in that make it a terrific tool for almost any kind of online e commerce business. I wanted to give you my top ten reasons why you should use zen cart for your ecommerce solution. Here they are…

1. It’s Open Source. That’ right it’s free to use and highly customizable due to it’s open source code
2. Easy to use. Once you understand the overall idea behind their framework, you find zen cart easy to use
3. Well Documented. The help and community sections of zen cart are fantastic. Just about every question you can think of has been documented and answered.
4. Great Plugins. There are tons of great plugins because of the great community of developers behind zen cart. An example is like the Quickbooks plugin I wrote about a few days ago.
5. Highly Customizable. You can make your shopping cart look however you want. Nobody would ever know it’s a zen cart installation.
6. Content Manageability. Zen cart is built it with it’s own content management system called “EZ Pages”. It’s easy to use and helps you manage not only your shopping cart, but your entire website.
7. Simple Installation. Zen Cart is easier to install than many other open source and proprietary applications on the web. It’s simple install makes it more affordable for you to pay someone to set it up for you.
8. Many Payment Gateways. By default zen cart let’s you setup easily with many different payment gateways. Pay Pal and Authorize.net as well as many others come default with you system
9. Downloads. If you are selling downloads of any kind zen cart is already setup for you to do so.
10. Gift Certificates. There is gift certificate manageability built into zen cart right from the gateway. You don’t need to worry about adding any kind of these features on your own.