Get started with Zen Cart

ZenCart is one of our free one-click installs which is a powerful e-commerce solution great for small budgets. ZenCart has an integrated ordering system and shopping cart so you can just change your settings, style your template to fit your branding, add your products and you’re ready to go. You can accept payments with Paypal, and you can also securely accept card payments with the addition of an SSL certificate.

You can sell physical products, downloads such as PDFs, or a combination of the two. If you’re a designer, Zen Cart a great option for selling things such as Icons, patterns and themes which customers can buy and download instantly with no work required on your part, giving you more time to produce more products. If you already sell on websites such as eBay and Amazon and are ready to take it to the next level, selling via your own website is the best way to cut out listing fees and third party design/content restrictions.

Click Here to view an example of a great Zen Cart store.

Installing Zen Cart: We offer a one-click install of Zen Cart so you can get up and running straight away. You will need our Home Plan web hosting package or higher. Just log in to your customer control panel, click on manage Web Hosting and enter your Web Hosting Control Panel and scroll down to the E-commerce section. Click on “Zen Cart Shopping Cart” and install to a directory of your choice.

Do I Need Anything Else? If you want to style/design it yourself, you’ll need some HTML and CSS knowledge and the ability to make minor PHP changes. An SSL certificate is needed for secure card payments.

A few tips to Get Started

With any e-commerce platform, Zen Cart takes a bit of getting used to at first…mainly because of the amount of features it has on offer and the customisation you’ll probably want to do. Once you’ve installed Zen Cart, sign up at the free support forum, the forum has plenty of knowledgeable members who are happy to help out with any questions and problems you may have.

1st Web Designer also has an excellent beginner’s guide to Zen Cart. The official Zen Cart website also contains plenty of useful articles which can be found here.