“What shopping cart do you recommend?” is the top inquiry we get. An easy adequate question, but the answer relies on your business and your demands. To make your selection easier, we have actually compared the features of our 2 most popular carts, Zen Cart and Magento.
MAGENTO
Magento is a complimentary open source shopping cart started by Varien in 2007. Magento impresses with its substantial function list. Many functions which have to be added with other carts come as standard. It’s ideally suited for companies who require a professional online store presence.
- Highly flexible discount coupon and pricing functions
- Thorough filter performance (filter products by).
- Multi-store as standard.
- Capability to produce and modify orders in admin.
- Multitude of high quality modules through Magento Connect.
- No need to hack core code.
- Excellent design template system.
Magento sometimes gets a bad press for being too complicated and server resource-intensive. Both are fair comments, but must not put you off considering Magento. With the right designers on board and a high-end hosting environment, Magento can offer substantial functionality at open source level.
ZEN CART
Zen Cart is an open source project started in 2003, based initially on osCommerce. Zen Cart impresses with its reliability, strong function list and ease of use, making it ideal for shop owners who mean to deal with development themselves.
- Extremely trustworthy.
- Includes all basic features to sell online.
- Easy to understand templating and PHP structure.
- Ideal for coders starting with PHP.
- Light footprint making it really available for shared hosting environments.
- Friendly forum.
- Active development team.
That Zen Cart has actually been around because 2003 however shows in its PHP coding structure. However this downside is precisely what makes it easily accessible to novices in PHP and makes it an ideal very first cart for brand-new coders.
COMPARISON IN BETWEEN MAGENTO AND ZEN-CART
Both Magento and Zen Cart operate on the LIGHT environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Zen Cart is quick to set up and is kind to shared hosting environments. Magento is more demanding and needs a high-end hosting environment. Zen Cart is normally fast to find out by simply “going in and playing around” whereas for Magento a guide or read on the wiki will help you to obtain your bearings.
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Requirements | PHP5.2 MySQL4.1.20+, InnoDB, cURL | PHP4.0+ MySQL4.1.14+ |
| Open Source? | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited products? | Yes | Yes |
| Fee? | None | None |
| SSL support | full SSL | full or shared SSL |
| Knowledge level for coding? | advanced | intermediate |
| Magento has multi-shop as standard, a feature very rarely seen with other carts and a comprehensive templating system. WYSIWYG editor is missing but easily added. Zen Cart is a reliable cart with all features necessary to sell online. | ||
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Multi-store | Yes | No |
| Multi-Lingual | Yes | Yes |
| Support for Multiple Currencies | Yes | Yes |
| Tax Rate support | Yes | Yes |
| iPhone optimised | Yes | No |
| Template system | Yes | Limited |
| WYSIWYG? Page content management | Yes | Limited |
| Email template management | Yes | No |
| Administration Permission System Roles and Users | Yes | Add-on |
| One-click installs of modules | Yes | No |
| Magento impresses with the product filters whilst Zen Cart makes it easy for new shops to get started quickly. | ||
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Batch Import and Export of catalog | Yes | Add-on |
| Google Base Integration | Yes | Add-on |
| Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products | Yes | Limited |
| Product comparisons | Yes | No |
| Product reviews | Yes | Yes |
| Bundled products and stock control for attributes stand out with Magento. Zen Cart however has some good features if you want customers to call for price or only use it as brochure-type site. | ||
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Multiple Images Per Product | Yes | Yes |
| Reports | Yes | Limited |
| Bundled products (show several products on one page) | Yes | No |
| Up-sells in Shopping Cart | Yes | No |
| Stock Control | Yes | Limited |
| Products can be marked as free or Call for Price | Add-on | Yes |
| Min or max quantities and units | Add-on | Yes |
| Probably the most important section for online shops these days. Magento has created an comprehensive discount functionality making it very easy to run campaigns. Gift Certificates however are not included in Magento, but they are with Zen Cart. | ||
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Google Site Map | Yes | Add-on |
| URL Rewrites | Yes | Add-on |
| Meta-information for products and categories | Yes | Yes |
| Discount Coupons | Yes | Yes |
| Catalog Promotional Pricing | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-tier pricing | Yes | Yes |
| Customer groups each with its own pricing structure | Yes | Add-on |
| Wishlist | Yes | No |
| Newsletter | Yes | Yes |
| Gift Certificates | No | Yes |
| Getting the checkout right is crucial for sales conversions. Magento recognises this by offering one-page checkout and the ability to buy without having to open an account (guest checkout). It also comes with Google checkout and PayPal as standard. Zen Cart on the the other hand offers a solid standard checkout. | ||
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Delivery / Billling address | Yes | Yes |
| One-Page Checkout | Yes | Add-on |
| Checkout without account/Guest Checkout | Yes | Add-on |
| Shipping to multiple addresses in one order | Yes | No |
| Integrated with Google Checkout (Level 2) | Yes | Add-on |
| Creating orders in admin is often required e.g. for orders taken by phone and Magento offers this as standard. Zen Cart does make order management simpler though by allowing you to create your own order statuses. | ||
| Magento | Zen-Cart | |
| Manage orders from admin | Yes | Yes |
| create, edit orders from admin panel. | Yes | Add-on |
| Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment | Yes | No |
| Order statuses | Preset only | Yes |
