The Case for ZenCart: Supporting the Long Tail of eCommerce
While Zen-Cart is one of the best open source ecommerce platforms it has plenty of deficiencies, however I recently understood that it will always be able to keep its niche and therefore always have a market. Of-course this will remain the case as long as its leaders remain true to its spirit.
Zen-Cart is an unwilling offspring of the popular osCommerce. Like all offsprings, it is an improved version of its predecessor with better templating system, class oriented design, and notification systems but still maintains its characteristics of spaghetti code and somewhat convoluted and non-flexible checkout process.
Zen-Cart’s strengths are its simplicity which gives many non-programmers the opportunity to tweak and add (or remove) features to their likings with no major effort. This means that implementing a Zen-Cart ecommerce website is usually inexpensive and fast. Another great benefit of the system’s simplicity is speed. Zen-Cart is many times lighter than many other ecommerce systems even without complex caching technologies. Together, these benefits support a specific market: the market of light ecommerce. I am talking about online shops with 1 to 100 daily transactions or even less. It can obviously support more than that but the simplicity and the light weight features will attract the small business which is budget oriented.
The light ecommerce market while being small in terms of overall sales figures is relatively large and will get larger and larger with time. This is also known as the long tail of any market, in our case it is the long tail of the ecommerce market. This means that the numbers of installations will most likely be large and not insignificant. It also means that it is a valid market and will not vanish overnight with any other solution such as Magento who now charges a hefty amount for licensing its Enterprise version.
Before you rush to declare this light and feature packed ecommerce platform the kind of the long tail ecommerce market, don’t underestimate the challenges that it is facing. With over a year and a half of no significant updates its market share is shrinking fast. The default template and the admin panel need some serious reworkings to get up to par in UI and design with other open source challengers and a major cleanup and reorganization of the backend configurations is way overdue. While it supports XHTML and validates correctly, the default template needs to be reworked without the tables.
In any case, Zen-Cart still serves its purpose as a free and light open source ecommerce platform. And here at Activo we have recently developed a Recurring Orders payment module that comply with PCI requirements and integrates well into the ARB module of Authorize.net. I’ll soon post links to an initial free version, a commercially licensed version should be available in about a month or so.
What do you think of ZenCart? here to stay or yet another open source project that will be lost in oblivion? somewhere in the middle perhaps?
If you want to have less spaghetti you might want to have a look at ZenMagick – it’s pretty much what Zen Cart has been promising for quite a while now…
Object oriented, much simpler templating, optional support for Smarty (via plugin), proper plugins, page (HTML) caching, build in Ajax support and more.
Demo store: http://demo.zenmagick.org/
To be fair, ZenMagick is aimed more at the advanced users and also web developers/designers that implement e-commerce for their clients. Looking at the amount of Zen Cart related freelance work it’s arguably a user segment not to be ignored…
Cheers, mano