A Hands-On Guide For Entrepreneurs & Businesses
This book serves to address two major concerns for store owners who are using Zen Cart to run their online stores.
Firstly, it goes into detail on how to set up a Zen Cart store on a reader’s local computer.
With this approach, store owners can familiarize themselves with the software before they start searching for a web
hosting provider and putting their store on the Internet.
Another advantage is that the local installation of Zen Cart is able to act as a test bed for store owners to try out
different ideas before they actually implement those ideas on their ‘live’ online store on the Internet.
Secondly, this book acts as a form of structured documentation for Zen Cart.
Now, anyone can start learning how to use this powerful piece of software in a structured manner and see how the
different pieces fit together. This !proactive!– aroach is in stark contrast to the !reactive!– apprch that current
users employ: asking questions in the forums, reading the Wiki or browsing the FAQs on Zen Cart’s site.
Ultimately, store owners can save themselves the time, effort and headaches of sifting through the forums to look for
answers to most of their problems. The developers of Zen Cart can then have more time to continue enhancing this
wonderful software and not repeatedly answering the same questions that keep popping up ever so often on the
forums.
How To Use This Book
This book covers Zen Cart version 1.3.7.1 which is the latest version at the time this book goes to print.
This book is divided into 5 parts. If you are reading this book for the first time, you should go through the book in
sequence from Part 1 to Part 5. After that, you can jump around the different chapters to accomplish a specific task.
What is Zen Cart
Zen Cart (http://www.zen-cart.com) is a piece of shopping cart software that allows you to create an online, e-
commerce store for selling your goods and services. It is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database to work.
You can use Zen Cart to create an online store to sell physical goods like shoes, pianos or digital goods like gift
certificates, music downloads, etc. You can even sell services like insurance policies, IT support plans, etc.
The developers of Zen Cart have adopted the line, !The Art of E-Commerce!–, as their goal when developng the
software. Hence, you will find that the software is designed to cater specifically to the requirements of store owners
and shoppers first. Store owners do not need an IT degree to set up and administer their web sites, and shoppers can
navigate the online store and check out their items easily. Programmers are also not forgotten, as the code for Zen
Cart is well-structured and well-designed for easy maintenance and custom logic.
Zen Cart comes absolutely free with many e-commerce features available out-of-the-box. Therefore, you do not have
to invest a lot of money to establish an online, robust and professional e-commerce presence. All you need is to pay
the web hosting fees and possibly some web design fees if you want to give your online store a more polished look.
The source code for Zen Cart is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In essence, this license
gives anyone the right to modify the source code to suit their needs. However, derivative works that modify the
source code have to adhere to certain restrictions if they are to be re-distributed.
And if you want this ebook[e-Start Your Web Store ], please go to buy this ebook in the website below http://www.cucumbermedia.com/
thank you
August 17th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Would like to see the ebook. Do not understand the need to delete after read. Do you mean one would have to commit all to memory? Us older folks may have problem remembering what we read and may have need to go back for reference.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:12 am
PLease, where can I get the ebook: e-Start Your Web Store with Zen Cart ?
August 24th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
yes please
August 28th, 2009 at 2:51 am
Please, please, please, Thank you again
Cheers!
February 11th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Hmmm interesting. I will finish checking this blog out later. I’m kind of in a hurry now. I like it.