Zen Cart & osCommerce are the 2 most popular ecommerce softwares for the business developers. Before you open a new business website, choosing a good ecommerce software is very important.
Here is comparison between 2 most popular and having largest users’ ecommerce applications – Zen Cart Vs. osCommerce.
What’s Zen Cart?
Zen Cart™ is an open source e-commerce application written in PHP and using Mysql database. For more information on the project, features, etc. Zen Cart™ was orginally based on osCommerce code from June 2003 and has undergone rapid development since that time. It has released three major point releases, and over a dozen minor point releases. The current release is 1.3.8.
What’s osCommerce?
osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License. osCommerce was started in March 2000 and has since matured to a solution that is currently powering 11,530 registered live shops around the world. The success of osCommerce is secured by a great and active community where members help one another out and participate in development issues reflecting upon the current state of the project.
Zen Cart Features:
- Works on the popular combination of PHP and MySQL technologies.
- Secure – no one but your administrative personnel can access your customer/catalog data.
- Easy to install – our helpful installation program guides you easily through the setup process.
- User frontend is validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Advanced template system using stylesheets and images.- Any PHP coding changes can be protected during upgrades by using the built-in override protection system.
- Built in WYSIWYG page editor for modifying non-database pages.
- Advertising banners – show information about your business colleagues and track banner link activity. Banners can open in new windows so that customers never really leave your site.
- Meta tags keywords and descriptions can be controlled at the per-product level, all from the administrative interface.
- Developers toolkit helps quickly locate a setting or text string to be customized.
- Shipping options – multiple carriers are supported, including hold for pickup, free delivery in an area, and most major couriers and postal services.
- Customer access control – you can set up your shop to only allow customers access to pricing or pricing but not buying until after being authorized by an administrator. You can restrict them from browsing at all too, if desired.
- Automatic detection of search engine spiders.
- Intelligent generation of metatags content for search engines.
osCommerce Features:
- All features enabled by default for a complete out-of-the-box solution
- Object oriented backend (3.0)
- Completely multilingual with English, German, and Spanish provided by default
- Compatible with all PHP 4 versions
- Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation
- Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
- Easily backup and restore the database
- Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
- Statistics for products and customers
- All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
- Customers can view their order history and order statuses
- Customers can maintain their accounts
- Dynamic product attributes relationship
- HTML based product descriptions
- Automated display of specials
- Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
- Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters
- Flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
- Set different tax rates for different products
- Charge tax on shipping on a per shipping service basis
- Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
- Real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
- Free shipping based on amount and destination
In addition to this,
there is also wordpress e-commerce plug-in which has limited set of features which might be applicable for small business owner.
You can read more about that here
