Can Zen Cart do this?

Miscellaneous FAQs about Zen Cart

Can Zen Cart be integrated with Accounting Packages such as QuickBooks or Sage?

Although Zen Cart does not come with built-in accounting package integration, community members have contributed add-ons for specific packages. These may be found in the Admin Tools section of this site’s Plugins Library.

If you are looking for integration with a specific package, it’s always worth searching the main forum as you may find references to packages which are not in the Plugins Library.

Can customers purchase from my Zen Cart shop without creating an account?

At this time all customers must register with their full name, address and other information before going to the checkout. The ability to have more flexibility in the login/account creation/checkout process is on our roadmap for the future. The first steps towards buying without an account are scheduled for inclusion in Zen Cart in the future.

In the meantime, the One Page Checkout plugin has a built-in guest checkout feature which might meet your needs.

Can products be in multiple categories?

Yes. See Linked Products.

Does Zen Cart support my preferred shipper?

Zen Cart supports UPS, USPS, Canada Post, and many other shippers.

Can I set my own shipping rates with Zen Cart?

You may offer free shipping or price shipping according to a variety of factors, such as the number or weight of items in an order. See Available Shipping Modules for more details.

Can Zen Cart create shipping labels?

No, but Zen Cart is supported by ShipStation, which is a popular postage and label creation solution. Some other options are discussed in the shipping labels FAQ.

Does Zen Cart support my preferred payment provider?

Zen Cart supports PayPal, Authorize, Square, and many other payment processors.

Can Zen Cart discount products?

Zen Cart supports a number of discounting mechanisms:

per product discounts called Specials
per category discounts called Sales
Coupons
Group Discounts
per-product Quantity Discounts
and other discounting methods.

Can Zen Cart offer tiered, customer specific or bundled pricing?

Tiered pricing is available on a per product basis using Quantity Discounts
Customer specific pricing is not available natively but can be performed with plugins.
Bundled pricing (sometimes called kit or package pricing) is not available natively but can be performed with plugins.

Can Zen Cart add fees to an order?

Zen Cart can add a fee line item on the basis of a variety of factors:

A Low Order Fee can be assessed on orders below a certain value.
A Payment module fee/discount can be added to an order based on the payment method chosen using the Ceon Payment Surcharges/Discounts plugin.
You can also add fees when you assign attributes to products. See Admin > Catalog > Attributes Controller.

See Order Total Modules for more details.

Can Zen Cart track my inventory?

Zen Cart offers basic inventory management (quantity in stock), with related settings like whether to allow checkout when stock is not sufficient to fill an order. See tracking inventory for more details.

Note that full cost-of-goods sold (COGS) tracking is not part of Zen Cart, and would require an external system, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool.

Can Zen Cart sell products with variants?

Zen Cart supports variants through the attributes system. You can add color, size, or any other product variant to your products with no limitations.

Can Zen Cart track the stock of products with variants?

At the current time, Zen Cart does not track the stock of individual product variants (a t-shirt’s stock of large versus medium, for example). There are commercial modifications that address this requirement however, such as the Products’ Options’ Stock Manager (POSM).

Note that this plugin is sometimes called Products Options Stock Manager (without the apostrophes).

There are also open source plugins which provide this capability; search for “Stock by Attributes.”

Can Zen Cart configure products with dependent attributes?

Dependent attributes describes a situation where the options for one attribute can only be determined when a prior attribute has been set to a specific value. For example, the values for Car Model depend on the value of Car Make.

The POSM plugin referenced above also does this.

Can Zen Cart allow me to create restricted admin accounts?

Yes - you can limit admin users to a subset of the superuser capabilities using Admin Profiles.

Can Zen Cart create SEO friendly (er, “human-friendly”) URLs?

This capability is not built into Zen Cart at the current time, but two popular plugins exist:

Can Zen Cart allow me to edit an order after it was placed?

Editing orders may be performed using the plugin Edit Orders.

Yes you can. See Master Password capabilities.

Can I add a new page to my cart easily?

Yes, there are several ways you can add a new page.

Does Zen Cart come with demo data?

Yes, and many of the product’s features can be seen by installing with the demo data. See demo data for details.

Is there a list of features that Zen Cart currently offers?

Yes - see What features does Zen Cart offer?

Is there a roadmap of Zen Cart features planned for the future?

There is a subforum called Development Road Map.

Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.

Last modified January 22, 2022 by Scott C Wilson (5b7a22d3).