I get emails like this all the time:
What’s the root cause? It varies – old software, failed upgrade, hoster changes … it goes on and on.
But here’s the good news: I can fix it. You might have to upgrade, but I can take care of that too. Just go on my Zen Cart Support plan and I’ll get started bringing your cart back to life.
By default, if you look at the HTML emails sent by Zen Cart, the $EXTRA_INFO block is unstyled. So it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the content, which is styled.
Fixing this problem easy. Just modify the templates that use this variable (email/*.html) and change
$EXTRA_INFO
to
<div class="xextra-info"> $EXTRA_INFO </div>
Then instead of this:
you will see this:
If you want to see a complete execution of this change, you can look at my Zen Cart 1.5.6 Pull Request to fix this issue.
Many people don’t know that Zen Cart Per User Group Specials also allows you to create per user or group Sales! (In Zen Cart, Sales are per *category* discounts, whereas Specials are per item discounts.)
Creating a per user or group sale looks just like creating a regular sale, except there are settings that allow you to configure it on a per user or group basis.
Once the sale is created, it looks like any other sale when seen by the targeted user or group.
One of my clients decided to reduce prices by 5% across the board. This kind of change is not hard to make in phpMyAdmin. Their database prefix was “zen_” so I used the commands
update zen_products set products_price = products_price * 0.95; update zen_products set products_price = round(products_price, 2);
If you wanted to increase prices by 5% instead, the first command would simply be
update zen_products set products_price = products_price * 1.05;
Note that this only changes the regular prices of products; products on sale or special are not changed. I’ll talk about those in a future blog post.
The Salesforce folks have given me another nice mention on their blog. They even talk about my Zen Cart to Salesforce integration, which was a nice touch. Although I did this integration for Zen Cart, it could easily be adapted for any other cart, so I’m hoping it helps out some non-ZenCart folks too.
ALAC is a very clever mod that allows you to login to any customer cart from your admin. It’s handy for placing orders on behalf of customers or investigating issues reported by customers during their shopping experience.
I just posted the updates for Zen Cart 1.5.5 to this mod; it’s available in the Zen Cart Downloads Area. I hope it works well for your store!
Google has made a change to Chrome so that now sites without SSL display as Not Secure. Is this happening on your Zen Cart? It’s not happening to my support customers because I have fixed it for them. If you’d like to run your business instead of your website, you should hire me to support your Zen Cart!
It’s fun sometimes to look back and see how much you have accomplished. I recently wrote up the origin story of That Software Guy, and as part of that, I created an infographic showing That Software Guy’s Timeline. 
Sellbrite is a tool that enables online retailers to list and sell their products across multiple channels, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Newegg, and more.
Do you want to work with Sellbrite and turn your Zen Cart based business into a multichannel selling machine? Take a look at my Zen Cart Sellbrite Integration.
Lots of people have found my Quick Quantity Update mod to be useful – it ,allows a single item’s quantity to be changed with one click.
Some people need more power though – if you’re doing 100 updates, one-at-a-time is not an option. For those people, I created CSV Stock Update. Update a product’s quantity for as many products as you like, all from a CSV you created in Excel or with a text editor.
