eCommerce with Zen Cart!
Custom Development for Zen Cart Sites
Plugins versus Custom Development
Plugins are designed to be dropped in to your site with minimal (if any) customization. Custom Zen Cart Development starts with a blank slate and builds exactly what you need. Here are some projects I have built for clients in the past:| Business Need | Solution |
|---|---|
| Accessibility | Accessibility is a new concern for the web, driven by both government mandates and litigation. I have solutions for this need - see my Zen Cart Accessibility page. |
| Choose your Own Price | Want your customers to be able to specify their own prices for specific products? Take a look at Zen Cart Choose Price. |
| Calendars | If you need calendars at checkout time for scheduling pickup or delivery, look at Zen Cart Checkout Calendars. |
| Date Based Products | For some products, a date attribute is important, but this feature is not built in to Zen Cart. Look at Zen Cart Date Based Products if your cart needs this. |
| Dropshipping | There's no such thing as turnkey dropshipping software. You will need customizations and tweaks to deal with specific vendors and situations. No one has done more than I have in this area. Take a look at my Zen Cart Dropshipping page if this is something you'd like to do. |
| Dynamic Pricing | Zen Cart attributes permit you to raise or lower product prices based on a single attribute - but what if there are inter-attribute dependencies, or if pricing needs to be based on a combination of attributes, such as dimensional pricing based on length times width? Take a look at my Zen Cart Dynamic Pricing solutions. |
| Take your Zen Cart email to the next level. To see what's possible, check out Zen Cart Email Transformation. | |
| ETL | Got a Zen Cart related ETL (extract, transform, load) need? I'm your guy. For more details, see ETL. |
| Payment Processing | Do you need to process payments for deposits, credit accounts, offline sales or anything else? Why not use the payment methods you already have in your cart to handle this! Take a look at Make a Payment. |
| Price Estimation | Got a product with lots of priced attributes? Customers complaining that they must "Add to Cart" to see the price of a particular configuration? My Zen Cart Price Estimation solution provides a client side price estimation feature that allows different prices to be displayed without a page refresh or needing to go back to the cart. |
| Product Customization | There are all sorts of reasons you might need to add new fields to your products in Zen Cart. I can handle any Zen Cart Product Customization you need. |
| Product Validation | Zen Cart has no ability to do inter-attribute validation, and it also lacks the ability to validate text attributes. Need this capability? Take a look at my Zen Cart Product Validation solutions. |
| Profitability | Do you know how profitable a particular order is? Are you factoring in all shipping fees, vendor discounts, cost of goods sold? The Sales Report is great, but it doesn't track all these things - you need customizations like the ones I describe in Zen Cart Profitability. |
| Sales Rep Management | Many businesses use Sales Reps for order entry, marketing and prospecting. Take a look at how I can help you custom your Zen Cart for Sales Rep Management. |
| Search and Filter | Need to filter products by some characteristic such as color? Want to extend the search to use your custom fields? I can do that. Take a look at some past Zen Cart search customizations I've done. |
| Shipping Restrictions | Many products are subject to restrictions in certain jurisdictions. For example, live plants, live animals, alcohol and firearms often have restrictions on where they can be shipped. If this applies to your Zen Cart, take a look at my Zen Cart Custom Shipping Restrictions page. |
| Shipping Surcharges |
My free plugin Shipping Surcharge adds a line item when products are shipped to a remote zone. But this is not sufficient for some retailers. If you have more complicated surcharging needs (or just don't want a second shipping line item), please see my Zen Cart Custom Shipping Surcharges page. |
| Templates | The template (some other software platforms call this a "skin" or "theme") of your site specifies how it looks on both desktop and mobile templates. You can read about my recommended Zen Cart templates, or just go straight to my favorite, the Bootstrap template for Zen Cart. |
| Quantity Discounts (native) | Zen Cart has its own built-in Quantity Discounts utility (different from my Quantity Discounts plugin) which discounts bulk purchases of a single product. that method of discounting meets your needs, and I have extended it for clients who like it. For example, you can show native Quantity Discounts on the product listing page. And you can copy native Quantity Discounts. |
| Valid Cart | Valid Cart allows a shopowner to place preconditions on checkout, such as minimum order size, minimum product purchases, etc. Unless these conditions are met, Checkout is not permitted. Messages are displayed on the shopping cart and checkout pages. For more details, see Zen Cart Valid Cart. |
| Other Customizations |
Need customization to discounting behavior? To a Shipping module?
I can make it work exactly the way you want.
Contact me with your specifics and I'll give you a quote.
Developers: are you in over your head? Subcontract it to me; discretion assured. Your client will never know you didn't do the work. Store Owners: Want to keep your current developer/webmaster, but just give a specific task to me? No problem. |
Would you like me to help you with your Zen Cart based business? Come work with me and I'll help you!
