My Installation and Configuration of Zen Cart

In my last post, I described my experiences with Volusion and Amazon Webstore, and my decision to go with Zen Cart.

Over the weekend, I installed the software at my hosting provider GoDaddy.  Zen Cart was one of about a hundred different applications that Godaddy would install for you.  You just click the install button, and you get an email later when it’s done (minutes to sometimes hours later).

Once I had Zen Cart installed, I started about the task of getting rid of the cobwebs and making it a real store.  I remember I had to replace a bunch of store messages that come with the product.  If these were displayed to a customer, that person would probably think you were an amateur outfit.

The first line of business was to set up Google analytics.  This proved to be actually pretty hard, and I spent about five hours playing with various settings before I finally got it to work.  Trust me: it wasn’t simple at all, and alot of people would probably give up.  The problem is that there are a few different Google Analytic packages available, all written by the same person, so it’s not clear which one is the most recent.  I ended up installing both packages and reinstalling them in an effort to get it to run.  Another problem is that, even though there was a support thread for these products in the forum, the messages were posted years ago.  In fact, I saw one conversation from 2005.   I don’t know how I finally got it to work, but it seems to be working.

My next task was to set up email.  Zen Cart has really cool automated email features, but you have to get connected to an email server to be able to use this critical tool.  I wanted to hook it up to my Gmail account, but I couldn’t get it to work.  From my research, I found that lots of other people were having my same problem, but it wasn’t clear what the solution was.  After about eight hours of screwing around trying to get the email to work with Gmail, I decided to try another approach: I set up an email address through my hosting provider GoDaddy.   Within another hour of tweaking the configuration page (containing 30-40 parameters), I finally got my first email from my webstore, and I was encouraged.

My final configuration task is to find a bulk upload program.  Here’s the deal: Zen Cart can only upload one product at a time.  If you have hundreds or thousands of products, you can upload all your products as a batch on a spreadsheet.

I found a program called Easy Populate, and it’s available here:  http://modhole.com/modhole/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=viewDocument&JAS_Document_id=2

I downloaded the program and plan to upload a bunch of product in the next few days, and I’ll let you know how it goes.