Zen Cart

Zen Cart is an incredible shopping cart software. It is editable, has great support (via forums), a great team and alot of contributions. It is the best open source shopping cart in my opinion. Visit their website at http://www.zen-cart.com for more information.

Open-source software generally allows anybody to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it. The aim of open source is to let the product be more understandable, modifiable, duplicatable, or simply accessible, while it is still marketable. - Wikipedia.com

How To Add A Product

The first step to creating a category is to log into your administration area in Zen. To do this, goto the web address of your store followed by /admin.

It would look something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/admin
or
http://www.yourdomain.com/store/admin
This would be used if your store is located in another directory.

Of course, change yourdomain.com to whatever your domain (web address) would be.

Once you get to the administration area, you will see the following:

Enter the username and password you chose or were assigned. If you do not know this information, contact the person who set up your cart.

MAIN ZEN SCREEN

Alright! You are now logged in to the administration area of Zen Cart! This is also know as the backend because your users do not have access to this area and it is more or less behind the scenes.

Now that you are logged into your administration area, you will see the following screen:

Please click on this image to see the full picture. This will open a new window.

For now, we will just concentrate on the 'Catalog' menu option.

Hover over the 'Catalog' menu option and select the Category/Product option.

Please click on this image to see the full picture. This will open a new window.

CATEGORY/PRODUCT SCREEN

You are now at the category / products screen. This shows you what products and categories you have in your store. Since we created a demo category in our last Zen tutorial, we will be using this to add our product.

We are now going to create a category to add our products to.

To do this, click on the category we created called 'Demo Category'. This will bring you to the demo category.

Please click on this image to see the full picture. This will open a new window.

The best way to keep your store is to be organized! Keeping a good cataloging system keeps everything in the right place and easy for you and your customers to find.

Once you have clicked on your demo category, you will see the following screen:

Please click on this image to see the full picture. This will open a new window.

We dont have any products yet, so there will be none listed. We will now fix this and start adding products!

To do this, please click on the 'new product' button.

Once we have gone to the new product section, we will see this screen:

Please click on this image to see the full picture. This will open a new window.

When you click on the image above, the picture is numbered to help explain what each area does.

1. Product Status - This allows you to change your product to out or in stock. This will not delete your product but only make it not visible to the users.
2. Date Available - If you have a product, but it either goes out of stock or you just want to add a product early, set this value.
3. Product Manufacturer - You can choose to set the manufacturer of your product.
4. Products Name - Enter the name of your product in this field.
5. Product Is Free - If you want to give the product away, set this to yes.
6. Product Is Call For Price - Select Yes if you don't want to add a price at the moment and you just want your customer to call for the price.
7. Product Priced By Attributes - If you set an attribute for a product (such as color, size, etc..) you can have the price depend on the attribute.
8. Tax Class - Mark an item taxable or not.
9. Product Price (Net) - This is your base product price.
10. Product Price (Gross) - This is your price multiplied by tax.
11. Product Is Virtual - Select Yes if your item is a download or something where the address is not required.
12. Always Free Shipping - Check Yes if you offer free shipping on this item.
13. Product Quantity Box Shows - Determine if you want people to be able to add quantities.
14. Product Qty Minimum - Set the minimum amount your customers must purchase.
15. Product Qty Maximum - Set the maximum amount your customers can purchase.
16. Products Qty Units - Set the amount of units in your product.
17. Products Qty Min/Unit Max - Choose yes or no if you want to use the minimum/maximum option.
18. Products Description - Enter your product description here. You are allowed to enter HTML.
19. Products Quantity - How much of the product you have in stock.
20. Products Model - The model number or your item.
21. Products Image - You can add an image for your product. Click on 'Browse' and you will be able to add a picture from your computer. Click HERE for a larger image (will open a new window). You can also select an a folder for your images to be uploaded. This folder permission MUST be set to 777 so Zen can write to the directory.
22. Products URL - Enter the url of the manufacturers website for that specific product. You can link to the manufacturers support page for that product if you want to.
23. Products Weight - Enter the weight for a single item. This will calculate the weight for your customer when they checkout and apply the proper shipping cost.
24. Sort Order - Choose the order your product is displayed. This starts from 0.
25. Preview or Cancel - Select Preview to preview your new product or cancel to disregard the information you just entered.

Congratulations!! Now that you have entered the information, click on the preview button and you will see this screen:

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If everything looks right, click on insert and this will be added to your catalog!

You will be sent back to the category your product was created in. This is where you can edit, move, add attributes, meta tags and other things to your product.

Please click on this image to see the full picture. This will open a new window.