Downloads necessary
1. ZenCart 1.3 (www.zen-cart.com): A very user friendly and light open source “Content Management System (CMS)” for managing e-commerce based websites. This is the most preferred e-com CMS in industry with the ability to support various payment gateways including PayPal (www.paypal.com).
“Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently.” (Ref: www.zen-cart.com)
Free download at www.zen-cart.com
2. ZenCart web template: There are many free ZenCart templates available. You can download these and use as your website theme. Once you get the hang of using ZenCart and when you have a good understanding of PHP, you can strip apart the free templates and customize it to suit your own business theme.
You can search online for “Free ZenCart templates”. You need to ensure that the template version matches your ZenCart version. E.g. only ZenCart 1.3 templates will work with ZenCart version 1.3.x
Setting up the website
ZenCart runs in an Apache web server using a MySQL database to store all the data which is used to dynamically generate the website and for holding all the information regarding the products you are selling. Therefore first we need to install the webserver and setup a MySQL database on your local machine.
You can also you a web host for this (e.g. www.godaddy.com / http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/ ). If you are thinking of purchasing a hosting package for your ZenCart website (which you must do if you want people to access the website through the internet), you need to purchase a Linux hosting with a MySQL database.
For this exercise we will be using XAMPP which will allow you to host the website on your local machine for testing. Please refer XAMPP installation for XAMPP installation instructions.
1. ZenCart installation
Extract the ZenCart ZIP package which you have downloaded and copy all the files and folders into the
“XAMPP installation directory/htdocs/(yourproject)/”
E.g: c:/Program Files/XAMPP/htdocs/myfirststore/
Go to http://localhost/xampp/index.php on your web browser and select “phpMyAdmin” from the left menu.
- Enter a name for the database that will be used by ZenCart on the “Create new database” field.
- Go to “Server: localhost” on the upper breadcrumb and press then the “Privileges” tab.
- Select “Add a new user”. Enter your desired username+password and “localhost” for host field. If you’re going to use that user for administration tasks you can check all global privileges.
Go to http://localhost/(yourproject)/zc_install/ on your web browser to start the ZenCart installer.
E.g: http://localhost/myfirststore/zc_install/
- Press “Continue” and follow instructions
- Read the licence if you feel bored ;)
- On the “Setup Inspection” page check that all the minimum requirements are working properly.
- When using XAMPP you need to manually enable a php module called cURL. Before this is done your “Setup Inspection” would show an error as follows.
- Please refer to Enabling cURL on XAMPP to see how to enable cURL. Do not skip this part as your site would not work if cURL is not enabled.
- After enabling cURL click “Re-Check” to see whether all is well.
- If all the minimum requirements are working properly, click “Install” at the bottom
- On the database configuration page, enter username+password and database name previously defined. Also “localhost” for host name field.
- Save system settings. You can read into these when you are ready to deploy your website online. Just click “Save System Settings” for now.
- Just use the default settings for phpBB section and continue.
- Fill in store information and continue. Leave “Store Zone” and “Default Currency” as they are. We can change this later.
- Insert admin details for the online store. Make sure you keep a note of these. This is the admin user name and password used to manage the whole store including payment transactions.
- Now the installation is complete. However we need to do some security updates to ensure no one can change the parameters in the site.
For security, you will need to reset your configure.php files located in the /admin/includes/ and /includes/ folders back to read-only mode before allowing people to access your store.
Additionally, you'll want to remove or rename the /zc_install folder so that someone can't re-install your shop again and wipe out your database! Warnings will appear until the folder has been removed or renamed.
Once you have completed the above steps, Click on “Click here to go to store”.
Now you can see your store and you are ready for business.
Note: If you see a blank page then that means you are running php 5.3. For ZenCart to work on php5.3 you are required to install a patch. Please refer to Installing php5.3 patch for ZenCart for install instructions.
2. Configuring your online store
Congratulations! The hard part is over. Now you need to configure your store (Add products, set prices, set currencies etc…).
To configure the online store you need to use the admin panel of your new store.
You can access this through
Use the username and password you entered during the installation to access the admin panel.
The admin panel would look like the following.
Now that you have setup your online store you can start to configure it.
