Help Please - Which Online Shop To Use For First Shop Website? Zencart, Magento...??

[laueaq]

Hi All,

I am looking to set up my first online shop website but cannot decide which of the Bluehost Soft Scripts to use. I want to get a professional and clean looking site but note have to get too bogged down with coding which I would relly need to learn from scratch...

I have narrowed it down to Zencart or Magento based on reviews.

The concerns I have with each are:

Zencart: Lack of professional looking templates readily available - good coding skills required to really get the look you want on your website.

Magento: Magento Community (Free version) appears to have no extras on it from the website product comparisson (http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/compare).

I get the impression that Magento looks the part but if I want a free shopsite with lots of extras (order forms, billing etc) then I will have to go with Zen?

I would really appreciate any comments on either product or any other free shopsite software which I can start building a site from 'out of the box'.

[Adolfo]

Personally I find Zencart very usefull if it's your first online shop, if you can and understand it, try making your own with PayPal checkout implemmented.

It is true that Zencart does not have nice templates, actually they are horrible, the lack of design is sad, however, you can modify the template if you understand HTML / PHP & know how to make new images with whatever program you like (personally I use Photoshop, though not everyone has it).

Magento, I never really went into Magento much, I know it is also good but I find Zencart more of a admin-friendly program, you can pretty much have track of everything and how orders are being done, your visitors, your income, taxes, etc.

[laueaq]

Thanks!
I've built a blog with WordPress before and used the Stylesheets there to fiddle with code and put in my own banner, so hopefully Zen wont be too tricky.

If you make your own Photoshop image (e.g. header for website), is it just a case of uploading the image to your site and putting the right code into the Zen template?

[Adolfo]

Basicaly, yes, you could even just replace the old image with a new one of the same size if you want to skip the programming part

[laueaq]

Thanks Adolfo,

Well I'm going to give Zen a go & pick out a decent template to work with. Hopefully I can get my head around the tweaking with code - there seem to be good help guides out there...

[Adolfo]

No problem,

I am not sure but there should be templates out there or something like it, "addons"? then you could probably just change the images from that template and apply it

Good luck!

[stitchnkitty]

I am a Zencartist - The forum is fantastic and I have been able to tweek my site without a template and I dont know too much about php.