internetpilot - 5:20 am on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

Out of all the free/open source carts available, it seems to be a great app at first glance. However, the support is simply horrible. I made the mistake of considering Zen Cart for my business, and I quickly regretted it because of the way I was treated in their forums.

A HUGE turn-off for me was that they advertise themselves as a "PayPal affiliate", yet when I asked if they supported PayPal Website Payments Pro as a payment gateway, I was quickly treated like an idiot, and informed that supporting PayPal WPP would require a complete rewrite of their checkout code in order to comply with PayPal's Terms of Service, which they weren't even thinking about doing for at least 8-12 months. I was then told I was an "amateur" and my store wasn't professional if I was trying to use PayPal for a payment gateway. For those not in the know, PayPal's new WPP allows you to accept credit cards directly on your site (like a merchant account gateway) for a fraction of the cost of the typical merchant gateways. I received dozens of emails and private messages from other ZC users, asking me for more information about this PayPal service working with Zen Cart, so apparently there are quite a few "amateurs" who want to use it in their "unprofessional" Zen Cart store.

There are already several 3rd-party developers who have written modules that fully support PayPal WPP in Zen Cart, AND the modules/code mods satisfy PayPal's Terms of Service. The Zen Cart development team is obviously just lazy or not interested in providing support for something that so many of their users obviously want. When I mentioned these modules as part of my posting, my message was quickly censored to remove all reference to them. Apparently this "upstart" (ie, motivated) developers had not paid appropriate homage to the ZC development team, so they aren't allowed to be mentioned on the ZC forum.

Personally, I wouldn't waste my time with Zen Cart, because chances are that the first time you encounter any problem, you're going to end up in the same situation I did. The support just isn't there, and you have to wade through all the BS that "power users" and even the ZC development team spew at you instead of providing even a vague semblance of assistance. If you want a professional, (relatively) inexpensive cart solution I would recommend picking up a license to X-Cart for $200. It supports all of the popular payment gateways right out of the box (including PayPal WPP), and offers professional support.

Sorry for the long post, but my experience with Zen Cart was very poor, and I wouldn't recommend it to my worst business competition.

[edited by: lorax at 12:42 pm (utc) on Oct. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]