Zen Cart vs Magento whats the advantage

[jastreet1]

Hi,

Following a conversation with another forum member, who tried to pursuade me switching from Zen Cart to Magento would be a positive move, is that really true?

For a compute novice, I am not all sure on the advantages or disadvantages, I hear Zen cart is faster and more stable but Magento has more options and is better presented. While no right or wrong answer in this case I wondered if anyone could share their opinion/thoughts on this topic?

Thanks in advance.

 

[mutasim]

My experience with Magento as a developer was its was great to build an e-commerce site with, very flexible, with a large community providing various extensions to the platform and the developers churned out regular updates to the core.

But I found that the backend was much to complicated for my clients, I got many complaints about feature overload. It can be a bit overwhelming, but if you take it for a spin on their demo site you will know if it is right for you.

I can't speak for Zen Cart, haven't had much experience with that.

- Mutasim

 

[ServWise]

Hi,

Following a conversation with another forum member, who tried to pursuade me switching from Zen Cart to Magento would be a positive move, is that really true?

For a compute novice, I am not all sure on the advantages or disadvantages, I hear Zen cart is faster and more stable but Magento has more options and is better presented. While no right or wrong answer in this case I wondered if anyone could share their opinion/thoughts on this topic?

Thanks in advance.

I personally would suggest you take a look at OpenCart www.opencart.com

Not quite as many high end features as Magento but the user experience for front and back-end is excellent.

 

[jastreet1]

I think personally for the hassle of switching (and cost) having looked at it closer, decided to carry on with my current system.

 

[TotalWebSolutions]

I think personally for the hassle of switching (and cost) having looked at it closer, decided to carry on with my current system.

I am just curious, are you currently using ZenCart on the 'Ultimate Applicances' website as it shows as eSeller Solutions at the bottom of the page? If it is ZenCart then it certainly is one of the better sites I have seen using this platform.

Thanks,

Simon

 

[Esk247]

If your website is working fine on ZenCart then just leave it, really, it's not worth the hassle for a few little bits and pieces that magento might offer.

You're effectively looking at rebuilding the website and if you make a pigs ear of it you'll regret the move.

I'm trialling a few different carts, currently between Prestashop and Opencart but to be honest, they're all very similar. All you get to change on the front end is the theme and some modules, but all the modules tend to be similar unless you're looking at having modules built specifically for you.

I'd recommend stick where you are for now. It's a mission having to move all of your files and data to a new website, upload everything, make sure no files are missing etc.

 

[bargainmania]

Leave it as it is, You are using the best cart available, why downgrade?

Alistair

 

[goldenspiralstudios]

Magento a very feature rich platform gives you total control over the look and functionality of your store. Nothing you can't do with magento to provide an unrivaled and rich online shopping experience for their customers, tailored to their unique business needs.

Cheers!
Goldenspiralstudios.com,
FREE One-Click Cart Checkout, Magento Extension

 

[edmondscommerce]

The main thing you will get with Magento is all round better security than Zen Cart, there is basically no way a Magento site can suffer from SQL injection. Zen Cart that is not the case unfortunatey.

You will also get a layered navigation system that works properly, I managed to trip yours up quite easily and get a fatal error (have PM'ed you).

Then of course you get the option to go down the multistore route, buy up some keyword rich domains and build some tightly focussed niche stores to go along with your main megastore.

There are loads of other great features but these are the ones I think you will notice and benefit from the most.

 

[Esk247]

but he still has to transfer all of his products yes? if his website is working fine at the moment then why bother with days of work just to move to something that might have an extra layer of security...it's still vulnerable to attacks just like every website anywhere in the world.

Unless the OP is looking for a shopping cart that allows for more products or a better setup for SEO or integration with stock control etc i don't see any reason to keep moving around all the platforms every few months.

It's a total pain in the backside having to move all your data across, all your product id's, all your prices, stock information, images etc. Argh!

 

[edmondscommerce]

We generally budget around 4 hours work for migrating from an osC type site (osc, zen cart, CRE Loaded etc).

The thread clearly asks what the advantage is, not whether he should move or not.

Magento is simply not vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. It's also really secure against XSS, CSRF etc. It's just loads more modern and uses modern best practices.

 

[jamie1183]

As above migrating the data from Zen, OSC, Cube, Presta etc to Magento takes no time at all and this includes all orders, customers, products etc.

Magento is a much more stable secure platform than Zen cart and this is the main reason why I recommended this to you.

Just working form experience and working on many many different platforms we have found that clients generally don't out grow magento as its so adaptable and regularly updated.

 

[bargainmania]

Guys guys guys

Good to see we have some magento fans but magento is using Zend for handling requests (by use of Zend_Table and the related functions) in order to reduce the probability of SQL injection. So far so good, but even Zend doesn’t eliminate the risk of SQL injection completely.
Seems to me that magento's bloated file structure and masses of database queries to function are its biggest vulnerability, it seems that it creates loads of i-frames to reduce page changes and its the cross-site scenario that creates a vulnerability.

Take into account that it costs in a month what zencart costs in a year to host.. Am sorry but i know what cart i prefer. Not really hard to choose.
Zencart also has Multi site, Established some time ago.

Alistair

The main thing you will get with Magento is all round better security than Zen Cart, there is basically no way a Magento site can suffer from SQL injection. Zen Cart that is not the case unfortunatey.

You will also get a layered navigation system that works properly, I managed to trip yours up quite easily and get a fatal error (have PM'ed you).

Then of course you get the option to go down the multistore route, buy up some keyword rich domains and build some tightly focussed niche stores to go along with your main megastore.

There are loads of other great features but these are the ones I think you will notice and benefit from the most.

 

[jamie1183]

Where do you get the idea hosting a magento site costs same per month as a zen per year?

We host our own Magento customers on a very very high spec server with one of Europe's leading hosts from around £9.99 per month, we don't host sites we don't build but there is no reason why a well built magento site has to have exceptionally expensive hosting

 

[bargainmania]

and we can get our sites hosted on top notch servers for £17 per year.
Not much difference like i said.

Alistair

 

[dx3webs]

To the OP.. if you want give Magento a try give us a shout

 

[CsDee]

I have used Zen cart and Magento , now I choose Mangento

 

[edmondscommerce]

So far so good, but even Zend doesn’t eliminate the risk of SQL injection completely.

I'd love to see how you think Zend_DB which uses PDO and prepared statements can suffer from SQL injection.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SQL...epared_Statements_.28Parameterized_Queries.29

"Prepared statements ensure that an attacker is not able to change the intent of a query, even if SQL commands are inserted by an attacker"

Also not sure what you mean regarding iframes. Are you confusing this with AJAX?

Regarding hosting - if you are getting "top notch servers" for less than £2 a month then good luck to you.

It's true, you will be on a very good server, along with a huge pile of other sites

 

[dx3webs]

The only iframe i can think of is used by the odd payment gateway.. other thank that I don't think the core application uses any.

 

[LianneF]

My site is OSC and can be slow at times and was told this "Part of the problem seems to be that all images are generated from a base image on the fly using a php script. This is not an efficient way of doing things (Magento for example creates a cache of these images so that it only does the heavy resizing calculation once), unfortunately its probably the only way that OSCommerce does things so not an easy thing to fix"

How does Zen Cart deal with the images as you may come across a similar problem if you plan on adding lots of products.

Lianne

 

[edmondscommerce]

Caching generated images is very easy to do

osC generate any images by default so you are running some custom code to do this. Extending this to cache the images would be really easy.

Would be happy to help you here if you want