With the Internet fast becoming a large marketplace, entrepreneurs are quick to jump in to this new venue for business. However, one of the first stumbling blocks they often encounter is how to sell their wares. With Zen Cart, you get to overcome that hurdle easily.

Zen Cart is a PHP shopping cart system that lets you put up your wares and sell them on the Internet. Best of all, it is available for free. Downloaded as a compressed file, you just extract the contents on your web server and run the built in install script. Details of your MySQL are also needed during installation. Once done with the installation, you can add the different products you'll be selling. Zen Cart is powerful software, with many different options to choose from. Also available for downloads are community contributed additions which extend the usability of Zen Cart. Documentation seems to be the weakest area of Zen Cart. Being free of charge, the documentation is quite meager, dealing with the basics alone. If you are looking for a fast, easy to install, and cheap shopping cart system for your budding business, Zen Cart is just a click away.

Zen Cart requires a web server with PHP 4.3 or later installed and MySQL 4.1 or 5.0.

Go to Zen Cart

What Shopping cart should I use?

This is usually the first question entrepreneurs ask when planning for an online shop for the first time – and rightly so. The shopping cart determines how easy and expensive going online will be. If you are planning on going online, read on and find out one of the many available shopping carts out there: osCommerce.

What sets osCommerce from others is that it is an open source e-commerce solution. In other words, it’s free. That takes care of the price, but what about the ease of setting it up? It doesn’t take a genius to setup osCommerce. Downloaded as a tarball or zip file, it’s just a matter of extracting the contents into your web server, making sure that PHP and MySQL are both running on it. Also, you need an empty database for osCommerce’s use. Once extracted, proceed to your site on a browser and an install script will get your shop on the way to being online. It must be noted, however, that because it’s open source, documentation isn’t extensive. Full functionality and tighter security is achieved only through the download of different user modules.

osCommerce runs on Linux or Windows with a web server that runs PHP and MySQL. Knowledge of setting up a database is also needed.

Go to osCommerce