I just thought I'd take a moment to explain why I love Zen-Cart for ecommerce.
First of all, it's NOT a cart for people who are afraid to get their hands dirty with coding. You need SOME experience with html, css, and php. PHP is embedded into the template files and certain settings are burried in the oddest places, which I don't like, but keep reading...
Zen-Cart is an extremely powerful shopping cart, even if you had to pay for it.
My first experience with Zen-Cart was for a non-apparel product where I needed people to be able to order decimal amounts of a product (ie: .5, 1.75, etc...). Zen-Cart was the only free shopping cart that I could find that would allow this. Now with apparel, I find that feature usefull for people who want to order Gift Certificates. They can order a GC for EXACTLY the amount they want, down to the cent.
Second, Gift Certificates. This was a feature that I couldn't find in Cube Cart, and was something I felt strongly that I should be able to offer to my customers, along with coupons codes if I so choose.
It's cross-server compatible, which, when I tried osCommerce that software needed special server settings to be changed in order to use it, which I thought was a little strange as it came with Fantastico on the server I had.
You can have unlimited products in unlimited categories and sub-categories, which. I admit, that's more and more common now.
Pricing by attributes is another thing that I find important. I can charge a different amount for a 3XL than I would for S-XL. Maybe other shopping carts offer that, but I didn't delve into them enough to find out.
You can also STOCK by attributes with a FREE mod for Zen-Cart. In other words, you can add the exact amount of stock that you have per color per size per design. I don't use it because I print on-demand, but I would think that that would be EXTREMELY important to screenprinters.
Most mods are FREE! There are some that you need to pay for, but those would be for VERY specific needs.
It INCLUDES a Contact Us form. You don't need to put your email address out there for spambots to grab. I found it very strange that you actually had to PAY for a Contact Us form for Cube Cart.
Last (in this list)...I'm building a site right now that offers custom-printed shirts that are based on user-submitted photographs. I was trying to figure out how I would go about having my customers submit photos to me. I did a quick search to find out if there was a mod to add attachments to the Contact Us form, but the very first link was to a post on the Zen-Cart forum that told me EXACTLY what I needed...useing only the BASE software, you can set up a "File" attribute. When you add that to a product, your customer can upload a picture to your server, so it brings a several-step process down to a single-step process for custom printers.
There's more that I like about this software, but I'll keep it to those for now.
Why I Love Zen-Cart 
