[A Perfect Pixel]

Anyone running their screen printing shop off of Zencart?

I don't mean transfers, or dye sub shops, I mean strictly screen printing shops set up on a Zencart e-commerce shop?

I'm curious how you set it up.

Thanks

 

[lindsayanng]

I am very confindent that you will be able to use Zen Cart for a printing shop. I have not used it directly for that reason, i have used oscommerce, but they have the same options with the same features and it is a VERY flexible panel to start off with.

There is a big clearning curve though, if you have never worked with php you might, at some times find yourself in over your head.. but if you stick with it, you will get out

 

[A Perfect Pixel]

I'm actually a website designer / graphic designer / screen printer all in one... I have no problems with the design and other stuff, I was just wondering how some people had set theirs up.

I currently run 2 different zencart websites for different things and recently considered trying to set one up for my screen printing for easy ordering

 

[lindsayanng]

well, if you are good with coding and such, you SHOULD consider OSCOMMERCE then.> They have a LOT more options as far as contributions.. For things like Screen Printing, you might want Special Pricing Per Customer options, so different customer groups and see ONLY their pricing.. So when someone sets up an account, you give them a customer group which shows them THEIR price.

Also Quantity Price breaks, so if you sell one shirt for $7.99 you can sell 10 for $45.00 and so on.. You can set the quantity and the price.. There is also a MULTI STORE contribution where you can have separate stores for the different types of printing.. SO one store for shirts, one for signs, one for paper BUT once the customer signs up on one store, they become a customer of all of them..

There are LOADS of things you can do.. And although i didnt do TOO much with zen cart yet, i know that it is an offshoot of oscommerce, but since its newer, there are not as many contributions..

it basically depends on how far you want to get into it

 

[cookiesa]

Zen is generally much "cleaner" thank OS but then again Cubecart has even cleaner coding (all really based around the same)

Although you can set up different pricing, setting up "private" products is not as easy and as yet I haven't seen it truely implemented in that things like the site map will still show the "hidden" catagories.

Another issue I have had (although as a coder you probably won't find it much of an issue) is that they all require changes to the core modules which of course can, and often does leed to conflicts. (this is when you get in to "heavily" modding the cart system)

If you already use joomla/mambo then there is virtuecart available free which, touch wood so far seems very good.

There is also Magento, seems good but I haven't had much success and have left it... again after it crashing for the third time. (Again as a coder you may not have the same isues!)

 

[sicSRT8]

I wouldnt use Joomla for anything other than a blog site. It will begin to have retention issues once you build your client base and have frequent visiters. Zen Cart is one of the best user friendly cart systems without getting into extensive coding for other types of systems. If you can bare the basics with it then I would use Zen but if you need extensive custom options then your into another relm and alot of hours coding.

Im a web designer by day and clothing designer at night.
Thats just my 2cents.