How to add Zen Cart to your Website
September 22, 2009 by Michelle Green
Filed under Tutorials
Zen Cart is a free shopping cart solution that allows you to create an online “mall” on your website.
It can be modified to suit the look and feel of the rest of your website, and once configured, it’s easy to add products and categories.
This tutorial is the first of many steps to building your online shopping mall!
Hi Michelle
Can the ZenCart be added to a site where wordpress is already installed? I installed wordpress on a few of my domains and then decided I could easily fill those domains with products..
Thanks for the video tutorial..
Kavi
Hi Kavi and thank you for your question. Yes it can be put on the same site, but it will have to go into a different directory.
For example, you might have your blog in the root directory (eg. http://www.yourdomain.com), so your shopping cart might need to go into something like http://www.yourdomain.com/products/.
Also, if you decide to put your shopping cart into a “products” directory, go into Wordpress, create a page called “Products” and when you click on the products page link, it will take you to the shopping cart.
I hope that makes sense!?
I have more videos I will be placing on this site soon too, so stay tuned!
When I add the shopping cart into Products directory, I thought the page will automatically get created but I guess not, so should I create this page first and then add shopping cart to it? I’ve always been a bit confused on this – even with the affiliates when on many sites people’s affiliate links point to a page like ‘www.yourdomain.com/recommends/whateveraff’ which is then redirected to that affiliate page.. could you please clear that up in a video for me some day? thank you so much for a quick reply too..
Kavi
No it doesn’t – it just creates the directory for it. It doesn’t matter if you do it before or after, but first make sure you have your permalinks set to Custom and /%category%/%postname%/.
The reason for this is because you want your url to look like “http://yourdomain.com/products/” and not “http://yourdomain.com/page=34″ or whatever it does!
As for the affiliate codes, this is done through redirects and I’ll definitely put a video tutorial together for that, once I’ve finished my Zen cart tutorials which I hope to have finished later today if I can.
Great.. looking forward to all of your videos and learning. I’m so glad to have found your blog, (via Flokka) so subscribed!
Thanks so much Kavi. I hope I can offer value as time goes on and I add more content – that’s the plan anyway!