Zen cart’s way to do mobile commerce

Zen Cart is an online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for numerous languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License.

Zen Cart branched from osCommerce as a separate project in 2003. Beyond some aesthetic changes, the major differences between the two systems come from Zen Cart’s architectural changes (for example, a template system) and additional included features in the core. The release of the 1.3.x series further differentiated Zen Cart by moving the template system from its historic tables-based layout approach to one that is largely CSS-based.Zen Cart branched from osCommerce as a separate project in 2003. Beyond some aesthetic changes, the major differences between the two systems come from Zen Cart’s architectural changes (for example, a template system) and additional included features in the core. The release of the 1.3.x series further differentiated Zen Cart by moving the template system from its historic tables-based layout approach to one that is largely CSS-based.

For most of Zencart merchants, it’s not an easy job to decide the ways of how to do mobile commerce development. Generally there are four ways to process that. The table below describes these ways clearly.

	Cost	Risk	Time	Advantage	Disadvantage
Own Development Team	Very High	Medium	Slow	Fully under your control	High cost, High risk,High complexity
Outsource	High	High	Medium	Lower costLower complexity	Extremely high risk
Install Mobile Template	Low	Low	Fast	Low costLow complexity	Mobile commerce is not just a template
Mobile Cloud Service	Low	Low	Fast	All cloud service advantage, keep your mobile site ahead of others	A good mobile cloud service provide is not easy to find

The first way is to build up own development team. It’s easy to satisfy merchant’s requirements but has to endure long development cycle and usually not cheap. This would be a long term and large cost for you.

The second way is outsourcing. Usually this way has the highest risks because merchants are hard to measure the quality of outsource team in advance. If the quality cannot be guaranteed, merchants will be in trouble when their mobile website or app is released to public.

The third way is install zen cart mobile template. It’s fast, cheap, but you need to ask one question:  Is mobile commerce just simply to put the PC screen layout into a smaller screen? The truth is the user scenario, device features of mobile is completely different, the key function and operating focus of your mobile site are also different with PC websites. You must be aware that, mobile commerce is by no means simply to help you change a mobile skin. It is a complete solution from product design to mobile marketing, mobile operations and data analysis.

So what you need is a mobile commerce solution, not a mobile template. Mobile cloud service which provide an one stop solution for mobile commerce is the best. Special designed feature for mobile user scenario, mobile commerce operation task list, auto convert your pc web site. Provided that your shopping website is based on standard shopping cart program, then it will only cost you 10 minutes to finish the mobile web site conversion. But the question is how can merchants find those cloud service providers?

Thanks to Kancart, it provides the best solution to above issues. It features various zen cart mobile theme to choose and connect with your current system tightly. Furthermore, QR code, push message, location services and passbook are supported friendly by Kancart.

Still confused with mobile website operation? No worries Kancart provided a series of solutions to help big or small merchants resolve the mobilisation issues. Since your website is based on magento shopping cart system, Kancart will bring you a brand new mobile website or app in a fast & easy way.