Why Developers Use OS Commerce and Zen Cart

If you are a website developer you get paid to build a website and then move on to the next project.

• Developers are concerned with cost and time to implement solutions.

• They are completely oblivious to any needs of the merchant to continue operating their website or the tools needed to run a retail business.

Programs like Zen cart and OS Commerce offer fast and easy complete solutions that developers can install in minutes. As a matter of fact many hosting companies have them preinstalled on the servers, so installation is as easy as one click.

This lets web developers earn bigger profits because they can charge less than if they were paying programmers to build custom shopping carts.

The customer is happier because the cost of developing the website is low and the cart has countless features and tools.

Totally Unsupported

The problem here is that web developers are concerned with their profit margins and not yours. So when merchants go to run their business they find the program often falls short, is too complicated to manage and when they need help there is none.

There is no support for free unsupported programs like Zencart. So despite all the value it adds to the initial 1 day installation, users are left in out in the cold when they have to run it for the next several years.

That means when you have a problem with the programming you are on your own. When you have a question about how to add an item or access an invoice, you are on your own.

You can hire an expensive webmaster to answer your simple question or spend hours online reading blogs and forums looking for the answer to your question. You can even try posting a question in a forum and see if you get a useful answer in the next week.

During this time your business suffers because you are busy trying to figure out how to use your website or find someone that can help you.

If you used a cart like pageBuzz, while it may seem more expensive than a free cart the small fee of $20 a month is very cheap.

With Zen cart, if you have to hire one person for just a couple of hours a year, you will have spent that much or more. If you have to hire a programmer to make an update to work with a newer browser, they you will most certainly have spent much more than you would at pageBuzz.com

Another huge problem with open source programs is they have no limits.

They offer unlimited entries and configurations. Unfortunately they cannot handle unlimited items and the more you add the slower the store gets because it over works the server.

Usually that is not a problem except when that your cart consumes more than your allocated CPU usage on the server and the hosting company turns off your website. That happens often even with a few hundred items if you have several people in the store at the same time.

This is a big problem with carts like Zencart & OS Commerce particularly. They just were never designed for large volumes of traffic or large numbers of products.

In fact they are developed by developers and not by ecommerce companies that have spent years learning what works. Programmers write code, they don't run stores, so sometimes those two things don't work that very well together.

The open source community has developed some incredible programs and these 2 carts are great accomplishments. But programmers are not retail merchants and while they tend to write exciting code the average person does not understand it.

Likewise the programmers have little or no experience running a business and the programming reflects that.

They add in everything including the kitchen sink but they forget that someone who is not a programmer will need to access this program daily to run their store.

The merchants don't really care if they can edit style sheets or install javascript plugins, they need to add items and manage inventory and sales. These carts tend to make simple tasks very complicated and modifications require advanced programming knowledge.

The worst part about paying programmers to modify these carts is that if you move, change hosts or the server fails you have to do it all over again. So the thousands of dollars you paid to customize the application is flushed down the toilet.

If you do make modifications you could have created new problems in the programming that now the only person that can help is the programmer you paid to make the changes.

It is a headache no business owner wants.

• Shopping carts like pageBuzz.com have been developed by working directly with the merchants to provide the tools they need in a manner they understand. Programming is the responsibility of the host and maintained at our cost.

• Help is just a phone call away and there is no charge for it. So rather than dealing with forums and expensive programmers you can simply call and get help.

Most carts similar to pageBuzz are sold with support packages and either leased at monthly rates or sold with steep price tags often in the thousands of dollars and thousands of dollars a year for support or $100 an hour for hourly support.

As a business owner it is important to be able to run your business.

In the early years of the Internet programmers and webmasters took advantage of business owners because people had no clue about how stuff worked.

Today there is expanded competition and cut throat rates making solutions dirt cheap. But cheap does not mean good and merchants need to be aware of what that website will do and how it works before they invest money into it.

Just because you save a few dollars building your website does not mean that it will be cheaper to run.

In fact, using open source programs can be the lest cost effective solution of all because there is no body making updates, nobody to ask for help and nobody to fix problems.

If you install a program and it has bugs and almost all do, even if the open source community fixes them, you still have to make the updates to your version.

In some cases, you have to start all over again and rebuild your cart depending on how different the updated version is than the one you are using.

Disadvantages of Supported Programs

Of course there are disadvantages of supported programs as well. You don't have access to make programming changes because if you did, the company would not be able to support it.

That can sometimes limit what you can do.

But unless you are a programmer, in most cases, programs like pageBuzz will be more cost effective and save you money in the long run. They also prevent costly downtime as you look for help.

Know what your web developer is doing

Web developers and programmers do what they do, They don't see a problem in using free software because they know how to fix it, update it and make changes.

But that means, you will be forever bound to them paying continued fees as you run your store.

You should understand why they use programs like Zencart and how that will affect your business moving forward.

If you are paying a webmaster to build your store the worst thing you can do is use open source solutions. Where as, for a webmaster that runs his own store and has limited funds, Zencart is a great alternative.

If you are reading this article looking for information then the likelihood of you being an expert programmer are low and you should understand the implications of using programs that don't offer continued support.