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Zen cart is a very powerful free open source ecommerce programme. In it’s raw state it is pretty versatile and has a lot of features – but it also has a large number of free plug-ins that add even more functionality to the package.  Trying to choose the top three modules is not easy with the wealth of plug-ins available but here goes.

So what are my 3 favorite zen cart optional modules that I can not live without?

Easy Populate CSV

This is a handy little tool once you have installed it to allow you to use csv files to bulk upload items to your store. The free version only allows you to upload a basic skeleton to do much more you will need to purchase the full version. However for most of my purposes I find this free csv version more than adequate and I just polish of the products in the admin. I tend to use Open Office as my spreadsheet for the csv file and you can add html to the descriptions cell. This is a good tool to prepare the bulk of your store offline.

Reward Point Full Suite

Finding customers is not easy on the internet so once you have them you want to keep them coming back and encourage loyalty. This loyalty points scheme for zen cart is a great full fledged module that allows you to set your rewards for customers. It’s not the easiest zen cart plug-in to get your head around and you need to go to a number of sections to configure it all properly. But it is very powerful and once you’ve got it set up and running it is sure to help you to develop a loyal following.

Simple SEO

This is a zen cart module that produces ’search engine friendly’ URL addresses.  Just how search engine friendly it is now is debatable but it does produce a much cleaner address for your products and may help you. Before you install the plug-in make sure you have the module manager installed otherwise you will get error messages. You then need to go to admin and in the extras section you will install simple SEO before going to configure it in the configuration section and then returning to extras to produce the URL. If you change the configuration then you must go back to reset the URLs. You also need to manually change the configuration in the .htaccess file.

So those are my top 3 optional modules for zen cart. But other highly recommended modules are:

Tinymce editor - this gives a much more powerful html coding feature for your product descriptions or pages. I find tinymce more useful than the standard htmlarea function of zen cart. After installing switch it on by going to the configuration – my store section.

Automatic currency updates -  if like me one of your stores sells internationally then this is a useful feature where you can set up a cron job to automatically change the prices of your goods and services as often as you like.

Wordpress on Zencart - Search engines love new content and being ‘minty fresh’ will help you to bring in new customers. A blog is an ideal way of doing fresh content. This module will put in a sidebox to display you latest blogs in your shop. Blogs are great to keep in touch with your customers but make sure you have something to say before you say it

So there’s my top 3 zen cart plug-ins and an extra three useful modules to get your ecommerce shop up and running smoothly. There’s lots more you can introduce to increase the power and usefulness of your shop.

e-Start Your Web Store with Zen Cart.

Zen Cart: Building an Online Store the Zen Way

Zen Cart: E-commerce Application Development