Zen Cart is an online store management system. It is PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

-based, using a MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 database and HTML components. Support is provided for numerous languages and currencies, and it is freely available under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

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Zen Cart branched from osCommerce

OsCommerce

osCommerce is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. It can be used on any web server that has PHP and MySQL installed. It is available as free software under the GNU General Public License.-History:...

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.

Features

Zen Cart's default installation provides everything needed to maintain an online store.
Products, customers, pricing, payment and shipping, newsletters, orders and more are managed by the store owner through the administration area. The shopping cart is set up to receive payments from major credit cards via the merchant's choice of numerous available payment gateway services, some built-in or easily added with free addons.

The following is a list of some of the key features of Zen Cart as stated on their website:

• multiple language support
• multiple customer modes
• unlimited category depth
• multiple sales and discounts
• multiple display modes
• XHTML 1.0 compliant template system
• built-in content management system
• multiple ad banner controller
• multiple shipping options
• multiple payment options
• newsletter manager
• discount coupons
• gift certificates
• featured products
• quantity discounts