An Azure product Zen Cart: the art of e-commerce powered by Niles Partners. Zen Cart is an online store management system. Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce. There are hundreds of shopping cart programs available, but none come close to offering the level of options, features and support available with Zen Cart. Zen Cart is Free Open Source software. It is licensed under GPL2, meaning you are free to modify the source code in whatever ways your application requires.
We are launching a product which will configure and publish Zen Cart, an open source e-commerce software solution which is embedded pre-configured tool with LAMP on Azure image that contains Zen Cart, Apache, MySQL, Linux, PHP (LAMP).
There are hundreds of shopping cart programs available, but none come close to offering the level of options, features and support available with Zen Cart. Even the commercial programs have a hard time competing.
User interaction features include:
It will take a few minutes for your VM to be deployed. When the deployment is finished, move on to the next section.
Connect to virtual machine
Create an SSH connection with the VM.
bashCopy
ssh azureuser@10.111.12.123
3.Using the same bash shell you used to create your SSH key pair (you can reopen the Cloud Shell by selecting >_ again or going to https://shell.azure.com/bash), paste the SSH connection command into the shell to create an SSH session.
Usage/Deployment Instructions
Step 1: Access Zenacrt from Azure Marketplace and click ON Get it now button.
Step 2: Now to create a virtual machine, enter or select appropriate values for zone, machine type, resource group and so on as per your choice.
Click on review + create button.
Step 3:The Azure create vm Console confirms that Zencart was deployed when all validations are passed,
Note: You will get the Instance IP Address as shown in the screenshot below:
Step 4: Now Use the browser to access the application at http://<instance iP address>replace <instance ip address> with the actual IP address of the running instance.
Now Click on CLICK HERE to proceed
Now Click on Continue,
Fill in the details as you require then click on continue,
While Installing use the following detail as given below:
Host: localhost
Database Name: zencart
Username (for Database): root
Password (For Database): Niles@123
Now Click on Continue and Fill the details for admin
Copy the temporary admin password and Continue
Step 5: For setting up MySQL database user do the following steps:
Do SSH into your instance.
Type the following commands:
Command: sudo su
Command: mysql –u root –p
Type in the password as: Niles@123
Type the following commands to make a new database and user as per your choice:
Command: Create database <database name as you like>;
Command: CREATE USER ‘<username as you like>’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘<password as you like>’;
Command: GRANT ALL ON <database name>.* TO ‘<username>’@’localhost’;
Command: FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Command: exit;
NOTE: Please don’t forget to set the <database name as you like>, <username as you like> and <password as you like> in the above mentioned commands to run the product smoothly.
Step 6: Setup is finished now.
Zencart is installed now.
Step 6: Now to access the Admin panel, folow the below steps;
Remove installation folder. Run below command on your server.
$ sudo rm -r /var/www/html/zc_install/
$ sudo cd /var/www/html/
$ sudo mv admin* Admin
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2.service
Now hit the Ip of the VM as shown below;
<public-ip>/Admin
This is the admin login panel.
Dashboard screen appears as shown below
Enjoy your Application
Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com’s robust infrastructure.
When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.
Secondly, many hosting services don’t provide full control over the compute resources being provided. Using Amazon EC2, developers can choose not only to initiate or shut down instances at any time, they can completely customize the configuration of their instances to suit their needs – and change it at any time. Most hosting services cater more towards groups of users with similar system requirements, and so offer limited ability to change these.
Finally, with Amazon EC2 developers enjoy the benefit of paying only for their actual resource consumption – and at very low rates. Most hosting services require users to pay a fixed, up-front fee irrespective of their actual computing power used, and so users risk overbuying resources to compensate for the inability to quickly scale up resources within a short time frame.
No. You do not need an Elastic IP address for all your instances. By default, every instance comes with a private IP address and an internet routable public IP address. The private address is associated exclusively with the instance and is only returned to Amazon EC2 when the instance is stopped or terminated. The public address is associated exclusively with the instance until it is stopped, terminated or replaced with an Elastic IP address. These IP addresses should be adequate for many applications where you do not need a long lived internet routable end point. Compute clusters, web crawling, and backend services are all examples of applications that typically do not require Elastic IP addresses.
You have complete control over the visibility of your systems. The Amazon EC2 security systems allow you to place your running instances into arbitrary groups of your choice. Using the web services interface, you can then specify which groups may communicate with which other groups, and also which IP subnets on the Internet may talk to which groups. This allows you to control access to your instances in our highly dynamic environment. Of course, you should also secure your instance as you would any other server.
Ecommerce website owners should always keep in mind the three dimensions of security – confidentiality, integrity and availability. Business owners should develop a good strategy that can help to make the site and transactions secured. To avoid any hackers gain access to important confidential data, include encryption methods for any data transactions
No, as such there are no limits on the size. The biggest benefit of having an online store is that you can add unlimited products and catalogues and at the same time you can grow your customer base as you require.
If you are a non-tech, fully hosted solutions are ideal for you but if you want more flexibility you can opt for self hosted solutions.
All online sellers need GST number for selling taxable items. Rules are strict and you should not sell without it. Penalty is heavy if you’re caught. Moreover, marketplaces won’t allow you to register as sellers without GST number for selling taxable items.
For selling branded products, some companies require merchants to get authorization to sell online and that is brand authorization. But, if you have a purchase invoice, you may not require brand authorization.