Carl Hutzler’s Blog

My Conservatory Ballet client wanted to sell tickets online to some upcoming performances of the Nutcracker Ballet. I guess doing it all by hand as they have done in the past (phone calls, running a credit card, recording who paid, etc) is a pain in the you know. So with just 4 days notice :-) they asked if I could whip something up.

I took a quick look around and was overwhelmed by the number of shopping cart programs available. Everything from a service to software to freeware. I tried to ensure the package I was going to use had inventory management and could take paypal payments. You need inventory control to sell tickets of course. And Paypal is just easy to set-up on such short notice.

I went with Zen Cart and have been reasonably pleased. The software seems robust and the shopping experience is very professional and amazingly full featured. And the price was $0!

My only complaint about the program is that the admin interface is very poorly organized. Trying to find a setting for this or that is a 10-15 minute exploration. There are just zillions of options and its not clear what category the option you need is located under. I usually had more success Googling it and seeing someone elses frustration trying to do the same thing along with a reply from someone who happened to know how.

Not sure I would want to run a store with 1000’s of items for sale using Zen Cart, but for something small like we are doing, it worked out just fine. Take a peek if you like…and if you are in the Washington DC area, you should consider buying a ticket. The show is held at the amazing Madeira School overlooking the Potomac in Great Falls, Virginia. The view is worth the price alone….but the show (the 35th production) will be amazing too!

http://conservatoryballet.com/tickets/

Added @11:30am 11/30: Found out that we also need to allow for a 10% discount for purchases of >10 tickets. Zen Cart can discount a single product but did not have the ability to discount an entire shopping cart. Since we wanted the discount to apply for any mix of adult/child and show time tickets, I thought we were stuck. But then I found a free module called Quantity Discounts. After installing the code and activating it under modules, I applied a 10% discount to the cart for >10 items and viola!