Portfolio & Case Studies

Running Zen Cart 1.5.4 with a heavily modified checkout flow and a custom B2B trade account module. Two previous developers had declined the upgrade due to module complexity.

Full migration to 2.2.2 on staging, porting the custom checkout and trade account module to 2.x-compatible code. PayPal Classic replaced with PayPal Commerce Platform.

The client sells to both retail customers and trade accounts. Trade accounts needed to see different prices, minimum order quantities, and a separate checkout workflow — none of which Zen Cart offers natively.

Built a full B2B module using Zen Cart's override system: customer group detection, tiered pricing engine, MOQ enforcement, and a trade-only checkout path with net-30 payment option.

Store went completely blank (WSOD) at 11 PM on a Friday after the hosting provider automatically upgraded PHP from 7.4 to 8.1. 600+ products, active orders, and a Monday sale event pending.

Diagnosed within 2 hours: 4 plugin files using deprecated PHP 7.x functions. Patched all four files and tested against PHP 8.1 on staging. Store restored to fully operational within 4 hours of first contact.

Running the default Zen Cart template from 2015 on a recently upgraded 2.1 store. Mobile conversion rate was below 1% and the client's brand identity wasn't reflected in the storefront at all.

Full custom responsive theme on Bootstrap 5, using Zen Cart's override system. New product page layout with larger images, improved category navigation, and a simplified mobile checkout.

Store had been injected with card-skimming malware via an unpatched file upload vulnerability. Google had flagged the site. Payment processor had suspended the account. Store had been running the default admin path for 6 years.

Full malware removal, file integrity audit against known-good 1.5.5 files, admin path obfuscation, file permission hardening, and patch of the upload vulnerability. Submitted clean site to Google for review.

One of our largest upgrade projects: 12,000 SKUs, 8 years of order history, 7 custom modules, and a deeply modified template — all on Zen Cart 1.3.9 with PHP 5.6 on legacy hosting.

Phased migration over 3 weeks. New PHP 8.1 hosting, full DB migration, 7 modules audited (4 ported, 3 replaced with modern equivalents), custom template rebuilt for Bootstrap 5.

Gift box retailer wanted to offer a monthly subscription product alongside their regular one-off products. Needed recurring billing via Stripe, subscriber management in admin, and skip/pause functionality.

Custom subscription module integrating Stripe Billing API: recurring charge scheduling, subscriber dashboard, admin management panel, automatic skip/pause handling, and dunning emails.

PayPal was accepting payment but no orders were registering in Zen Cart. Customers were being charged but receiving no confirmation email. 3 weeks of lost order data before the client noticed the pattern.

Diagnosed as broken IPN — a server migration had changed the domain's SSL certificate CN, causing PayPal's IPN verification to fail silently. Fixed IPN config, recovered 3 weeks of missing orders from PayPal transaction history.