Disclaimer and warning: manually editing your Zen Cart database runs the risk of corrupting your site and losing everything so only attempt this if you’re confident you know what you’re doing and are happy to take the risk. This tutorial is intended as a quick guide and relates for standard Zen Cart installations only. If you have any concerns or are not experienced with PHP MyAdmin, MD5 hashes or editing a database, please ask an expert to do this for you instead. We can’t be held responsible for anything that might go wrong as a result of attempting to fix this yourself.

If you’d prefer us to manually reset your Zen cart password, get in touch.

If you’re using Zen Cart and lose your password, for whatever reason, and the ‘resend password’ option isn’t working, it is possible to manually reset your password directly through the database.

Here is how you do it:

1. Log in to your Zen Cart database using PHP MyAdmin
2. Find the ‘admin’ table
3. Replace the MD5 hash with the following: 351683ea4e19efe34874b501fdbf9792:9b
4. Go back to the login page on your Zen Cart site and login again using the password ‘admin’

Once you’re logged in to your site again you’ll need to reset the password straight away to something more secure. Good luck!

More information on Zen Cart passwords

An MD5 hash is an algorithm generally to encrypt a password. This algorithm is one-way meaning you can’t de-encrypt the phrase or word from the hash.

There are, however, several openly available databases allowing you to look up an MD5 hash to find the corresponding word or phrase so this is why it’s very important to choose a complicated string when you pick your password. All the commonly occurring words and common passwords can be easily found but a password that is long, unique and complex will be almost impossible to discover.

Long, complex passwords are, however, not very user friendly for us humans so many people still decide to go against the advice and choose something simple for their password so one way to get round this problem is by using a ‘salt’

A ‘salt’ is a word or phrase that is combined with the required password to create the MD5 hash. When you log into your website, this is how the site checked you’ve entered the right password:

1. Combines what you’ve entered in the ‘password’ field with the predefined ‘salt’
2. Creates an MD5 hash from this combination
3. Compares this hash with the correct password hash stored in the database
4. Match means the password is correct

Let us know if you need any help with your Zen Cart passwords