Google Analytics is a power site analysis tool that can provide lot of insight into the traffic behaviour and pattern. It allows site owners to see the source of traffic (search engines, referral websites, direct). It also gives the keywords that users are searching on search engines to reach the website. Map overlays give graphical reports about what parts of the sites are being clicked frequently. Details about visitors, their Internet speed, browser resolution, browser type, geographical area etc is also shared. This data can help webmasters optimize their websites for most popular browsers and screen resolutions.

Zen cart based e-commerce websites are no different in this respect. However Google Analytics can help a zen cart based e-commerce website more. Google Analytics allows you to track ROI (Return On Investment) if you are doing PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns using Google Adwords. It also allows you to see what geographical area your traffic is coming from. That way you can target better products on your website.

It is important that admin and staff members’ access is not recorded in Google Analytics data. Hence we can develop a special mod for zen cart based e-commerce website that will easily allow you to include Analytics code on your web store. At the same time it will make sure that traffic data generated by your staff members and admins are not sent to google.

Contact us today to know more about integration of Google Analytics with Zencart. Use the contact form on the website to reach us or simply email at quote @ zencartonline.com

It is always important to enhance the user/visitor experience coming to your zen cart e-commerce store. This not only increases the brand value of your website and company but also has a positive impact on your sales and conversion ratio.

One of the best way of increasing or enhancing visitor experience is to recommend them products based on their spending pattern or order history. However an even better way is to recommend them products and services that are complimentary to what they are planning to order from your website. This concept is also called as cross selling.

Zen cart e-commerce stores can be hacked to allow recommended or related product sale. Lets say you sell a particular digital camera brand on your electronic web store. Now you know that a camera pouch that fits this camera is very popular amongst the people. So you can mark this camera pouch as related to the camera. This allows zen cart store to show this as a recommended product when anyone adds the camera to their shopping cart. What’s more, you can also attach some kind of discount to the entire order if the customer buys your recommended product. This cross selling increases your average order value and also create value for your customers. Win-win situation.

Contact us today to receive a free quote for zen cart cross sell mod. You can use the contact form on the website to get in touch with us or simply email us at quote @ zencartonline.com

One of the most important aspects of the Internet revolution has been the e-commerce. With advancements in the technology and popularity of open source solutions, e-commerce software have not only become more advanced but also cost effective. In fact most of these open source e-commerce scripts do not cost any licensing fee. If you know how to install, configure and support the script, you don’t have to shell out any money for its usage (of course except for the hosting fees that you pay to your web hosting company).

So before you venture out into choosing the best way to add a shopping cart to your existing website (or for that matter starting a new site with a cart feature) what are some of the points you must keep in mind?

Technology

You have to really decide what technology or platform you wish to use for your shopping cart e-commerce website. If you think from an end user perspective – you may think how does it matter? Well the decision that you take here will determine almost all of your future plans related to the website. Be it choosing the correct hosting company or looking for help/support for your website maintenance etc.

There are many e-commerce solutions available in the market today. Most of them do not have a licensing fee (i.e. they are free to use). The only time you have to spend money on these systems is when you wish to get them customized or the design integrated (the site look and feel). Open source scripts like zen cart, oscommerce etc fair pretty well in terms of license cost (they have none) and support cost. These scripts are supported by the open source community. Hence any security vulnerability is fixed within hours of it being reported. Also since its a community driven project, there are lot of additional modules available for free. Given the entire community system, finding a technical person to help you setting up the site or maintenance is also not really a problem. Technical resource is available in abundance and at a very reasonable rate. These scripts are also based on PHP and MySQL, one of the most popular web application development platform.

The other thing you must keep in mind is whether the software that you choose supports your preferred payment method. Zen cart supports almost all the popular payment processors including Paypal, PayFlowPro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, MoneyBookers, EPDQ etc.

Security

The second aspect that you should look at is the security of the system. Generally open source scripts are more secure than closed source scripts. You may ask why? Well, the entire code for these software is open to public and hence gets scrutinized by a large community of programmers, testers and technology enthusiasts. This review weeds out any optimization or other such technical snags in the software. Also given the huge community support for these scripts, any vulnerability that is reported gets fixed in matter of hours.

Web Hosting

The next important task is to find the right hosting partner for your website. In case you already have a website, you must check with your host if your existing plan supports installation of an e-commerce website. You will generally require a database (MySQL) and permission to run dynamic pages (PHP).

Apart from the technology requirements, you should also check with your hosting company about scalability. If your website grows, does your hosting company provides higher plans? Do they provide virtual and dedicated server hosting. This sort of planning makes sure that you can form a long term relationship with your host and you know that the hosting company can take care of your scalability related upgrades easily.

Creating your site design and its integration

Once you have finalized the hosting provider, you can look for some design work completion. Most of the e-commerce softwares including zen cart come with a standard look. You may want to change that especially if you already have a website. You would want the zen cart based e-commerce store to resemble your website. You can easily hire a zen cart specialist to help you integrate your existing design into the zen cart store. Or you can get a new design made and integrated into zen cart

Setting up the store

Once the design is ready, you need to install and configure the store. Most of the e-commerce scripts come with their installation instructions which are pretty easy to follow. However you can simply hire a zen cart or e-commerce specialist to do the installation and initial configuration for you. The configuration will include setting up the store categories, products, payment methods (paypal, credit card etc), support email IDs, installation of SSL etc.

Installing Tracking code and onsite SEO

It is important to install some kind of traffic monitoring code on your e-commerce store. The best traffic analysis software is Google Analytics. Its free and very user friendly. Whats more it gives out lot of information about user and site activity that can help you plan promotions, fix site issues, identify and promote high conversion items etc. It is also important to make sure that all onsite SEO (search engine optimization) is done on the store. This includes title, meta tags, correct xHTML code for the template, SEO friendly site URLs, integration of Google sitemaps.

E-commerce store promotion

E-commerce store promotion can be a topic in itself. However you should look at ways of integrating social media tools like Digg, Facebook, Twitter on your website. Zen cart based e-commerce stores can be easily customized to integrate with many social media and micro blogging platforms.

One of the important features of zen cart is that it allows you to start an online e-commerce store. You can sell items on your own website and ship them through out the world. Research has shown that if your customers can track their shipment online, the number of support tickets can drastically reduce.

One of the popular shipping methods for both domestic and international shippment is United States Postal Service or USPS. However it can be very cumbersome to manually email each of your customer with the USPS tracking URL to track the item.

We can help you customize your e-commerce website such that it can automatically track shipments through USPS. Whats more, it can email the customers when their orders are shipped through USPS along with the tracking URL. All this can be handled automatically once you mark the order as shipped.

Contact us today to receive a free quote on USPS module for your zen cart based e-commerce store. You can use the contact form on our website for the same or simply email us at quote @ zencartonline.com

Many zen cart based e-commerce website owners use QuickBooks for accounting. Quick Books is really popular accounting system and can manage invoices, expenses and host of other accounting related activities.

When you start a zen cart ecommerce website, it has its own invoicing and payment management system. While this is required for your customers and back office team to manage orders and payments, it can create a lot of confusion when manually transferring zen cart related data to your quickbooks system. Problems get complicated when there are refunds, chargebacks or discounts given. It becomes very difficult to manage the changes between the two systems.

We can help you integrate your zen cart store with quickbooks accounting software. We can create a small interface in your zen cart admin panel that will allow you to import Zen Cart orders, zen cart products, and customers directly into Quickbooks.

It can even take care of discount codes, product mapping and host of other features. This can greatly improve your fulfillment and order processing time and weed out many difficulties and issues related to manual data transfer between the two applications.

Contact us today to receive a free quote for quickbooks integration. You can use the contact form on the website for the same or simply email us at quote @ zencartonline.com