We can help you implement such a module on your zen cart e-commerce website. Your customers can specify the date and time when selecting the shipping method at the time of the checkout. The date/time can even have constraints such as weekdays/work hours only, or no weekend delivery. The same is true when customer chooses to pick up the order at the store.

If you wish to implement such a feature at your store, do not hesitate to get in touch with us via the contact-us page on this website. Please mention all your requirements in the mail so that we can present you with an exact quote.

We help you customize zen cart administration panel to produce such reports. We also help in setting up email schedule and other alerts so that these reports can be directly emailed to you. If you have any such custom reports requirements do not hesitate to send us your requirement for a free quote. You can get in touch with us via the contact-us page or email us at quote @ zencartonline.com

If you wish to integrate your e-commerce store with your twitter account, look no further. We can help you integrate a twitter side box in your zen cart store. We call it the Zen cart twitter sidebox. What’s more, if your ecommerce store is fairly busy, the twitter results can be cached. This way, you can make sure that your twitter account is well within the connection limit of 150 queries per hour. It also makes sure that your zen cart site loads fast and at the same time your twitter account does not get banned.

For more details about the Zen cart twitter sidebox integration, please contact us via the contact-us page or email us at quote @zencartonline.com

One of the most popular support/help desk systems on the web is Kayako. Kayako has both esupport and supportsuite products that can handle tickets, online live chat and bunch of other features.

We can help you with the integration of zen cart with the kayako support suite or kayako esupport system. This way your members can seamlessly login into both the systems using the same login and password. Whats more, your support agents can see client’s zen cart profile and order details inside their kayako staff support panel. This not only saves their time on searching for the client records in zen cart database but also increases efficiency and reduces errors in handling support issues.

It also gives a more unified experience to your customers when it comes to the services that you offer. Research has shown that refund rate significantly reduces with increased efficiency in handling support tickets. Hence this is one area that no e-commerce store operator can look to ignore.

Contact us today to know more about Kayako zen cart integration. You can use the contact link on the website or simply email us at quote @ zencartonline.com.

Here a very cool tool called the zen cart multi site mod can help you. Zen cart multi site mod allows you to start a zen cart based e-commerce website at multiple websites, all having a common backend panel to manage orders, customers, support etc. This gives you a one-view of the entire system and allows you to track performance, growth, issues in a holistic way. It also allows you to consolidate costs for support, customer services, shipping and merchant account costs. Whats more – you can easily cross sell between sites and offer recommended products across stores.

This cross promotion can increase brand loyalty and visitor traffic.

Contact us today to know more about the zen cart multi-site module. You can use the contact us button on the site or simply email us at quote @ zencartonline.com

We can help you make a custom e-commerce site design and integrate it easily in zen cart. If you already have a design in place and wish to simply get it integrated in your zen cart store, we can help you do that as well. If during the integration of the design, it is found that custom mods have to be written then we can handle it as well.

We can also advice on placement of menu items, buttons etc for a better conversion rate. We will soon offer many free zen cart themes that you can use on your website.

In case you wish to get a custom zen cart theme designed, please contact us using the contact link on the website. You can also email us at quote @ zencartonline.com for more information.

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

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

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 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

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

However, many business models would want that the transaction be two way. That is, the customers can buy items from the website and at the same time they can sell items on the site to get a discount. For example, I am planning to a new car – but I also want to sell my old car and get a discount. Such transactions are not supported in Zen cart standard software.

However we can easily patch your zen cart based store to allow customers to sell items to your website and gain credits. These credits can then be redeemed to buy new items. The mod also can have features like – the credits are on hold until the item is received by the website and verified. You can options for your customers to self assess the condition of the item they are selling. For example it can be an item in poor condition, good condition or excellent condition. Based on these ratings – credit points can vary.

Expiry can also be attached to the credits thus gained. The credit points will expire in say 30 days after confirmation. This forces the customers to make a purchase in the stipulated time frame and there by increase your conversion rate.

Feel free to contact us today to receive more details about this mod and how we can integrate it on your website. You can use the contact link on the website to contact us or email us at quote @ zencartonline.com

The problem with starting a forum on an e-commerce website is that your members have to register twice, once at the zen cart store and the other time at your forum. This is not only annoying but can be one of the biggest reasons why your forums will not be very popular.

Forums can provide lot of community based support and can reduce the number of support tickets that are sent for common questions. Vbulletin based forums can also help you in forum based marketing where lot of potential clients can read and ask questions before taking a decision to buy products or services from your zen cart based e-commerce website.

In order to make the customer experience better, its best to have some kind of integration between zen cart and vbulletin.

We can help you do a member registration integration between zen cart and vbulletin. That means if a member registers at Zen cart (they buy something), they automatically get registered with vBulletin based forum and vice-versa. Not only that, we can do a login integration as well. This means that if your members login into their zen cart member area, they get automatically logged into the vbulletin forum. We can also configure the forum such that some special area within the forum is only accessible to registered members. This area can be used to provide “member only” support.

This not only enhances customer experience but also makes your website look more professional. We can also help you integrate your zen cart design into your vbulletin based forum.

Contact us today at quote @ zencartonline.com via email or use the contact form on the website to send us your requirements and we will be happy to send you a quote!

WordPress has emerged as one of the biggest and most popular blogging software script. Its free, open source and secure!

If you are looking to start a blog on your website or integrate wordpress based blog on your zen cart based e-commerce website, feel free to contact us today. We can help you integrate a blog on your zen cart based website that has a similar design. Members that create account on your zen cart based store get an account on your wordpress based blog as well.

We will also do the complete theme integration for the blog.

You can send us your requirements to receive a free quote at quote @ zencartonline.com

It is important to understand that zen cart by itself is not really optimized to help in coversion rates or get you more sales. There are lot of reasons for that. Lets look at what all things you should take care about in your zen cart based e-commerce store to get better conversion.

Make your important/high selling items featured
If something is selling good, why not make it featured on the home page. Make it stand out. Also if you have any promotion going, make sure to run the banner on the home page. The best products on your website should be on the front page. Indicate clearly the pricing, discount that is receivable, item details etc.

Make the checkout process simple
Its best not to ask for long registration details. A 5 step checkout process can be easily compacted into 1 or 2 step process. Also if your business allows, do not ask the visitors to create an account with your website (esp if you are selling a one-off item and customers wont be returning). It just increases your conversion rates.

Add usability features to your checkout process
You need to make sure that your entire shopping and checkout process is user friendly. The “Add to cart”, checkout, back, next buttons should be visible and stand out. I see many e-commerce website where it is almost impossible to locate the checkout button on the shopping cart page. Its generally hidden in the menu or somewhere at the bottom. Its best to have these navigational buttons on the top as well as at the bottom of the page.

You should remove any unnecessary and unimportant text from the checkout process. Focus on getting the sale converted and put minimum distraction in place.

Optimize Thank You page
When the customer is done ordering from your website, they are redirected to a Thank you page. This page contains details about the order process and talks about the next step. Generally customers tend to save this page for future reference. It is best to put some offers or deals on this page. Like requesting them to subscribe to your newsletter or refer a friend. You can attach some incentive to do so (like free shipping on next order, or a discount code etc).

Related item search
You can install the zen cart better together mod and other similar mods to help recommend to your customers some related products based on the choices that they make. This can easily add to your conversion rates and provide for a better user experience.

Site Security & customer confidence
It is important to reassure the customer that your website is absolutely secure. You should display your SSL credentials, hackersafe banner and other such important items on your home page and the payment processing page. This will add to customers’ confidence and they will shop on your website without fear or worry of their credit card data getting stolen.

Give multiple payment options
It is always good to give 2 or 3 payment options. If possible, one of them should always be Paypal. If you are a local provider, you may want to give a check payment or cash on delivery option as well.

Google Base integration
Install and configure Google Base mod for zen cart. This will allow automatic submission to Google Base about all your new and existing items.

We can help you with all of the above and more to optimize and increase your conversion and sales rate on your zen cart based e-commerce website. Contact us today to receive a free quote or email us at quotes @ zencartonline.com