With the cost of starting e-commerce website very less, its not a surprise that more and more small and medium businesses are opening multiple e-commerce websites. When the business picks up, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all these e-commerce websites together.

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

Zen cart e-commerce store is a powerful system that can be used to start and run a highly scalable e-commerce store. However, one of the drawbacks of the standard script is that it comes with a standard look. As a site owner, you would want your zen cart e-commerce store to look unique.

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.

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.