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.

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