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.