When you first install Zen Cart (or your programmers do it for you) it handles most of the tasks you’ll want. But as your shop and experience grows, you’ll want more functionality and flexibility.
Kill the Clutter
Zen Cart comes with an overwhelming number of features, or “boxes,” turned on – all those boxes down the left and right columns of your shop. You don’t need most of them, they just distract the customer. Turning them off won’t double your sales, but it might increase sales a few percent - and clean up your shop in the process.
To turn off the boxes, log into Zen Cart and go to Tools and then Layout Boxes Controller. Go through every box and ask: do I really need this? Boxes such as Who’s Online, Languages, Currencies and Sponsors should almost certainly go.
For most shops, we recommend that you keep Best Sellers turned on - people like to know what other people are buying, and it can drive sales.
Cross Selling During Checkout
Checkout is a great time to up-sell people – it’s the same principle as the candy bars at the supermarket checkout. The Checkout Candy extension (part of the “Better Together” set of extensions) enables you to up-sell your customers. This extension isn’t free, but you should quickly recoup the cost through increased order size.
Speed Up your Shop
A JupiterResearch report found that 33 percent of broadband shoppers won’t wait more than four seconds for a Web page to load. Other studies have shown increasing page speed boosts sales up to 20 percent.
An easy way to speed things up is to use a feature called GZip. GZip makes your Web pages smaller before sending them to your shoppers, similar to someone e-mailing a ZIP file. The good thing is your shoppers don’t have to do anything; their browser does all the work seamlessly. Turning on GZip makes your pages about 75 percent smaller.
Enabling GZip is easy in Zen Cart. Under the Configuration menu find GZip Compression. By default this is turned off. You should turn it on – set it to “1” in Zen Cart. It’s possible that your Webhost has GZip on for your whole server – you can check by using GZip tester. It’s worth checking because having GZip enabled twice will sometimes cause errors.
Track Your Advertising
A challenge for any business is tracking the success of advertising. You can spend $500 on a magazine ad, but was it worth it? Coupons are an easy way to track this metric. Go to Gift Certificate/Coupons and select Coupon Admin.
For example, in your magazine ad, you could say:
 Creating a coupon allows you to track advertising and creates a strong incentive for new customers to buy.
(Click for larger image). |
“Enter code ‘MAGFREE’ in the checkout to get free shipping on any order before May 31”.
You can check how many people use the ‘MAGFREE’ coupon to check your ads effectiveness. Putting a time limit on a coupon is even more effective at creating sales. With no dead line, people often procrastinate and forget, but a deadline creates urgency and drives action.
Use Newsletters to Drive Sales
Newsletters are a great way to keep customers engaged. They not only drive sales – sending a newsletter usually results in a spike in sales – but they keep you in the customer’s mind. It’s easy for people to forget you, but receiving a regular newsletter reminds them, and the next time they are shopping for your products, you stand a better chance of getting their business.
Zen Cart offers built-in newsletter functions that make sending newsletters easy. While not as powerful as dedicated e-mail software, it’s great for a small business that doesn’t have time or money for specialist software.
Giving people a reason to sign up for your newsletter will increase subscriptions a lot. Include text like “Exclusive offers available only to newsletter subscribers” next to the newsletter signup box (and make sure you include an exclusive offer in every newsletter!). It’s also recommended you say “We value your privacy”, to reassure them you won’t spam them.
In Zen Cart, go to Tools and Send Email to send a newsletter. Normally you’d choose All Newsletter Subscribers to e-mail your subscribers. There’s an extra feature in there – Dormant Customers (more than three months) This e-mails customers who haven’t been active on your site for at least three months. These people are prime candidates to re-engage via email. Offering a discount to this group often works very well.
Keeping Your shop Safe
Scott Wilson, a Zen Cart consultant and the author of numerous popular Zen Cart extensions, recommends creating a test cart to make sure all your changes are working before you go live. “You never know what damage a change might do to your store, so best to test first. Also, keep backups of your software and database in case disaster strikes,” he said.
You can install your test site in a subfolder like, for example, www.yourshop.com/test or in a subdomain such as test.yourshop.com. With most Webhosts there’ll be no extra charge.
Most Webhosts use CPanel software for you to manage the site, which makes backups a breeze. Just log into your control panel, usually at www.yourshop.com:2082 and choose Backups.
We also recommended that you keep a close eye on the known bugs and fixes section in the forum. For example, for version 1.3.8 you would look at http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=82619. This will keep you safe from security flaws as well as annoying bugs. With such a popular product, hackers will often scan the net for shops with security flaws, so you need to be vigilant.
Mark Baartse is founder of Shopping-Cart-Reviews.com , the leading shopping cart information site. He lives in Sydney, Australia where he works on e-commerce sites, helping to maxmize their profitability. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/markbaa .
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