There is just some shopping cart software that don't really fit your taste for one reason or the other. It could be that they are not flexible, making it difficult for you to customise functions and designs in relation to you business. Others are equipped with everything you need but possess a very hefty price tag.
The Zen shopping cart software is an open-source application that opts to provide another alternative for business owners. The features are very easy to use and can easily be modified according to your specifications.
Here are the benefits of using a Zen shopping cart program:
1. It's practically free. Since it's an open-source program, anyone can basically use this one. This is the most ideal option for start-up businesses and those who could not afford to buy a more comprehensive online store infrastructure. All you need to do is to download the software and then integrate it later into your website.
2. It has a very easy-to-manage payment processing scheme. The Zen shopping cart software has an easy-to-use payment processing mechanism. You can set up prices for your products, offer discounts to your customers, charge goods to their accounts at one time, and even introduce sale reductions. You can also conveniently set up this e-commerce program together with Paypal and other merchant and payment gateway accounts that you have.
3. The templates can be customised according to your liking. There's practically no limit as to what you can possibly do with the various templates that you can find in this shopping cart program. You can make use of the HTML editor if you want to modify the fonts, colors, and even the layouts of the page. It's also compatible with XHTML 1.0, which means that you can basically do the editing even if you have no prior education of any programming language like PHP.
4. It consists of different types of highly useful functionalities. There are different kinds of functionalities that you can tweak in your Zen shopping cart software. You can change your tax rate, identify shipping charges, relate the program with your existing shipping carriers, and even accept and convert payments from other currencies to your own currency.
5. It doesn't take too long to set up. The Zen shopping cart software can be installed in less than an hour. As a matter of fact, you only need to set aside around 20 minutes of your time. This only proves that it's a no-hassle software.
6. Security is at its best in Zen shopping cart program. This application can work with any kind of SSL technology, which you need to secure credit card payments of customers. Moreover, you are also given your own account in accessing the control panel, so nobody else will be able to change the settings, unless you allow someone to do so.
The Zen shopping cart program can also help you in your marketing efforts, such as the addition of banners, setting up of mailing lists, and distributing newsletters to the inboxes of your subscribers.
Powerful Shopping Cart Software
A shopping cart software can do a lot of things for your business: inventory and shipping tracking, pricing, template design, and even image hosting. But do you know that it can also help you in your online marketing efforts as well?
You simply need to optimise them to really make them work out. If you have no idea how, you can refer to some of the techniques below:
1. Get rid of duplicate content. A lot of business owners may think that duplicate contents only happen when you submit an article that's already published. What they don't know is that it could also happen to your shopping cart software. But how?
A product page is normally composed of different categories, which you need to do so to make it a lot easier for your customers to search and browse. Whilst in the process of classifying your items, you may accidentally or deliberately place one or a number of them to the same categories. This constitutes a duplicate content.
What happens when you have duplicate content? First you can get penalised by search engines, especially Google, which are so sensitive when it comes to these cases. There's also the link inequality, which happens when a competitor outranks you in the process.
2. Make use of targeted keywords. You can also optimise the shopping cart program by peppering keywords in your product descriptions, header, and in other parts of the application. However, keep in mind that what you're really after are the targeted key phrases and words. This means that they have good amount of traffic, really describes the nature of the product or the business, and can high rank in search engines. For your shopping cart software, you can utilise several keyword suggestion tools, if you can't come up with any.
If there's one thing that you should be careful about, it's keyword stuffing. Make sure that you just have enough. Normally, keyword density between 2 and 8% is considered ideal, even for a shopping a shopping cart software.
3. Always update your contents. One of your goals is to get indexed by search engines. To achieve that, your shopping cart should be constantly visited by search engine spiders. You can improve your spiderability if you can always add more contents to your shopping cart. You may perhaps add more descriptions, images with their corresponding captions, and even new articles on your on-site publication.
4. Add an alternative text link for your images. Though shopping carts can display loads of images on your website, unfortunately, search engine spiders won't be able to read them. This is because they have been programmed to index texts alone. Hence, to increase your chances of having your images indexed, use alternative texts.
If you're clever enough, you can do the optimisation of the shopping cart on your own and just by using the HTML editor. Nevertheless, don't be afraid to ask help from professionals. You better spend now and have someone do it right for you.
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